Just as talks with OpenAI ended, Windsurf turned to Google. (Picture: Windsurf)OpenAI had been negotiating a $3 billion to acquire the agentic coding platform, but Google just snagged their top executives to work in their field for its Gemini platform.
The deal will see Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen and a small team join Google’s DeepMind division.
Also licensing key tech
Further, Google will invest $2.4 billion in a non-exclusive deal to license Windsurf’s technology, reports Reuters, among others.
Image-to-video generation comes to Veo 3
After opening up Veo 3 worldwide for Gemini Pro users and teasing the feature last week, it’s finally gone live globally.
It is now possible to upload a picture and have it animated in an 8-second 720p video if you are a Gemini Pro ($20/month) or Ultra ($250/month) user.
Simply upload a photo, add any instructions for the scene you want to create, and two minutes later you should have a nicely animated video. Google also says they have generated over 40 million videos since Veo 3’s inception in May. More at Google’s blog and on 9to5Google.
In coming update, Youtube will demonetize «inauthentic» content
In a battle against «AI slop,» as in mass produced, unoriginal content chruned out at scale and made by AI tools, Youtube is now saying they will clarify their position on «inauthentic» content on July 15. They already have an extensive page on AI tools, but requires their use to be «original» and «authentic» and is seeing a lot of misuse. These videos will likely be demonetized shortly. More at Youtube’s policy updates, and Gizmodo bemoans AI slop, as usual.
Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs promises a cure for every disease
Isomorphic Labs president Colin Murdoch has spoken to Fortune about his ambitions to use AI discovery to find cures for just about anything. They are a spinoff from the AlphaFold unit and are «collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer,» «right now,» he says.
The next stage is doing human trials on some of the drugs they have discovered, which can be a long and cumbersome process, but is crucial to getting the drugs approved.
«We’re staffing up now. We’re getting very close,» says Murdoch, and «we’re making good progress.» Read the full interview at Fortune.
A ChatGPT-based browser could look a little like this screenshot of OpenAI’s Operator. (Picture: OpenAI)Rumors have been spinning since the company hired two Google vice presidents who were part of the original Chrome team.
Now, Reuters is reporting that it’s just around the corner.
Grok had a busy couple of days at x.com after getting “unfiltered.” (Picture: x.ai)Note: This post contains links to offensive content: After a deluge of hate filled, anti-semitic replies, often hailing Hitler, questioning Jews in the movie industry and saying democrats are detrimental to society, Grok replies has been turned off on X.com, according to Express Tribune.
This comes after a morning of massive backlash against the bots «politically incorrect» settings, and «serving up unfiltered truths» — the entiremainstreammedia piled on to the bots inflammatory and upsetting replies.
ChatGPT usage is way up in K-12 schools, and now teachers are getting a leg up in how to use it better. (Picture: Wesley Fryer, CC BY 2.0)With help and funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, the American Federation of Teachers hopes to educate 400 000 teachers across the USA in ethical AI use in classrooms.
The program will begin right away with virtual, online training for all 1.8 million members of the union, and in New York City with a «three-day training session, including six hours of AI-focused material that highlighted practical, hands-on ways to marry the emerging technology with established pedagogy.»
Already used by a fourth of students According to the latest data, from February 2025, 79% of teens said they had heard about ChatGPT, while 26% admitted to using it in schoolwork — and there are a plethora of other tools available.
Meta is looking to kickstart its AI teams after a string of mishaps. (Picture: Meta)The top AI executive and 15-year Google veteran was offered «tens of millions» in compensation to join the Superintelligence Labs at Meta.
Pang was in charge of roughly 100 developers making Apple’s Foundational models, powering features the company calls «Apple Intelligence,» and is found in every corner of iOS 26, such as email summaries, notifications and Genmoji — that was all over the latest WWDC 2025.
Bad vibes at Apple Bloomberg (paywalled) writes that news of Apple considering other models than its in-house ones to power a smarter Siri has impacted the morale at the foundational model team, and MacRumors says that other engineers are also entertaining offers from outside companies.
Grok is churning out what itself called antisemitic myths just a few days ago. (Picture: x.ai)Just after Elon Musk announced the update to Grok, his AI model, the X.com chatbot started writing in first person about his encounters with Jeffrey Epstein.
This piece of 1977 hardware hardly broke a sweat beating Copilot in chess. (Picture: Wikipedia) TikTok gets a taste of racist Veo 3-generations
Racist and dehumanizing Veo 3 videos aimed at blacks and immigrants are raking in millions of views on TikTok, MediaMatters reports.
The videos depict black people as monkeys with warrants, decries missing parents and calls them «the usual suspects.» Some of these 8-second videos, complete with watermarks, had 3 to 4 million views at the time they were discovered. — We proactively enforce robust rules against hateful speech and behavior and have removed the accounts we identified in the report, many of which were already banned prior to the report publishing, says TikTok in a statement to Mashable.
For higher engagement, Meta’s chatbots will reach out first
Users of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram could soon receive unprompted messages to ask about recent conversations, according to leaked documents seen by Business Insider. This is intended for bots made in Meta’s AI Studio, which lets users create custom chatbots. These will remember past chats and preferences, and will «follow up with you to share ideas or ask additional questions,» says a Meta spokesman.
Microsoft’s Copilot also sucks at chess
After first brimming with confidence and promising a «strong fight,» claiming to think 10-15 moves ahead, «remember previous moves and maintain continuity in gameplay» and that «our match should be much smoother» against the Atari 2600 chess simulator from 1977, Copilot went the way of ChatGPT by failing miserably in their game. By the seventh turn, it had lost two pawns, a knight and a bishop, while the Atari had only lost a single pawn. It went south from there, as reported by The Register.
Are you ready for a new wave of Veo 3 videos? It just got cheaper and available to more users. (Picture: Google)Using the famous video generator Veo 3 just got a whole lot cheaper, moving from being exclusively available on the $250 Ultra plan to being included in the $20 Pro plan.
Veo 3 is also now available in India, Indonesia and all of Europe, Google’s Josh Woodward tweets:
They are calling it Content Independence Day — and talk of taking the content back from the bots. (Picture: Cloudflare)Wading into the ongoing battle between web publishers and AI chatbots, the infrastructure giant that serves up 15-20% of the web is setting up some new rules.
Starting Tuesday, all new accounts on the content caching service will block AI bots — the crawlers that scrape a website’s content for AIs — by default.
Meta’s historical hiring spree might come to a close now they’ve announced their team. (Picture: Carnaval.com Studios, CC BY 2.0)After a few hectic weeks of agressively poaching talent from their rivals, and an acqiusition or two, Meta reveals the completion of their new AI lab.
This comes hot on the heels of several months or years of what Zuckerberg deemed lackluster performance from the Llama team, before he decided to get some seasoned pros in.
The new team is headed up Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman from Scale AI and Github, respectively.
They will be joined by an 11-man team that will spearhead Metas future AI efforts, that reads like a who’s who of significant AI efforts over the last couple of years from Anthropic, OpenAI and even Google’s DeepMind:
Siri might be getting smarter, with a little outside help. (Picture: Apple) Bloomberg reports that the iPhone company is considering opting out of using its homegrown LLM for future versions of the chatbot Siri.
They have instead asked Anthropic and OpenAI to train some of their models on their Private Cloud Compute servers.
The Samsung model
This mirrors Samsung’s approach to integrating Large Language Models in its Galaxy phones, where they have some in-house, lower level AI doing the legwork and passing the rest off to Google’s Gemini, writes Engadget.
According to Bloomberg, Apple has recently focused on Anthropic as the most promising LLM, being more compatible with Apple servers and offering the best experience.
Usage of AI will become part of permanence reviews at this Microsoft division. (Picture: Ryan Vaarsi, CC BY 2.0)The developer tools division head at Microsoft, Julia Liuson, recently sent out a memo to managers bluntly saying that «Using AI is no longer optional.»
— AI is now a fundamental part of how we work, she wrote. — Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.
Employee evaluations should now include their use of AI tools, she says, and managers are rushing to find a formal metric to measure it.
Internal performance requirements at Microsoft vary from team to team, and this is just one division. But it shows how quickly companies are adopting the technology.
Across all of Microsoft, it is estimated that 30% of all coding is already done by AI.
