OpenAI has acquired the AI finance startup Roi, known for offering investment advice based on individual financial data. The service will shut down on October 15. Roi's CEO and founder Sujith Vishwajith is the only team member joining OpenAI. The deal supports OpenAI's interest in personalized consumer AI. The purchase price was not disclosed.
ChatGPT still dominates the AI market, but Google Gemini is catching up. Over the past year, Similarweb says Gemini's share of generative AI traffic jumped from 6.5 percent to 13.7 percent. ChatGPT leads at 73.8 percent, down from 87.1 percent a year ago.
The rest of the market is much smaller. DeepSeek holds 3.9 percent, while Perplexity and Grok each have 2.0 percent. Claude sits at 1.8 percent, and Microsoft's Copilot brings up the rear with 1.2 percent. These numbers haven't shifted much for the smaller players. Overall traffic to AI services continues to grow.
Alibaba's Qwen group has released two new small-scale multimodal models, Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct and Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking, each with 3 billion active parameters. According to Qwen, both versions are competitive with GPT-5-Mini and Claude 4 Sonnet, and in some benchmarks show stronger performance in math, image recognition, text recognition, video processing, and agent control.
The lineup includes an FP8 version for faster inference, and an FP8 variant of the Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B model. The models are available on HuggingFace, ModelScope, and GitHub, or via an Alibaba Cloud API. There is also a web chat interface for direct use.
Synthesia has launched version 3.0 of its video avatar platform, adding several new features focused on interaction and realism. The main change is the introduction of "video agents" that can appear in videos, hold real-time conversations with viewers, answer or ask questions, and access company-specific information.
Other updates include more customizable avatars with natural movement, faster and more flexible voice cloning, interactive video features, and automatic translation. An AI-driven video editor and a new course format for interactive learning with avatars and video agents are also in development.
OpenAI has reportedly reached a $500 billion valuation following a major secondary share sale, according to Reuters. Current and former OpenAI employees sold roughly $6.6 billion worth of shares to investors like SoftBank, Thrive Capital, Dragoneer, MGX, and T. Rowe Price. The deal marks a sharp jump from the previous $300 billion estimate. The report notes that OpenAI has approved more than $10 billion in secondary share sales so far.
The Information recently reported that OpenAI generated about $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, up 16 percent compared to all of last year. However, the company is projected to spend another $80 billion by 2029.
