Mark Zuckerberg is shaking up Meta's AI department one more time as he looks to split its recently-formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. An internal announcement on Tuesday said that the AI lab would separate into dedicated teams: one for AI research, a second for developing its AI models, a third for products, and a fourth for infrastructure. According to two people familiar with the matter, the reorganization is likely to be the last for a while, yet added that some AI executives are expected to depart as Meta looks to downsize its AI department after a ludicrous talent spending spree.
Character.AI is reportedly exploring either a potential sale or raising hundreds of millions in funding at a valuation over $1 billion, as operating costs mount beyond what it can manage, according to The Information. Founded by ex-Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the startup now runs on open-source models and generates revenue primarily through its $10/mo subscriptions, expecting $50 million in annualized revenue this year. Despite its 20 million users, recent lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny have put Character.AI in a spotlight it would probably rather not be in.
Much like OpenAI and then Anthropic soon after, Google has joined a recent trend among its rivals as it announced plans to begin selling a custom suite of Gemini to government agencies. "Gemini for Government" will include access to NotebookLM, its enterprise search, multimedia AI generation package, and many of its AI agents, such as Deep Research. Google is offering all of this for just $0.50 per agency, a jab at OpenAI's and Anthropic's $1 offers, though it is offering extra security features for a bump in price.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly released one of its largest AI models to date that rivals the world's best in open-source. The 685-billion-parameterDeepSeek V3.1-Base non-reasoning model (the full model is hybrid) was shipped to Hugging Face under the permissive MIT license, racking up a buzz on social media within just hours of its stealth launch. The model comes with a 128,000 token context window at a rock-bottom price - on the Aider Polyglot benchmark, DeepSeek V3.1 scored 1% higher than Claude Opus 4.0 while costing 68 times less to run.
Starting Wednesday, Google's AI Mode has begun rolling out globally to 180 countries and territories, broadening availability beyond its initial launch in the US, UK, and India. The AI-powered feature, still English-only, has also been receiving new agentic tools, starting with restaurant reservations, available to Google AI Ultra subscribers through platforms like OpenTable and Resy. For those in the US who have opted into the AI Mode experiment in Labs, AI Mode is also becoming more personal by factoring in past searches and offering shareable links.