During Figma's 2025 rendition of its annual Config conference, the company unveiled its next major leap in bringing more AI to its product suite, giving Adobe and other competitors something to worry about.
Other main key highlights include:
- OpenAI launches a global "democratic AI" program to expand its Stargate Project overseas
- The Trump administration announces plans to begin dismantling Biden's last-minute export controls on semiconductors
- France's Mistral launches Medium 3, an AI model that fights at the industry's frontier at "8x lower cost"
Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!
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As part of a major feature update released on Wednesday during its annual Config conference, Figma unveiled four new AI-powered tools - Sites, Make, Buzz, and Draw - that are looking to try and bring many of its competitors' offerings directly into its own platform. Although Figma may still not cover the same breadth as Adobe does with its Creative Cloud, it's another step closer to a richer, more competitive market.
What do the new features bring to the Figma suite?
Figma Sites turns designs into live websites with AI-generated layouts, blocks, and templating, while Figma Make, powered by Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, is Figma's take on a prompt-to-code tool. Meanwhile, Figma Buzz offers brand-approved marketing templates and bulk image generation, and Figma Draw provides Adobe Illustrator-like vector tools. All of these tools are already in beta for full seat users, with Draw being available to the general public.
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OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, recently unveiled "OpenAI for Countries," a program partnering with nations worldwide to build and operate data centers delivering localized ChatGPT versions for healthcare, education, and more. Participating countries will help fund infrastructure under an expanded Stargate Project and work closely with the US government on export controls for deployments. The post puts emphasis on "democratic AI" over authoritarian models, which looks to offer data sovereignty and a national AI ecosystem fund to support domestic startups.
The Commerce Department under President Trump plans to revoke the "AI diffusion rule," a tiered set of Biden-era export controls on advanced AI semiconductors that were due to take effect May 15. Nvidia, whose shares surged right after the announcement, praised the move, saying it will help the US "lead the next industrial revolution" and create more high-paying jobs. A spokesperson for the The Commerce Department called Biden's rule "overly complex" and promised a simpler replacement to "unleash American innovation."
French frontier AI startup Mistral has returned with the release of its latest AI model, Mistral 3 Medium, designed to balance cost without sacrificing its spot near industry leading performance. Priced at $0.40 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens, Mistral claims Medium 3 matches or exceeds 90% of Anthropic's higher-cost Claude 3.7 Sonnet on major benchmarks and outperforms Meta's Llama 4 Maverick and Cohere's Command A. The model is designed for four-GPU environments or any cloud and is available via Mistral's API and Amazon SageMaker, with support for Azure AI Foundry and Google Vertex AI on the way.
As reported first by Business Insider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working on a new AI-powered code generation tool called "Kiro." The tool is designed to produce code in "near real-time" from prompts and existing data by leveraging AI agents, supporting multimodal input and even integration with third-party agents. Beyond code generation, Kiro can also draft technical design documents, flag issues, and make optimizations to existing code. AWS already offers the Q Developer coding assistant, similar to GitHub Copilot, and though Kiro was slated for a late-June launch, that timeline may have shifted.
Google has rolled out another suite of AI-powered safety features across its platforms to detect and block increasingly sophisticated scams. Chrome's desktop Enhanced Protection now uses its on-device Gemini Nano model to analyze sites in real time, while Chrome for Android gained AI-driven notification alerts and Google Messages and Phone apps now feature on-device Scam Detection for texts and calls. According to Google, these AI defenses now block 20 times more scammy sites than three years ago and, together with other implementations, have reduced official-site impersonations by over 70% in 2024.
AI-agent driven sales automation startup Clay is allowing employees with at least one year's tenure to sell a portion of their equity in a tender offer led by Sequoia, which has agreed to buy up to $20 million at a $1.5 billion valuation - a $250 million raise from January's Series B. According to company CEO and co-founder Kareen Amin, both current and former staff may sell shares typically equivalent to about one year's salary, though he himself and co-founder Varun Anand are not selling.
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Lens - Edit, trim, and sync your videos faster and more efficiently with Lens, a video editing agent that allows you to vibe prompt your way through the boring parts to stay creative for the important ones.
Omniflow - Supercharge your product development journey from ideation, design, development till release with Omniflow, an all-in-one AI agent-driven platform.
Needle - Meet Needle, a seamlessly integrating platform that simplifies how teams access and manage knowledge across their favorite tools by leveraging AI to do organization-wide searches and save time.
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"Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College" (7-min watch)
It's no secret that students in the modern day use AI to help get by at school and reduce busywork, but the shift might be more rampant and overbearing than previously thought. College students are quietly outsourcing their entire education to AI - dumping essays, coding assignments, even exam prep into ChatGPT and friends, and getting away with it.
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