Deepseek releases update to its R1 model

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Deepseek releases update to its R1 model + Perplexity launches productivity toolset

💰 Funding: Grammarly secures $1Bn in new funding

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released an updated version of its R1 reasoning model, describing it as a “minor” upgrade, though it remains highly advanced in performance and scale.

2. Perplexity has launched Labs, a feature that uses AI to generate advanced outputs like reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and interactive web apps, marking its evolution from search engine to productivity platform.

3. Black Forest Labs has launched Flux.1 Kontext, a family of advanced AI models that enable users to generate and edit photorealistic images via text prompts, with editing features like changing clothing or scene elements and speeds up to 8x faster than competitors.

4. Mistral AI introduced its new Agents API, designed to enhance AI capabilities by enabling agents to perform actions, maintain conversational context, and orchestrate complex tasks by integrating built-in tools like code execution, web search, and image generation.

5. Opera’s new browser Neon introduces AI-driven agents capable of coding, shopping, and multitasking autonomously in the cloud—even offline—signaling the company’s push into the competitive AI assistant space.

6. To navigate U.S. export restrictions, Nvidia and AMD will begin selling downgraded AI GPUs like the “B20” and Radeon AI PRO R9700 in China starting July, signaling a major shift in their strategy to preserve access to a lucrative but politically fraught market.

7. Amazon has signed its first major AI content licensing deal with The New York Times, allowing the tech giant to use its editorial content—including articles, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic—to train AI models and enhance customer experiences like Alexa.

8. Meta is restructuring its AI organization into two teams—AI Products and AGI Foundations—to speed up innovation in areas like Llama models, voice, and multimedia.

9. Odyssey, a startup founded by autonomous vehicle experts, has launched a demo of its AI model that streams interactive 3D video worlds in real time, enabling viewers to navigate within scenes like a video game while planning to expand toward deeper interactivity and creative collaborations.

10. xAI will pay Telegram $300M in cash and equity to integrate its Grok chatbot across the messaging platform, allowing users to interact with Grok directly in chats and search, with Telegram receiving half of all in-app subscription revenue.

11. The Browser Company is pivoting from the Arc browser to a new AI-native product, Dia, citing Arc’s lack of mass adoption, underused features, and architectural constraints, and positions Dia as a faster, simpler, and more secure foundation for the emerging era of intelligent, chat-integrated web interfaces.

12. Google is rolling out a globally redesigned editor packed with AI tools like Reimagine and Auto Frame that transform photos via text prompts and smart framing, alongside new features for contextual edits and QR-code album sharing.

13. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is warning that AI may soon obliterate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, creating a wave of 10–20% unemployment, as companies rapidly adopt cost-saving agentic AI while the U.S. government and public remain dangerously unprepared for the disruption.

14. Salesforce is reducing engineering hires and redeploying 500 customer service workers—saving $50M this year—thanks to productivity gains from internal AI tools that it views as workforce "assistants."

15. Delaware’s attorney general has brought in an independent investment bank to scrutinize OpenAI’s nonprofit-to-for-profit transition, adding a regulatory hurdle that could delay the company’s investment and IPO ambitions.

💰 Top Funding News:

1.  Salesforce is acquiring data management leader Informatica for $8Bn to fuse its cloud-native governance, metadata, and MDM technologies with Salesforce's platform, enabling trustworthy and scalable agentic AI across industries.

2. Grammarly, which applies AI to enhance writing and productivity tools, secured a $1Bn nondilutive round from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund to fuel sales and marketing expansion without diluting equity.

3. Snorkel AI, which enables enterprises to build expert-driven evaluation systems for fine-tuning and testing AI models, raised a $100M Series D led by Addition with participation from Greylock.

4. Buildots, which uses AI and computer vision to track and forecast construction project performance, raised a $45M Series D led by Qumra Capital with participation from OG Venture Partners, TLV Partners, Poalim Equity, Future Energy Ventures, and Viola Growth.

5. AMD has acquired silicon photonics startup Enosemi to accelerate co-packaged optics development for AI systems, strengthening its AI hardware roadmap with next-gen data center interconnect solutions and absorbing key engineering talent from the startup.

6. Rillet, which uses AI to automate general ledger accounting for mid-sized companies, raised a $25M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from First Round Capital, Creandum, and Susa Ventures.

7. Context, which is developing an AI-powered office suite with a unified, chat-based interface, raised an $11M Seed round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures and General Catalyst.

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