Though its predecessor may have caused a fuss on social media just before its launch, xAI's Grok 4 has made its entrance - question is, how does it hold up?
Here are our main key takeaways:
Comet, Perplexity's AI-driven web browser, makes its initial debut as part of its Max subscription plan
AWS gears itself up to launch an AI agent marketplace with Anthropic during its New York summit
France's AI powerhouse, Mistral, is looking to raise $1 billion in its latest fundraiser
Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!
THE BIG AI STORY
Credits: Klaudia Radecka / NurPhoto / Getty Images
After staff at Elon Musk's AI startup reeled in its Grok 3-powered chatbot on X (formerly Twitter) after it went rogue spouting extremism, xAI has released its long-awaited next-gen family of AI models. Collectively dubbed Grok 4, the new models come as part of the industry's most expensive subscription plan yet, the $300/month SuperGrok Heavy. Even with the controversies surrounding Grok and its associated flaws, is xAI's Grok 4 and the price tag it comes with worth it for individuals and businesses alike?
Where does Grok 4 place on the hierarchy?
The debut livestream came with two models, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, the latter being a specialized model with multiple AI agents at its disposal. xAI claims that Grok 4 leads the pack on several benchmarks, scoring 25.4% on Humanity's Last Exam without external tools, beating Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at 21.6% in 2nd place - with tooling enabled, Grok 4 Heavy jumped to 44.4%. Meanwhile, on the ARC‑AGI‑2 benchmark, it achieved a new state‑of‑the‑art score of 16.2%, nearly doubling the next best commercial model, Claude Opus 4.
With leaks of Google's Gemini 3 beginning to circulate and OpenAI's GPT-5 expected to launch sometime this summer, it remains to be seen how long xAI's Grok 4 holds onto its top spot.
AI LIGHTNING ROUND
📊 Nvidia Makes History - The world's leading AI chip manufacturer, Nvidia, becomes the first to reach a market cap of $4 trillion following its Blackwell chips.
🔧 OpenAI's Revenge Poaching - After a streak of departures from OpenAI, Sam Altman poached back four researchers in total from xAI, Tesla, and even Meta.
💸 European Chip Cashflow - French chipmaker SiPearl raises €130 million in a Series A fundraiser to kickstart its flagship product, the Rhea1, for AI inference.
💰 Demonetizing Mass AI - An upcoming update to YouTube's policy guidelines aims to demonetize repetitive videos using AI-generated clips, content, and other.
5 QUICK HITS
Perplexity's AI-powered web browser has been a long time coming, and on Wednesday, the AI search company officially launched Comet. The browser launches as part of Perplexity's $200/mo Max plan and ships with its AI search engine as the default with its AI-generated summaries atop traditional results. Comet's signature feature takes on the form of Comet Assistant, a side-panel AI agent that can perform a variety of general tasks, be it managing your calendar or navigating pages. The company is looking to position Comet as users' "operating system" as it takes aim at Chrome and Safari. Recent reports allege that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon launch a dedicated AI agent marketplace at its July 15 AWS Summit in New York, with Anthropic among the launch partners. The new storefront will let users browse, subscribe to, and easily deploy autonomous AI agents directly in their cloud environments. AWS intends to run the marketplace as a SaaS mode, taking a modest platform fee to boost revenue. Amazon's launch idea for an agent marketplace is similar to others from Google Cloud and Microsoft as looks leverages its existing $13.8 billion stake in Anthropic. France's most well-known AI startup, Mistral AI, is reportedly in talks to secure up to $1 billion in equity from investors, including Abu Dhabi's MGX fund, Bloomberg reports. The startup is also negotiating debt facilities worth "hundreds of millions of euros" with lenders like Bpifrance SACA. It's already partnering with MGX and Nvidia to build Europe's largest AI data center campus, supported by the UAE's €50 billion commitment to AI projects in France. To date, Mistral has pooled $1.19 billion at a $6.51 billion post‑money valuation as of its Series B fundraiser in June 2024. Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and two major teachers' unions today jointly announced the National Academy of AI Instruction, a $23 million initiative to train 400,000 K-12 teachers in the US in AI over five years. The project includes online courses, workshops, and an in-person campus in New York City, covering how AI systems work and how to use them ethically in the classroom. Microsoft will invest $12.5 million, OpenAI $10 million, and Anthropic $500 million, all over different periods of time. AFT President Randi Weingarten says the effort will help teachers make the most of AI's potential while safeguarding learning. Security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry recently discovered that McDonald's AI recruiter Olivia, powered by Paradox.ai on McHire.com, was vulnerable to leaking massive amounts of personal data. The researchers found that Olivia was protected by a default Paradox employee login using "123456" as the username and password. This gave the researchers access to an inactive test account and, as a result, every chat log and contact detail from up to 64 million McDonald's job applicants. Paradox has since patched the vulnerability and launched a bug bounty program, while McDonald's confirmed it had forced immediate remediation. |
3 AI PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
Gem - Unify your recruiting tech stack with Gem, a platform powered with AI, CRM, and analytics to provide an all-in-one solution to recruiters' problems. Parafact - Factcheck any human or AI-written text in real-time with Parafact, an AI-powered tool that tracks down reliable sources and citations - all in one click. Lens - Edit, trim, and sync your videos faster and more efficiently with Lens, a video editing agent that allows you to vibe prompt your way through the boring parts to stay creative for the important ones. |
AI EXTRA READ
A Sweeping Change Faster Than We Realize (3-min read)
With each passing month, AI advances more rapidly than before, and the people building AI are making that fact heard. However, many are unaware just how much AI could change the way we live and how fast it could happen - until it already has.
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Mark R. Hinkle
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