After a few months since it was first unveiled, OpenAI has finally made o3-pro, a beefed-up version of its o3 reasoning model, available to its Pro and Team users as it replaces o1-pro. The model comes with access to many of OpenAI's tools, such as web search, file analysis, and visual reasoning capabilities. However, for the time being, o3-pro does not come with image generation nor its Canvas feature. On top of the o3-pro release, OpenAI has also lowered the price of o3 by about 80% across the board, making it a reasonable alternative to Google's industry-standard Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Soon after reports of a potential Meta and Scale AI investment deal began to surface, Meta announced preparations to unveil a new AI research lab to pursue "superintelligence." This research lab would tap into Scale AI's headcount as part of the $14 billion deal, including the company's founder and CEO Alexander Wang, and has offered members high–seven to nine-figure compensation packages. With the fallout of Meta's Llama team and the disastrous launch of Llama 4, the move is part of Meta's recently announced plans to reorganize its AI operations under company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
First reported by The Wall Street Journal, Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a lawsuit against the internet-famous Midjourney, alleging that its models were trained on copyrighted material without explicit permission. They claim that Midjourney ignored earlier cease-and-desist requests and provided dozens of infringing examples of the studio's characters in the filing, such as AI-generated images of Darth Vader and Homer Simpson. Now, they are seeking monetary damages, a jury trial, and an order to stop any further violations.
In an unusual turn of events, Reuters reports that OpenAI has decided to tap into the Google Cloud service to satisfy its computing capacity hunger despite being fierce competitors in the AI space. Multiple sources allege that this deal has been in the works for months and was finalized just recently in May. As OpenAI's and ChatGPT's popularity continue to skyrocket, Google's cloud unit is a must-needed boost for Sam Altman's firm, which has begun diversifying its compute sources beyond Microsoft not long ago.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami has struck a deal with an AI company, namely Google's London-based DeepMind, for the first time to start experimenting with AI. Dubbed Weather Lab, the experimental public preview AI model is a breakthrough in weather forecasting, with Google claiming that its model offers much fewer trade-offs compared to traditional, physics-based ones. As part of the deal, Weather Lab will be deployed for use together with NHC forecasters for the hurricane season, even as it faces layoffs amid the Trump administration.
Spain-based quantum computing startup Multiverse Computing has recently announced that it has secured $215 million in Series B funding to continue its mission of reducing AI costs. Multiverse achieves this with its quantum computing-inspired compression technology called CompactifAI to compress small AI models, such as Llama 4 Scout and Mistral Small 3.1, into "slim" models, reducing inference costs by 50-80% and increasing speeds by 4-12x without gutting performance. With this, Multiverse claims that many AI models could be run on devices as small as the developer-favorite Raspberry PI, not to mention drones, phones, and more.