The Week Compacted: OpenAI's DevDay, a $2 trillion IPO and Google takes an Uber ride to space

Welcome to The Week Compacted. In AI land, compacting is what happens when a chat gets too long and the model squashes it into a summary so it can keep going. That's this: "Dot" points about AI this week, covering tech news, the odd viral story and anything I care about. Every Friday. If I forget, I'll get one of my future Dot bots to cover the shift.

OpenAI DevDay recap

OpenAI held DevDay on 29 September and the headline act was Dots: always-on agents that get their own cloud computer and work through your to-do list while you pretend to be in a meeting. Full breakdown here.

The sneaky big one is ChatGPT Space and Pages. Space is a shared home for your team to work with AI and Pages are documents you and the agent write together, with research and charts built in. Collaborative Slides are coming soon. So that's Notion and Google Docs, except the intern also has opinions.

There's also a new $500 plan. ChatGPT Pro now comes in $100, $200 and $500 flavours and the top one gets 25 times the Plus allowance plus an Ultrafast mode (up to 300 tokens per second). Pick your pain.

And a whole bunch more:

GPT-6.1 Sol: a new model at about a fifth of the cost of GPT-6 Astra, aimed at coding.
Codex: cloud development environments, a CLI you can talk to and code review for GitHub and GitLab.
Decisions API: fast answers for yes/no and multiple-choice style questions.
Sign in with ChatGPT: 16 launch partners including Notion and Vercel, so apps can use your ChatGPT allowance.
Bedrock Managed Agents: OpenAI agents that run entirely inside AWS.

Anthropic files for an IPO

Anthropic's prospectus reportedly shows $4.59 billion in 2025 revenue, an operating loss of about $8 billion and around $518 billion in future cloud commitments. It's reportedly eyeing a November listing at roughly $2 trillion, with investor meetings said to start on 14 October. Nothing says "we're fine" like half a trillion dollars of cloud bills.

Quick disclosure: I build this site with Claude, so I'm allowed to be slightly biased. I'm an IT guy and this isn't financial advice. OpenAI is reportedly raising $30 billion at about $1.4 trillion, because round numbers are free.

Meta's Muse is number one

Meta's Muse reportedly overtook ChatGPT as the number one free iPhone app in the US. Turns out free beats $500. In a demo it negotiated a Marketplace deal, then shared the buyer's pickup address with the seller and announced "I'm here". Meta says no privacy controls were breached and the permission prompts will be clearer. Autonomous agents: great at turning up unannounced. The Australian angle: Muse is US only for now and not officially available here, so we get to watch the number one app from the sidelines. There is no local timeline yet.

Google's chips go to space

Project Suncatcher launched four of its TPU chips on a SpaceX Uber ride on 1 October. They shared the rideshare with a few other satellites and there's no word on the driver rating. The solar-powered test checks how the chips handle launch vibration, radiation and getting rid of heat in a vacuum, with laser links between satellites planned for 2027. The point: whether AI data centres can eventually live in orbit instead of fighting over your local power grid.

The White House tech summit

On 29 September Trump hosted Zuckerberg, Musk, Amodei, Pichai, Huang, Bezos, Karp and Brockman to sign the "White House Accord on Superintelligence". It's voluntary: companies promise internal controls, outside audits and board oversight. Trump called it "morally binding" and compared it to a constitution, but it isn't law and has no enforcement mechanism. He also floated a 10-person oversight committee and an AI czar within days. Separately, an executive order tells federal agencies to say "Super Intelligence" instead of "AI". Rebranding: still the answer to everything.

Gemini 4 Argon

Google released Gemini 4 Argon on 30 September and called it its most powerful model yet. It's built for coding, long multi-step work and cybersecurity, where it can find and patch software vulnerabilities on its own. Google claims it beats GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's models on benchmarks. The catch: access starts with select cyber-defence partners, so the rest of us wait.

Every lab's newest model is the most powerful ever. It's like every new iPhone being the most powerful iPhone ever. Gemini also passed one billion monthly users in August.

The week in numbers: a $500 ChatGPT Pro tier, a $2 trillion IPO target, Muse at number one, four chips in orbit, eight tech execs at the White House and one million output tokens in Gemini 4 Argon

The takeaway

The pattern this week: AI is leaving the chat box. It writes your documents, haggles on Marketplace, runs in space and gets a "constitution" that isn't law. The honest question for the rest of us isn't which model is smartest. It's who's allowed to do what with your accounts.

Back next Friday. If you want to know what any of this means for your business, send me a brief.