Midjourney joins Meta in the headlines as the pair partnered up to license the startup's "aesthetic technology" for its future models and products, announced Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. Although most of the deal's terms and numbers are unknown, the research teams of both will collaborate to integrate each other's tech as Meta looks to more seriously compete in the visual AI space with the likes of OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo. Meta has had a stake in the space previously with the launch of its Imagine and Movie Gen, an AI image generator and AI video generator, respectively.
As is tradition at xAI, the AI company has open sourced an older version of Grok, namely Grok 2.5, for public use and research, announced by Musk himself on X/Twitter. The announcement also stated that Grok 3 will be made open source six months later, while its current Grok 4 line of AI models will continue to spearhead the company. Grok 2.5 and its model weights are available now on Hugging Face under a custom license with "some anti-competitive terms," as described by AI engineer Tim Kellogg.
American tech giant Intel has announced that the US government will acquire a 9.9% stake in the company through an $8.9 billion investment in stock, a rare direct financial involvement in a private company. The deal involves the purchase of 433.3 million shares at $20.47 each, giving taxpayers a discount on the market price, even as President Trump touts that the US paid "zero." Intel says that the move underscores "national priorities" to strengthen domestic chip production, complementing the $2.2 billion in CHIPS Act grants that it has already been awarded, which totals to a $11.1 billion investment.
"Leading the Future" is Silicon Valley's newly-formed pro-AI super-PAC network with already over $100 million poured into it, including by the likes of OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz. The political action committee network's goal is to advocate for more favorable AI regulations in next year's midterm elections with the help of digital ads and campaign donations, aligning itself primarily with the current policies of the White House and its "AI and crypto czar," David Sacks.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly discussed a £2 billion (or $2.7 billion) deal with the UK's Technology Secretary Peter Kyle to give all UK residents access to ChatGPT Plus, although the proposal was not seriously considered at the time. The Guardian reported the talks during Kyle's visit to San Francisco as part of wider discussions on AI's role in government. While the government denies such claims, Kyle has praised ChatGPT's usefulness for policy advice, and a non-binding July agreement with OpenAI could see its technology applied in education, defense, and public services.