Personnel Moves
- Meta builds Superintelligence lab: Meta acquired 49% of Scale AI for $15 billion and hired founder Alexandr Wang to lead its new "Superintelligence" division, reportedly offering top researchers eight-figure salaries. Jack Rae joined from Gemini. Details: The Verge
- Cross-industry executive moves: Lamini founder Sharon Zhou joined AMD as VP of AI, reporting to Lisa Su. Former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo became CEO of OpenAI's Applications division, reporting to Sam Altman. Source
- OpenAI o3-pro released: Available to ChatGPT Pro users and via API. Scores 87.3 on Extended NYT Connections (vs. 82.5 for o3), tops SnakeBench, and solves 10-disc Tower of Hanoi. Users report it "far exceeds Claude Opus 4" on non-code tasks, though inference is 3x slower than o1-pro. Source
- OpenAI cuts o3 pricing by 80%: Now $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens — 20% cheaper than GPT-4o — potentially forcing Google and Anthropic to follow. Source
- DPO fine-tuning for GPT-4.1: GPT-4.1, 4.1-mini, and 4.1-nano now support Direct Preference Optimization for improving style and creativity on subjective tasks. Source
- Volcano Engine launches Doubao 1.6 and Seedance 1.0 Pro: Announced at the FORCE conference. Doubao 1.6 uses unified pricing, supports "search-while-thinking" and DeepResearch. Seedance 1.0 Pro leads in text-to-video and image-to-video generation. More info
- Krea AI releases Krea1: First image generation model from Krea, addressing texture, contrast, and composition issues; supports style references and custom training, with a free beta. Demo
- Alibaba open-sources MaskSearch: From the Tongyi Lab, using Retrieval-Augmented Mask Prediction (RAMP) and reinforcement learning to improve complex question answering. Code: https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/MaskSearch
- Mistral releases Magistral: A 24B-parameter reasoning model based on Mistral Small 3.1, multilingual with 128K context (40K effective), under Apache 2.0. Model card
- Meta V-JEPA 2: A 1.2B-parameter video-trained world model enabling zero-shot robot planning in unseen environments, plus three new physical-reasoning benchmarks. Blog
- Gemini 2.5 Pro gains: The 06-05 checkpoint tops Live Fiction (192K tokens) and document processing, reportedly solving all 2025 JEE Advanced math problems. Source
- OpenAI–Google cloud deal (reported): OpenAI reportedly signed a new cloud agreement with Google for additional compute. Source
- Modular supports AMD GPUs, launches Mammoth: Added AMD Instinct MI300X/MI325 support with 53% BF16 throughput gains, plus Mammoth, a Kubernetes-native system for scaling GenAI inference across GPU clusters. Details
- Figma Dev Mode MCP server beta: Passes design data to AI coding tools via a standardized protocol, improving code output fidelity from prototype to production. Details
- Disney and Universal sue Midjourney: The studios allege unauthorized use of copyrighted characters (e.g., Star Wars, The Simpsons) for training — a case that could shape AI training-data copyright standards. Reuters
Model Updates and Pricing
New Models and Research
Partnerships and Infrastructure
Legal and Ethics
*Source: Easy AI Daily*