Starting Friday last week, Google has begun rolling out Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, its most advanced AI reasoning model to date, of which a variant brought the company a gold medal at the 2025 International Math Olympiad. Similar to xAI's Grok 4, Google's model leverages a multi-agent approach to tackle complex tasks by exploring multiple reasoning paths in parallel and supports tools like code execution and Google Search out of the box. However, it doesn't come cheap, as the special Deep Think model is locked behind Google's $250/mo Ultra subscription plan.
Just as the last week came to a close, OpenAI outdid Anthropic's reported $5 billion fundraiser on the same week with a whopping $8.3 billion round of their own, according to The New York Times. The round, which came just a day after it announced it had hit $12 billion in ARR, puts OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation. The Times reports that the leader was a rather covert investor this time around, Dragoneer Investment Group, with a $2.8 billion contribution, joined by new names like Blackstone and TPG. The round reflects OpenAI's ambitions to raise $40 billion and $20 billion in ARR by the end of the year.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is developing an in-house, minimalist AI chatbot and search tool to compete with ChatGPT in the same space. The Bloomberg report alleges that the move is led by a new team in Apple called “Answers, Knowledge, and Information" under Robby Walker, who previously oversaw Siri. Sources tell that the tool could power anything from Siri to Safari to Spotlight, or even exist as a standalone app - whatever the case, Apple has been aggressively hiring talent with "search engine expertise" as it attempts to crawl back into AI relevance.
A recent blog post from Cloudflare has put the spotlight on AI startup Perplexity yet again as the cloud giant accuses it of unauthorized web scraping practices. The article details that Perplexity's content crawlers mask their identity by altering user agents and network identifiers to bypass web page restrictions. Although Perplexity denied ownership of the bot mentioned in the paper, Cloudflare claims its analysis of millions of requests points only to Perplexity. This wouldn't be the first time Perplexity is accused of unauthorized scraping, as popular news outlet Wired accused it of the same last year.
For the first time since its founding, data analytics and defense contractor Palantir hit an all-time high of $1 billion in quarterly revenue, it announced on Monday. The company also raised its yearly revenue projections from an earlier ~$3.9 billion to now ~$4.15 billion, further highlighted by a $10 billion deal with the U.S. Army last week. Palantir's bet on AI-driven systems has been a major driving factor behind its booming success, with its shares more than doubling this year, as the government's demand for services of Palantir's ilk continues to rise.
Google VP of security Heather Adkins has announced that the company's Big Sleep AI-driven vulnerability researcher has reported its first set of 20 security vulnerabilities across popular open-source projects like FFmpeg and ImageMagick. Developed together by DeepMind and Project Zero, Google claims that Big Sleep discovered and reproduced each bug autonomously before passing its findings on to human experts to confirm. Although details are scarce as the fixes based on Big Sleep's findings are still pending, Google claims that the milestone is a big step in automated bug discovery.