OpenAI is on a buying spree.
Also, Claude 4 dazzles, especially in coding tasks. But you won't find it easily in the now-owned-by-OpenAI Windsurf.
Happy Memorial day weekend! It was a whirlwind of a week with Google I/O, Claude, and billion-dollar acquisitions all rolling us into the long weekend.
-tara
I guess it’s acquisition season at OpenAI.
Hot off the tail of their $3B acquisition of popular coding agent Windsurf two weeks ago, they announced an all-equity deal to acquire io, the device startup headed up by famed x-Apple designer, Jony Ive, for a whopping $6.5B. (yes, billion)
Ive, known for crafting the iconic iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Apple Watches during his tenure at the hardware company, has been working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on an AI consumer device that is reportedly “not a pair of glasses”. The device is rumored to be screen-free, and designed to be placed on a desk, or around your neck ala the now-defunct Humane AI Pin (also by x-Apple designers).
This seems to be part of a broader strategy from OpenAI to own the “front-end” of the stack, in order to compete with tech giants like Google and OpenAI.
Interestingly enough, the recently-acquired Windsurf was denied access to Anthropic’s latest model Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 on the day of the release. While users can bring their own Anthropic keys, Windsurf users will not be getting dedicated capacity to Claude’s latest and greatest, it seems. Clearly a snub, as Microsoft’s Github Copilot gets to roll it out on day one.
I predict that acquisitions or alliances will likely continue to be hotly contested over the next few years. Maybe as an inkling, Google’s AI team this week announced their AI Futures Fund, which will invest in AI startups and offer premier support to the Gemini stack and beyond. Perplexity’s $50M ecosystem fund was also announced earlier in Feb this year.
Let the games begin.
Google announced a sweeping set of AI advancements at its annual I/O developer conference. Key highlights include:
Gemini’s “Deep Think” capabilities: Deep Think, an enhanced reasoning mode for the Pro model that Google claims delivers breakthrough performance on complex tasks by using parallel thinking techniques.
Virtual fitting rooms: Introduced a virtual try-on feature that allows users to see how clothes would look on them using just a single photo of themselves.
Introduced its video generation model Veo 3 that can generate videos with synchronized audio – including ambient sounds, effects, and character dialogue.
Google Beam evolves from Project Starline research: This technology creates the sensation of being in the same room with someone, even when communicating remotely. The result is a deeply immersive conversation experience that goes beyond traditional video calling.
Jony Ive to lead OpenAI’s design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company: OpenAI is acquiring io, the d that CEO Sam Altman and famed Apple designer Jony Ive have quietly been working on for two years, in an all-equity deal that values that startup at $6.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some speculations on the AI consumer device Ive and team are working on, which is reportedly “not a pair of glasses”.
Anthropic drops Claude 4, their Claude most powerful model yet, and the world’s best coding model. X user
got it to code up a working browser agent in one shot.GitHub Copilot evolves into autonomous agent with asynchronous code testing. GitHub Copilot Agent, first announced as Project Padawan back in February, will check, test and iterate code. When invoked, Copilot Agent can navigate the repo, edit files, run commands and open pull requests.
OpenAI launched Codex agent for software development. Built on codex-1, an o3 variant fine-tuned for software engineering. It runs in isolated clouds to write features, fix bugs, answer code questions, and run tests. Available to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, Team users.
Google’s Gemini AI app has 400M monthly active users: Google’s Gemini AI app now has more than 400 million monthly active users, CEO Sundar Pichai said during a press briefing ahead of Google I/O 2025. Google’s AI chatbot app is now approaching a similar scale to OpenAI’s ChatGPT app. According to recent court filings, Google estimated in March that ChatGPT had around 600 million MAUs, whereas Gemini only had 350 million MAUs.
Super cool collab between famed music producer Rick Rubin and Anthropic: The Way of the Code
Huawei’s new Ascend chips are said to be nearly as effective as Nvidia’s chips, and built on an open-source stack
We were made from prompts? Veo3 is scarily good.
Artificial Analysis has released its latest quarterly State of AI report, spotlighting six major trends shaping the AI landscape in early 2025.