Market brief: Gemini 4 Argon opens to all, tops Vals Index
A daily market roundup notes that Google DeepMind opened Gemini 4 Argon to everyone, ranked first on the Vals Index, at an intro price of $2 per million input tokens through Nov. 30.
☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 US consumer prices rose 0.6% in September, lifting annual inflation to 3.7%, above the 3.6% economists expected and up from 3.4% in August. That keeps another Fed rate hike this year on the table. #CPI 🔸 Google DeepMind opened Gemini 4 Argon to everyone, ranked #1 on the Vals Index, at an intro price of $2 per million input tokens through Nov. 30. Cheaper frontier AI puts rivals' pricing under pressure. #AI 🔸 ASML said some customers want to book chip-tool orders for 2029 and even 2030, and raised the low end of its 2026 sales outlook to €44B. AI chip demand is booked years out. 🔸 Fed's John Williams sees no 2027 rate hikes after one more this year, and Bitcoin rose 1.5% to just under $83,900. 🔸 The FBI arrested OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan for allegedly hiding a recording device in OpenAI's executive conference room. Frontier AI secrets are now a spy target, raising every lab's security bill. 🔸 JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon said the bank won't let outside AI agents like Meta's Muse into customer accounts. That shields cheap bank deposits from agents chasing higher yield. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 Solana set Oct. 21 for Alpenglow, targeting 150-millisecond finality and replacing TowerBFT, the voting system it has used since its 2020 launch. #Solana 🔸 The XRP Ledger is getting Stripe-owned Privy wallets via Ripple, so apps and AI agents can pay in XRP and RLUSD without managing keys. The XRPL AI Hub shows 14.3M AI payments. #XRP 🔸 Coinbase, which holds about 5% of all Bitcoin for clients, said Bitcoin should start preparing for quantum computers now and settle the fate of lost coins separately. 🔸 Hyperliquid's Assistance Fund has now bought over 48M HYPE for about $1.36B, a stash worth roughly $3.95B. #Crypto 🔸 Standard Chartered opened direct Bitcoin and Ether trading to wealthy UAE clients through their bank accounts, the first time it has offered crypto trading to wealthy clients in any market. 🔸 MediaMarktSaturn pulled Ledger wallets in all its countries, and Ledger asked resellers in seven Asian markets to halt sales over tampered devices.