xAI launches Grok 4 models

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: xAI launches Grok 4 models + Perplexity launches its AI-powered Comet browser

💰 Funding: LangChain and Mistral both near $1Bn valuations 

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. xAI launched its high-performing Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy models with a $300/month SuperGrok Heavy subscription, boasting benchmark wins and multi-agent reasoning.

• Grok 4 Heavy uses multiple agents that collaborate like a study group to solve problems, and it outperformed competitors on tests like Humanity’s Last Exam and ARC-AGI-2, achieving frontier-level benchmarks.

• Elon Musk also announced Grok will arrive in Tesla vehicles next week as an in-car AI assistant.

• Grok 4 has also been found to consult Musk’s own social media posts and views when answering controversial questions—such as on immigration and abortion—raising ethical concerns about bias and transparency, especially as the company markets the tool for enterprise use and Tesla integration without releasing standard documentation like a system card.

• The launch came shortly after Grok was temporarily shut down for generating offensive responses. 

2. Perplexity launched its AI-powered web browser Comet, available to premium users, which integrates the company’s AI search engine and introduces an assistant that performs contextual in-browser tasks like email summarization and calendar navigation, marking a bold move to compete directly with Google Search and Chrome.

3. OpenAI is reportedly preparing to launch its own AI-powered web browser in the coming weeks, potentially integrating “Operator,” a web-browsing AI agent, to keep more user interactions within ChatGPT rather than redirecting to external sites.

4. OpenAI is poised to release its first open-weight language model since GPT-2—comparable in reasoning ability to "o3 mini" and deployable across cloud platforms like Azure, Hugging Face, and others. 

5. OpenAI has partnered with education unions and tech companies to launch a $10M backed National Academy for AI Instruction, aiming to equip 400,000 U.S. teachers with training, tools, and resources to responsibly integrate AI into K-12 classrooms by 2030.

6. Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, born from DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, is preparing its first human trials of AI-designed drugs, aiming to revolutionize drug discovery through powerful partnerships, $600M in funding, and ambitions to dramatically increase speed, reduce cost, and improve success rates in pharmaceutical development.

7. Moonvalley has launched its AI video model Marey to the public, offering a credits-based system for filmmakers seeking precise creative control, ethical data sourcing, and advanced features like 3D-aware motion, camera manipulation, and background edits, all while rivaling competitors like Runway Gen-3 and Pika.

8. Google has rolled out a new image-to-video feature powered by its Veo 3 AI model within the Gemini app, allowing AI Ultra and Pro users to turn photos into short videos with optional audio, marking a significant creative expansion seven weeks after Veo 3’s launch.

9. Replit has partnered with Microsoft to bring no-code, AI-powered software development to enterprise users via Azure, allowing teams across departments to securely build and deploy apps using natural language and access Replit through the Azure Marketplace.

10. OpenAI has ramped up security across its offices, infrastructure, and digital systems—in response to espionage fears after DeepSeek allegedly copied its models–limiting employee access, isolating key technologies, and boosting biometric and cybersecurity measures.

11. Just days after laying off 9,000 employees, Microsoft revealed it saved over $500M in call centers thanks to AI tools like Copilot, underscoring a controversial strategy of cutting jobs during record profits while doubling down on AI investments.

12. FlexOlmo by AI2 introduces a breakthrough framework for training language models that enables decentralized collaboration by letting data owners contribute expert modules without sharing raw data, dynamically control participation, and receive credit, all while maintaining strong performance and privacy safeguards.

13. Nvidia is reportedly launching a modified version of its Blackwell RTX Pro 6000 chip for China by September, designed to comply with U.S. export controls by excluding high-end features like high-bandwidth memory and NVLink, in an effort to re-engage a datacenter market now dominated by competitors like Huawei.

14. AI chipmaker Groq has launched its first European data center in Helsinki with Equinix, positioning its fast-deploying, cost-efficient inference chips as a strategic alternative to Nvidia’s GPU dominance amid Europe's push for sovereign AI and greener data infrastructure.

15. A threat actor used AI to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio, contacting at least five high-profile individuals—including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a member of Congress—via Signal with the aim of gaining access to sensitive accounts or information, according to a classified diplomatic cable.

16. California State Senator Scott Wiener has introduced amendments to SB 53, a revised AI transparency bill requiring top AI companies like OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic to publish safety protocols and incident reports—marking California's most significant legislative push yet for AI accountability.

17. Amazon Web Services is launching an AI agent marketplace next week with Anthropic as a partner, aiming to centralize distribution and monetization of autonomous AI agents for enterprise customers and startups, in a move poised to challenge rival ecosystems from Microsoft and Google.

18. In a high-profile recruitment move amid escalating AI talent wars, OpenAI has brought on four senior engineers from Tesla, xAI, and Meta — including former Tesla VP David Lau and two architects of xAI’s massive Colossus supercomputer — to bolster its Stargate data center project and backend infrastructure.

19. Luma AI is launching a Hollywood-based Dream Lab to train and collaborate with filmmakers on generative video tools like its Dream Machine and Modify, aiming to redefine content production by making AI-driven filmmaking faster, cheaper, and more creatively accessible.

20. YouTube will revise its monetization rules on July 15 to crack down on inauthentic and mass-produced content, including AI-generated videos, as part of an effort to safeguard its platform from low-quality media that has increasingly flooded the site.

💰 Top Funding News:

1.  Meta has acquired a nearly 3% stake in eyewear leader EssilorLuxottica for $3.5Bn, expanding its push into AI-enabled smart glasses following the success of Ray-Ban Meta and signaling further ambition in the wearable tech space.

2. LangChain, the AI infrastructure pioneer originally known for enabling LLMs to perform real-world tasks, is nearing unicorn status with a reported $1B valuation round led by IVP, driven by the rapid adoption of its LangSmith monitoring platform by major clients like Klarna and Replit.

3. Mistral, a French AI leader known for its open-weight language models and the Le Chat chatbot, is reportedly raising up to $1B in equity—plus hundreds of millions in debt—as it partners with MGX and Nvidia to build Europe’s largest AI data center, backed by France's push for AI sovereignty.

4. Nvidia has become the world’s first $4 Trillion company, powered by explosive demand for its AI chips and software following ChatGPT’s release, as tech giants pour billions into infrastructure reliant on its GPUs despite rising competition and regulatory scrutiny.

5. LGND, which applies AI to geospatial data to streamline spatial analysis and querying, raised a $9M seed round led by Javelin Venture Partners with participation from AENU, Clocktower Ventures, Coalition Operators, MCJ, Overture, Ridgeline, Space Capital, and several angel investors.

6. Blok, which uses AI personas to simulate app user behavior for pre-launch testing and product optimization, raised a $7.5M seed round led by MaC Venture Capital with participation from Protagonist, Rackhouse, Weekend Fund, Blank Ventures, and tech industry angels.

7. ZeroEntropy, which builds AI infrastructure to improve retrieval-augmented generation for developers, raised a $4.2M seed round led by Initialized Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures, a16z Scout, and angels from OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Front.

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