xAI launches Grok Imagine - its text-to-image and video generation tool

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: xAI launches Grok Imagine - its text-to-image and video generation tool

💰 Funding: OpenAI raises $8.3Bn at a $300Bn valuation

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. xAI has officially launched Grok Imagine, a text-to-image and video generation tool, to all SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers on iOS, allowing users to create stylized 15-second videos with native audio from text or image prompts, and also featuring a controversial “spicy mode” that allows limited NSFW content creation. 

2. Google has publicly launched Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, a multi-agent AI model for its $250/month Ultra tier that answers complex questions by evaluating multiple ideas in parallel, outperforming top models in key benchmarks like the International Math Olympiad and LiveCodeBench 6.

3. Anthropic researchers have discovered "Persona Vectors," neural activation patterns that explain and help suppress undesirable AI behaviors like hallucinations and sycophancy by isolating the internal triggers behind personality drift.

4. Black Forest Labs and Krea have released FLUX.1 Krea, an open-weight AI image generation model designed to overcome the “AI look” by delivering more photorealistic and visually pleasing outputs.

5. Cohere has launched Command A Vision a new state-of-the-art multimodal AI model built specifically for business use, offering top-tier performance on visual tasks such as interpreting slides, diagrams, PDFs, photos, and real-world scenes, while offering secure, low-footprint deployment for industries like construction, finance, and healthcare.

6. Manus has introduced Wide Research, a breakthrough system that transforms its AI agent into a cloud supercomputing platform capable of massive-scale parallel processing and collaborative research, allowing users to command high-volume tasks simply by chatting.

7. Anthropic revoked OpenAI’s access to its Claude models after discovering the rival used Claude for internal tool comparisons and pre-GPT-5 testing, a breach of terms that underscores rising competition among top AI labs.

8. In a quiet shift, Apple has launched a new internal team, called Answers, Knowledge and Information (AKI), to build a ChatGPT-style AI-powered search engine, aiming to modernize Siri and Spotlight amid regulatory threats to its Google search deal and growing demand for generative AI search tools.

9. Cloudflare shared research accusing AI startup Perplexity of scraping websites that had explicitly blocked AI bots, alleging the company used deceptive techniques—like disguising its crawlers as Google Chrome and rotating IP addresses—to bypass protections such as robots.txt, impacting tens of thousands of domains and millions of daily requests.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. OpenAI has raised $8.3Bn at a $300Bn valuation—well ahead of its $40Bn annual target—with the round led by Dragoneer Investment Group ($2.8Bn) and backed by major new and existing investors including Blackstone, TPG, Sequoia, and Fidelity.

2. Meta plans to sell $2.04Bn in land and construction assets as part of a strategy to co-develop AI data centers with financial partners, helping offset the rising infrastructure costs of generative AI.

3. French AI startup Mistral is seeking a $10Bn valuation through a $1Bn raise to expand its open-source chatbot and LLMs, aiming to rival dominant U.S. and Chinese players while building a mega data center near Paris.

4. Vast Data, which provides AI-optimized storage infrastructure for efficient data center operations, is in talks to raise a new round at a valuation of up to $30B led by CapitalG and Nvidia.

5. fal, which provides infrastructure for real-time generative media across image, video, audio, and 3D, raised a $125M Series C led by Meritech with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures, Google AI Futures Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, a16z, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Village Global.

6. Fundamental Research Labs, which builds AI agents across verticals including productivity and financial modeling, raised a $33M Series A led by Prosus with participation from Patrick Collison.

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