OpenAI’s record-breaking $500B valuation

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI just claimed a crown that no private company has ever held — a $500B valuation that officially makes it more useful than SpaceX, ByteDance, and each other privately-held giant on Earth.

But with revenue surging and employees declining to sell billions in available shares, the AI leader’s rocket ship could also be just taking off.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST! Join and learn the way to create working prototypes in Cursor, without writing any code. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI becomes world’s most dear private company

• Where startups actually spend on AI

• Create n8n workflows directly from Claude

• Google pushes Jules coding agent into terminals

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

💰 OpenAI becomes world’s most dear private company

The Rundown: OpenAI just accomplished a secondary share sale, allowing employees to liquidate $6.6B in stock at a $500B valuation, officially making it the world’s most dear private company and surpassing SpaceX’s $456B mark.

The small print:

• Buyers included Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and MGX, with employees who held shares for two+ years eligible to take part in the tender offer.

• OpenAI authorized $10.3B in available shares, but employees sold only $6.6B, a niche some company insiders attributed to optimism about future upside.

• The valuation jumped from $300B in March, following OpenAI generating $4.3B in revenue in the course of the first half of 2025, exceeding all of 2024.

Why it matters: The sale gives OAI employees liquidity to compete with rivals circling with nine-figure pay packages, and there is no such thing as a shortage of investors attempting to get in on the corporate’s massive ambitions. OpenAI now sits at the highest of the private company universe, and the scary part is that it still seems like that valuation has rather a lot higher to go.

TOGETHER WITH LOVART

🍌 The design agent that mastered Nano Banana

The Rundown: While everyone scrambles to access the newest AI models individually, Lovart users get them multi functional collaborative workspace. From trending models like Nano Banana to powerhouses like Veo 3, Lovart orchestrates multiple AI engines to deliver results no single tool can match.

The world’s first design agent offers:

• Multi-model orchestration with Nano Banana, Veo 3, GPT-Image, and more

• ChatCanvas collaboration that thinks and iterates with you in real-time

• Skilled design quality that saves time and lowers costs

Try Lovart and join nearly 2M other users experiencing multi-model design collaboration.

AI USAGE RESEARCH

💰 Where startups actually spend on AI

The Rundown: Andreessen Horowitz released its AI Spending Report, analyzing transaction patterns from fintech startup Mercury’s 200,000+ customers to indicate which AI firms are capturing real startup dollars versus just generating traffic.

The small print:

• OpenAI took the highest spot, with Anthropic within the second place, and Perplexity (No. 12) and Merlin AI (No. 30) rounding out the list of general assistants.

• 4 vibe coding platforms (Replit, Cursor, Lovable, and Emergent) appear on the list, showing the trend seeping beyond consumers into the enterprise.

• Creative tools make up the most important category with 10 featured, including Freepik (No .4), ElevenLabs (No. 5), Kling (No .15), and Canva (No .17).

• Other trending categories included meeting assistants, AI employees for specific industries/tasks, and agentic tools.

Why it matters: While ChatGPT and Claude at the highest of the chart is not any surprise, among the other popular categories are — with vibe coding becoming rather more than simply a private tool, and agentic AI platforms beginning to proliferate beyond novelty and across actual work use cases.

AI TRAINING

🤩 Create n8n workflows directly from Claude

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the way to generate complete n8n workflow automations by describing what you wish in plain English — using Claude Sonnet 4.5 via MCP to construct workflows without manually connecting nodes.

Step-by-step:

1. Install Claude Desktop and Node.js, then open your terminal and run npx n8n-mcp to begin the MCP server

2. In Claude Desktop, go to Settings > Developer > Edit Config and paste the configuration code, adding your n8n URL (out of your workflow dashboard) and API key (Settings > n8n API > Create API Key)

3. Restart Claude Desktop, click the n8n MCP icon in the underside right, and hit “Enable all tools” to offer Claude access to your workflows

4. Describe your automation to Claude: “Construct an n8n workflow that monitors my Gmail for emails with ‘invoice’ in the topic, extracts the invoice amount using AI, and logs it to a Google Sheet”

5. Claude will construct the automation and provide you with a direct link to open in n8n

Pro tip: Claude works best with specific requests. As an alternative of “automate my emails,” try “after I get a Slack message with ‘urgent,’ create a task in Todoist and send me a calendar reminder.” The more details you give, the higher the workflow.

PRESENTED BY ENCORD

📈 Scale AV data workflows 10x faster

The Rundown: Encord is the universal data layer trusted by the world’s leading AV & ADAS teams, like Woven by Toyota and Zipline. They depend on Encord’s unified workflow to arrange high-quality, labeled multimodal datasets 10x faster, accelerating iteration cycles and deploying production models at scale.

Join Encord’s LiDAR experts on Oct. 28 for a masterclass on the way to:

• Visualize and curate multimodal data, including LiDAR and radar data

• Automate 3D segmentation of obstacles with single-shot labeling and object tracking

• Create robust, scalable pipelines for model training and evaluation

Join here to affix live or catch the replay.

GOOGLE

🐙 Google pushes Jules coding agent into terminals

The Rundown: Google launched Jules Tools, a brand new command-line interface and public API for its autonomous coding agent, allowing developers to trigger tasks and monitor progress from terminals somewhat than switching to separate browser windows.

The small print:

• Developers can now control Jules through typed commands in terminal windows, automating repetitive tasks or creating coding assignments.

• Google opened access to Jules’ underlying connections, allowing firms to plug the assistant into workplace tools like Slack and development pipelines.

• The assistant now remembers programmer preferences and past corrections, and includes tools for managing access to credentials during automated work.

• Jules also handles tasks within the background on Google’s server, allowing devs to concentrate on their primary workspace as an alternative of monitoring browser tabs.

Why it matters: After launching almost a 12 months ago, Jules has been quiet despite the AI coding space as an entire going parabolic. With the brand new CLI and API access, Jules’ higher integrations into dev workflows could boost adoption — but it surely also faces no shortage of competition from OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code, and others.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ☄️ Comet – Perplexity’s AI-first browser, now generally available

• ⚙️ Tinker – Pondering Machines’ API for fine-tuning language models

• 💼 Claude in Slack – Latest connection to go looking and reference workspaces

• ⚡️ IBM Granite 4.0 – Latest, efficient, hybrid models for enterprise

📰 Every part else in AI today

Perplexity announced the official open launch of its AI-native Comet web browser, now available totally free worldwide after an invite-gated initial rollout in July.

OpenAI issued a response and motion to dismiss Musk and xAI’s lawsuit alleging trade secret theft, saying the corporate “won’t be intimidated by his attempts to bully them.”

Google rolled out Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) as generally available, with latest features including additional aspect ratios and prompt customizations.

The NBA is partnering with AWS to launch Contained in the Game, a brand new platform for TV broadcasts with AI-powered advanced stats, strategy, and player tracking.

IBM launched Granite 4.0, a brand new family of open, small, efficient LLMs that excel at agentic workflows and enterprise tasks.

Samsung and Korean manufacturer SK Hynix joined OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, with a concentrate on increasing production of memory chips and data centers within the region.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Sam S. in Big Sur, CA:

“I exploit AI as a coach, particularly for tasks I’m afraid to tackle. I’ll discover a goal after which say, “I would like to work for half-hour day by day; I would like you to guide me in every step of the method. Be my cheerleader but in addition a really honest critic.” I do know AI is sycophantic, but in certain cases, that is really helpful. Just committing to the duty in and of itself is a giant step forward — crucially, I feel like I’m not doing it alone.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Apple chases Meta’s AI glasses lead

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ AI

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Drones that search out shoplifters

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create n8n workflows directly from Claude

• RSVP to our next workshop today @ 4PM EST: Vibe coding for non-devs

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown