Vaprolus

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that the company will build a humanoid robot.

He said it on the Sources podcast. Asked whether OpenAI's hardware push meant a humanoid or a data center machine, he answered "Both". Asked if OpenAI would build humanoid robots itself, he said, "We will." OpenAI is already busy with AI models and new consumer hardware, so this is one more project on top.

His reasoning for the human shape is practical. Doors, keyboards and tools are all designed for people.

He also said the body is the easier half. The hard part is the software that works as its brain: reading camera and sensor data, interpreting instructions, planning actions, coordinating movements and adjusting to the real world.

Altman told Fortune he expects "a cool demo in 2027" and does not expect robots walking the streets for a few years after that.

OpenAI has not said what the demo will show or what the robot will look like. Its stated near-term goal is robots that help skilled workers build infrastructure. The long-term goal is a personal robot. Its careers page lists 27 robotics positions.

For now, this is a CEO's target, not a product plan.

Sources: Engadget, Fortune, Sources podcast.

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

@Ravlizk Haha, so the post worked

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

On August 31, 1976, a firm with three employees launched a fund that almost nobody bought.

Vanguard had been incorporated less than two years earlier, on September 24, 1974. John Bogle told his board to expect $150 million for the first index fund sold to ordinary investors. It would simply hold the stocks of the S&P 500. No stock picker.

It raised $11.3 million. That was not enough to buy every stock in the index.

The investment banks underwriting the offering were so disappointed that they wanted to give investors their money back. Bogle went ahead anyway. He later called the launch an abject failure.

Wall Street named it Bogle's Folly. A poster with that name circulated around the Street.

It was not even the first index portfolio. In 1971, a division of Wells Fargo launched a $6 million indexed portfolio for the pension fund of Samsonite. Bogle's was the first one built for individual investors. For about its first six months it was sold through brokers, and buyers paid sales commissions.

By 1985, index funds as a group held only $511 million.

In 2016, the fund Bogle started, now called Vanguard 500 Index Fund, held more than $252 billion. Index mutual funds and ETFs together held nearly $5 trillion.

[Shevaxgod @shevaxgod]

https://t.co/Z1EE80pMp2

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

Louis Vuitton stores in Marseille and Bordeaux were broken into over the weekend. Dior, Hermès, Celine and other luxury shops were hit the same way. Retail groups put the total number of affected businesses above 1,500 and the damage in the hundreds of millions of euros.

The scenes come from the same weekend that sent the OAT-Bund spread to 145 basis points and pushed the CAC 40 down more than 1 percent.

[Heather @HeaterMart]

They’ve just looted Louis Vuitton in #Bordeaux #17octobre

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

@RadioGenoa My God, what are they doing? This is an economic crisis for all of France and even Europe. I feel deeply for all Europeans.

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

On Saturday night a Christian Dior store on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris was looted. About 550,000 people had marched across France that day. A Louis Vuitton store in Marseille was broken into, and the town hall of Limoges burned.

It began in September with school blockades in poor Paris suburbs. By October 6 the Justice Ministry counted 5,060 arrests, 87% of them minors. After the weekend the Interior Ministry counted 2,397 arrests and 997 police and gendarmes injured. CCI France says more than 2,000 businesses were hit. The retail federation puts the damage at several hundred million euros.

The bond market moved first. On September 18 the French 10-year yield was 4.5% and Germany’s 3.5%, the widest gap since 2012. On October 1 France touched 4.99%, the highest since 2002. On Monday it rose about 8 basis points to 4.86%, against 3.41% for Germany. The gap is about 145 basis points.

The 2027 budget has to cut the deficit. Interest on the debt is projected at 74.5 billion euros, more than the 65.5 billion for education. The European Commission expects a 2026 deficit of 5.1% of GDP and debt at 118.1%.

Macron’s allies have had no majority since 2024. The presidential election is six months away. Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid says the weekend makes it harder for foreign investors to feel comfortable buying French bonds.

Ministers owe their first school proposals by the end of October.

[RadioGenoa @RadioGenoa]

Apocalypse in Italy: Milan today.

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

On Saturday night a Christian Dior store on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris was looted. About 550,000 people had marched across France that day. A Louis Vuitton store in Marseille was broken into, and the town hall of Limoges burned.

It began in September with school blockades in poor Paris suburbs. By October 6 the Justice Ministry counted 5,060 arrests, 87% of them minors. After the weekend the Interior Ministry counted 2,397 arrests and 997 police and gendarmes injured. CCI France says more than 2,000 businesses were hit. The retail federation puts the damage at several hundred million euros.

The bond market moved first. On September 18 the French 10-year yield was 4.5% and Germany’s 3.5%, the widest gap since 2012. On October 1 France touched 4.99%, the highest since 2002. On Monday it rose about 8 basis points to 4.86%, against 3.41% for Germany. The gap is about 145 basis points.

The 2027 budget has to cut the deficit. Interest on the debt is projected at 74.5 billion euros, more than the 65.5 billion for education. The European Commission expects a 2026 deficit of 5.1% of GDP and debt at 118.1%.

Macron’s allies have had no majority since 2024. The presidential election is six months away. Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid says the weekend makes it harder for foreign investors to feel comfortable buying French bonds.

Ministers owe their first school proposals by the end of October.

[Frontières @Frontieresmedia]

🚨 ALERTE - Un magasin CHRISTIAN DIOR a été PILLÉ rue Saint-Honoré à Paris.

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

Hedge funds had a rough week in AI stocks, and the data shows how many of them were on the same side.

Goldman Sachs' prime brokerage unit tracks hedge fund performance. In the week to October 15, global fundamental long-short funds, the stock pickers, lost 2.9%. They lost money on every trading day. Goldman said long-short managers had sold global AI stocks for six sessions in a row.

On October 15 the three broad strategies all fell together: stock pickers, systematic long-short and multi-strategy funds each dropped by roughly 1%. Goldman said that kind of day had not happened between COVID and the end of 2025. It has now happened three times in 2026: February 4, July 28 and October 15.

Asia-focused stock pickers lost 6.8% in the first half of October. That wiped out more than half of their gains from a late-June peak, when they were up more than 40% for the year. CoreWeave's bonds also sold off, pushing their yields above 15%.

A hedge fund investor quoted by Reuters described the week as a crowded trade unwinding into a tougher macro backdrop, more than a verdict on AI itself. Hotter US inflation data had raised expectations of further rate hikes.

Global stock pickers are still up 14.3% for 2026.

Source: Reuters, citing a Goldman Sachs prime brokerage note.

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

More than half of US businesses on Ramp now pay for AI.

Ramp is a corporate card and expense company. It counts a business as an AI adopter when it has a payment to an AI vendor in a given month. No surveys. Its sample is more than 70,000 American businesses, and the series runs from January 2023 to August 2026.

In January 2023 that share was 7.5%. In January 2026 it was 47.0%. In August 2026 it was 56.1%.

The pace has changed. From January to March 2023 the share went from 7.5% to 20.9%. From January to August 2026 it went from 47.0% to 56.1%, a gain of about 9 points in seven months.

By company size, mid-sized businesses went from 57.1% in January to 66.8% in August. Large businesses went from 51.4% to 59.0%.

Ramp lists its own caveats. It only sees paid transactions, so free tools and personal accounts go uncounted, which likely means real adoption is higher. Its customers also lean tech-forward, which may push the number the other way. Ramp says its estimate runs more than double the government's survey-based figure.

The data comes from card, invoice and bank-transfer payments, not from asking companies whether they use AI.

Source: Ramp AI Index series on FRED, last updated September 29, 2026.

[Hanako @hanakoxbt]

REA is the most dangerous repo on GitHub right now

It gives your AI agent a real disassembler, so it reads any app down to the binary

Every claim comes back with the address behind it

I broke down the exact 8 steps: https://t.co/eaeZ4OFJrH

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

In 2000, Goldman Sachs had 600 traders working its US cash equities desk at the New York headquarters. In early 2017 it had two.

The number came from Marty Chavez, then the bank's deputy chief financial officer, speaking at a Harvard symposium that January. The rest of the work had gone to automated trading programs, supported by about 200 computer engineers.

Algorithms took over first where prices were easy to read off the market, which covered the stocks Goldman's 600 had been handling. Some of those algorithms had machine learning in them.

Currencies were next. Chavez said Goldman had consistently found that one engineer could replace four traders. About 9,000 people at the firm, roughly a third of its staff, were engineers. He pointed out how much empty floor space was left where the traders used to sit, and said the consumer lending platform Marcus ran entirely on software. Research firm Coalition put nearly 45% of cash equities trading revenue at electronic trades.

Investment banking was the next target. Goldman had mapped 146 separate steps in a stock IPO, and Chavez said not all of them needed a person.

He became Goldman's chief financial officer in April 2017. As of July 2026 he's at Sixth Street and on Alphabet's board.

[Lupen @0xLupenn]

https://t.co/87P80B6arY

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

In 1994, a 30-year-old with a senior job at a quantitative hedge fund walked away to start an online bookstore.

Jeff Bezos, a Princeton-trained computer scientist, worked at D.E. Shaw. David Shaw founded the firm in 1988 after leaving Morgan Stanley. It traded with math and computers.

Bezos had seen a report saying web usage was growing 2,300% a year. In a 2010 speech at Princeton he said he had never seen anything grow that fast.

He took the idea to Shaw. Shaw suggested a walk in Central Park. After listening, he told Bezos to take 48 hours to think it over.

Bezos used a test he later called a regret minimization framework. He pictured himself at 80 and asked which choice he would regret. He decided he would not regret failing. He might regret never having tried. He said that if Amazon failed, he expected to be a happy software programmer somewhere.

He and his wife MacKenzie drove from New York to Seattle. He seeded the company with $10,000 of his own money and lined up $84,000 in interest-free loans, according to Benzinga. Amazon was incorporated on July 5, 1994, as a place to order books online. The site launched on July 16, 1995.

Bezos described the decision in a 2001 interview with the Academy of Achievement.

[Reid @reidgrows]

https://t.co/YF5JtEIvDR

[Vaprolus @Vaprolus]

In 2007, Warren Buffett put $500,000 behind a bet. From January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2017, a plain S&P 500 index fund would beat a group of hedge funds, measured after fees.

His counterparty was Protégé Partners, which picked five funds of funds. Between them they held stakes in more than 200 hedge funds. The total stake was $1 million.

Buffett chose a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund with token fees. The hedge funds charged fixed annual fees averaging about 2.5%. Each fund of funds also added its own fee on top of the fees of the hedge funds inside it.

Year one went to the professionals. In 2008 the S&P 500 fell 37%, a bigger loss than any of the five funds of funds took.

Then the index fund beat the five funds of funds as a group in each of the next nine years.

By the end of 2017 the S&P 500 fund had gained 125.8%, or 8.5% a year. The five funds of funds averaged a gain of 36.3%. The best of them made 87.7%.

Buffett reported the result in his 2017 shareholder letter. He noted that the 200-plus hedge fund managers had almost certainly made tens of thousands of buy and sell decisions over the ten years.

Girls Inc of Omaha, the charity Buffett picked, received $2,222,279 in January 2018, rather than $1 million.