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Perplexity launches new ‘Max’ subscription

Plus xAI raises $10Bn

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Perplexity launches new ‘Max’ subscription + Amazon releases foundational gen-AI model for warehouse robots

💰 Funding: Grammarly acquires Superhuman + xAI raises $10Bn

⚡️ Top News Stories:

3. Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have built Centaur, an AI model that simulates human decision-making with high precision by training on 60,000 participants' choices across 160 psychology experiments, outperforming cognitive models in nearly all benchmarks and offering a revolutionary new tool for behavioral science.

5. Baidu has unveiled ERNIE 4.5, a suite of 10 fully open-source multimodal AI models that outperform GPT-4o and Gemini in tasks like OCR, visual math, and Chinese reasoning, while also launching the ERNIE X1 model aimed at high-performance reasoning, all underpinned by efficient MoE training and cost-effective inference.

6. Cloudflare has launched “Pay per Crawl,” a bold new marketplace enabling websites to charge AI bots micropayments for scraping their content — a direct response to declining Google traffic and rampant free AI scraping by OpenAI and Anthropic, which Cloudflare says gives publishers little to no return.

7. Sakana AI introduced AB-MCTS, a novel algorithm that coordinates multiple AI models — including ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek — to collaboratively tackle complex tasks by assigning roles based on model strengths, outperforming any solo model. 

8. SciArena, a new platform from AI2, Yale, and NYU, lets expert scientists vote on the best answers generated by competing AI models to scientific questions, creating a dynamic, human-evaluated leaderboard that reveals performance gaps even among top-tier LLMs like o3, Claude, and DeepSeek.

9. X is testing AI-generated Community Notes from chatbots like Grok and third-party models, raising hopes of scalable fact-checking but also concerns about hallucinations, human oversight fatigue, and the accuracy of automated moderation.

10. OpenAI will lease 4.5 gigawatts of computing power from Oracle in a record-setting expansion of the Stargate initiative, prompting a U.S.-wide data center buildout and reinforcing Oracle’s role as a key player in global AI infrastructure.

11. Ilya Sutskever has assumed the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence following Daniel Gross' departure amid reports of Meta’s acquisition interest, reaffirming the company’s sole focus on building safe superintelligence despite looming challenges in leadership and recruitment.

12. Sam Altman responded to Meta’s poaching of OpenAI talent by reaffirming OpenAI’s mission-driven culture, criticizing Meta for prioritizing opportunism over long-term values, and promising to review compensation to retain top researchers.

💰 Top Funding News:

2. xAI has raised $10Bn in a mix of debt and equity to fund its Grok chatbot and massive data center buildout, pushing its total funding to $17Bn and expanding its access to capital markets.

3. Lovable, which offers an AI-driven coding platform that allows users to create apps without coding experience, is set to raise over $150M at a $1.8B valuation in a round led by Accel, with participation from 20VC and Creandum.

4. Genesis AI, which is building a foundational AI model to power general-purpose robots using synthetic data, raised a $105M seed round co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures.

5. Wonderful, which builds AI customer support agents for non-English speaking markets using customizable multilingual models, raised a $34M seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Vine Ventures.

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