AI Weekly Malaysia

Earendil Engineering published a post explaining why Pi reversed its public position on MCP: Pi's site and podcasts had previously declared that Pi does not support MCP, and MCP was available only as an extension, but it is now part of Pi's core. The post says the change came from rethinking MCP rather than from MCP improving alone, and that the same sandbox/interpreter work needed for MCP also makes it easier to use Jev inside Pi. Earendil argues MCP's biggest remaining problem is composition — even with codemode — and that MCP should be closer to OpenAPI with intelligent tool discovery, returning structured data instead of text.

Why: If you maintain an MCP server that returns prose text to save tokens, this post is a direct argument that you are optimizing for the wrong harness: Earendil says tools should return structured data and be discoverable by their documentation and description. It also matters if you build on Pi specifically, because MCP moved from optional extension to core, so upgrade behaviour changes rather than being opt-in. The composition complaint is the practical warning — even a core MCP implementation with a sandbox does not fully solve chaining tool calls, so plan for that gap rather than assuming the integration removes it.

Factory CEO Matan Grinberg posted on X on Sept 30 that he fired VC Chris Degnan as a board advisor, alleging Degnan shared confidential information with Cognition, which Grinberg calls Factory's biggest competitor. Two hours later Degnan announced on X and LinkedIn that he had joined Cognition as chief revenue officer, denied the allegations, and said he resigned rather than was fired. Degnan, Snowflake's first sales hire and its CRO for 11 years, had spent the last five months as a partner at Newport Beach-based RPT Partners, an investor in Factory, and also advises startups on go-to-market for Iconiq.

Why: Factory raised $200M at a $5B valuation this month with customers including Nvidia, Adobe and T-Mobile, while Cognition (maker of Devin) raised $2B at a $48B valuation with customers including Goldman Sachs and Citi — so this is a governance fight between two funded agentic-coding rivals, not a product change. If you take board advisors or GTM advisors from funds that also back competitors, this is a concrete case for writing confidentiality and conflict-of-interest terms into advisor agreements and controlling what roadmap and pipeline data such advisors can see. Nothing here changes code you ship or a tool you use today.

Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is in talks to raise at least $30 billion in a pre-IPO round at a valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion, a bridge round ahead of an eventual listing. The report cites a 70% jump in run-rate revenue since July, reaching $40 billion in August, driven by a strategic refocus on coding, after a March round of $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. Sam Altman has ruled out a public debut in 2026, telling Fortune it is 'unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade.'

Why: The one concrete operational signal here is the stated cause of the revenue jump: a refocus on coding. If that holds, expect OpenAI's coding and agent products to keep getting pricing, roadmap and sales attention, which is where most builders in this community actually compete or build. Everything else is a funding rumor the article itself attributes to Bloomberg, with OpenAI not commenting, so do not plan budgets or vendor commitments around the $1.4T number. There is no Malaysian or Southeast Asian angle in the text; treat this as global market context only.

Simon Willison's post is the opening entry of a live blog from OpenAI DevDay 2026 at Fort Mason, San Francisco, published 29 September 2026 — written before the keynote began, so it contains no product announcements. The only concrete technical detail is his own tooling: he vibe-coded a photo-upload system for the live blog on his phone en route to the venue, started on Codex Cloud, hit problems, and switched to Claude Code for web. The page's "more recent articles" links reference a prior post titled "Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war" (22 September 2026), but no DevDay content is in this text.

Why: There is nothing here to act on yet: no models, prices, limits, or APIs are named, so no decision about your stack can be made from this item. The one usable signal is a small workflow data point — a developer trying to build on a phone abandoned Codex Cloud mid-task and finished on Claude Code for web, which is worth noting if you rely on either for mobile or quick-turnaround work. Treat the DevDay announcements themselves as unread until the keynote text exists; the adjacent headline about a September 2026 price war across Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna suggests pricing is moving fast, but that is a separate article, not this one.