Welcome back to Tech in 60, where listeners get the critical tech news, trends, and breakthroughs shaping the world right now. October 2025 has delivered major shifts you need to know, driven by artificial intelligence, new hardware, and architectural rethinks that are impacting everything from healthcare to small business, data centers, and the way teams build digital products.

Generative AI has taken a dramatic leap this month. Multiple companies announced new models capable of running on 60 billion parameters, performing real-time text, image, video, audio and code generation in less than 100 milliseconds per query—bringing instant AI creativity to work and life. These advances go beyond chatbots. The latest systems are multi-modal, fusing different data types and fine-tuning on just a few hundred examples. That means personal assistants and content creation tools can now operate at unprecedented speed and personalization, even on smaller devices. With energy-efficient architectures cutting power use by 40% over last year, generative models are opening AI to startups and edge devices that previously couldn’t afford the scale.

October also saw China’s DeepSeek introduce the R1 model, claiming training costs 70% lower than major US competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. This signals fierce global competition and new cost efficiencies in AI deployment. Meanwhile, Microsoft shifted focus by launching its own proprietary models—MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1 Preview—which create a minute of audio in one second and offer new foundational language capabilities. Microsoft’s pivot away from exclusively relying on OpenAI reflects a broader trend: companies want their own tailored AI stacks for speed, privacy, and differentiation.

Listeners in healthcare should note several recent breakthroughs. Transformer-based AI systems can now predict the progression and timing of over a thousand diseases using detailed patient backgrounds, revolutionizing proactive care and planning. Another team debuted AI-powered cardiac imaging, embedding tiny cameras in catheters to visualize arterial blockages missed by traditional scans—potentially transforming heart attack prevention.

The story in infrastructure is equally striking. Cloud spend soared, with quarterly investment hitting nearly $100 billion globally. AI-powered workloads now demand elastic capacity, GPU allocation, and modular design patterns. Security teams are moving “shift-left,” guarding against a 188% year-over-year spike in malicious software packages by focusing on the supply chain and defaulting to signature verification. Edge computing and serverless design for streaming and social apps have never been more critical, as DDoS attacks set new records and user expectations for latency remain high.

Agentic and autonomous AI systems are quickly moving past experimentation, with fully autonomous vehicles taking to city streets and adaptive robotic agents learning new tasks within hours. These systems promise rapid productivity gains across industries, from fintech, where PostgreSQL remains king, to small businesses using AI for streamlined client services and operations.

Enterprise AI adoption is now mainstream, with over half of workplace leaders in the Americas and Europe using these technologies. Existing AI tools could automate up to 70% of work activities, liberating employees for more creative and strategic roles. AI-generated vertical solutions are gaining ground, especially in healthcare and retail, delivering tailored insights and automation. Tech giants are investing in dedicated AI data centers and renewable energy deals to meet ever-growing compute and electricity needs—a move that could have economic impacts as data center energy use climbs.

This month all signs point toward smarter, more adaptive AI deployed everywhere—underpinned by modular architectures, agentic systems, and a deliberate push toward...