Anthropic launches research to study AI consciousness

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Anthropic launches research to study AI consciousness + OpenAI increases access deep-research and Image generation API

💰 Funding: Supabase raises $200M Series D

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Anthropic has launched a pioneering research program on 'model welfare' to study whether advanced AI systems might exhibit signs of consciousness or ethical relevance, despite no current scientific consensus.

2. OpenAI has introduced a more cost-effective, lightweight version of its deep research tool powered by the o4-mini model, bringing scalable and quality web-based research capabilities to all ChatGPT user tiers, including free users.

3. OpenAI has partnered with The Washington Post to incorporate summaries and links to its articles within ChatGPT responses, boosting content quality for users and visibility for the publisher amid a mixed media industry reception to AI integrations.

4. OpenAI’s new image generator model, gpt-image-1, is now available via API, offering developers multimodal visual creation tools with safety filters, speed control, and watermarking — already being adopted by major brands like Figma and Instacart.

5. Adobe unveiled Firefly Image Model 4 and Ultra for more refined AI image generation, expanded video and vector creation tools, and a revamped Firefly web app that supports both its own and rival models, along with ethical content attribution features.

6. xAI’s Grok chatbot now offers Grok Vision, enabling iOS users to ask questions about their surroundings via their phone’s camera, joining the competitive wave of real-time visual AI features seen in rivals like Gemini and ChatGPT.

7. Character.AI has launched AvatarFX, a video generation model that animates chatbots with visuals and voices from text prompts or existing images—enabling lifelike or cartoon characters but raising deepfake concerns over the manipulation of real photos.

8. Tempus AI has entered $200 million agreements with AstraZeneca and Pathos to develop the largest multimodal foundation model in oncology, using its de-identified patient data to advance drug discovery and personalized cancer treatment.

9. A coalition of legal scholars, AI experts, nonprofit leaders, and former OpenAI employees have published an open letter at NotForPrivateGain.org urging California and Delaware attorneys general to block OpenAI’s proposed restructuring, which would shift control of AGI development from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity

10. Two undergraduates from Korea have developed Dia, a surprisingly advanced open-source AI speech model rivaling Google’s NotebookLM in synthetic voice generation, offering customizable audio outputs with minimal safeguards and unclear training data provenance.

11. NVIDIA’s NeMo microservices platform, now generally available, empowers enterprises to build and scale AI teammates through customizable, secure, and continuously optimized agents fueled by real-time data flywheels.

12. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index introduces the concept of the "Frontier Firm," where organizations integrate AI agents into their core operations, enabling scalable, agile, and efficient business models that redefine traditional work structure.

13. MIT researchers have unveiled I-Con, a "periodic table" of machine learning that unifies over 20 algorithms under a single mathematical equation modeling data point connections, revealing a shared foundation across clustering, contrastive learning, and classification methods.

14. OpenAI is set to release a highly permissive, benchmark-leading open-source reasoning model this summer—its most open offering since GPT-2—optimized for consumer hardware, equipped with full safety evaluations, featuring togglable reasoning, and designed to rival Meta’s LLaMA and DeepSeek’s R1.

15. Google’s AI Overviews now reach over 1.5 billion users monthly, a major milestone in the company's shift toward AI-powered search experiences, as Alphabet expands Gemini integrations and faces intensifying antitrust scrutiny in the U.S.

16. Anthropic warns that AI-powered virtual employees with autonomous roles, memories, and corporate credentials could appear within a year — posing significant cybersecurity challenges that companies must prepare for or risk major breaches.

17. Perplexity CEO revealed the company's new Comet browser will track users' entire online activity to create hyper-personalized ad profiles, aiming to replicate Google's ad dominance by harvesting behavioral data far beyond AI prompts.

18. During Google’s antitrust trial, OpenAI executive Nick Turley revealed the company would be eager to acquire the Chrome browser if available, seeing it as a chance to redefine browsing through an AI-first experience powered by ChatGPT.

19. OpenAI forecasts a dramatic revenue increase to over $125 billion by 2029, propelled by the expansion of AI agents and a diversified product portfolio, despite anticipating continued investments that delay profitability until that year.

20. President Trump has signed an executive order titled "Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth," mandating the integration of AI education into K-12 curricula, establishes a dedicated task force, and initiates a national AI challenge to cultivate an AI-ready workforce and sustain U.S. technological leadership. 

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Supabase, which provides an open-source backend platform combining Postgres with AI-ready tools for building scalable applications, raised a $200M Series D led by Accel, with participation from Coatue, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, and Felicis.

2. Superpower, which uses AI to generate personalized health insights and action plans from lab tests and personal data, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner. 

3. Adaptive Computer, which uses AI to let non-programmers build full-featured web apps from text prompts, raised a $7M Seed round led by Pebblebed, with participation from Conviction, Weekend Fund, Anti Fund, Dave Baszucki, and others.

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