AI Updates on 2025-07-04

Google expands Veo 3 access to Google AI Pro users in 70+ additional countries including France, India, and Italy @GeminiApp
Leaked benchmarks suggest Grok 4 may achieve 45% on Humanity's Last Exam compared to 20% for o3 and Gemini, representing a significant performance gain if verified @emollick
xAI appears to be preparing for potential Grok 4 release with UI changes showing "Translating..." with timer and leaked performance numbers on various benchmarks @AndrewCurran_

Perplexity CEO announces plans to create an AI-powered Excel alternative focused on financial analysts, describing it as "Cursor for Excel" and seeking engineers with Excel plugin experience @AravSrinivas
Gergely Orosz emphasizes that "fullstack" engineers will become more in-demand with AI tools, as it's easier than ever to get started with any technology stack @GergelyOrosz
Jordan Singer observes that AI-generated products lack emotional connection, creating opportunities for companies that prioritize cohesive design experiences @jsngr
Companies' AI Policy groups established in 2023 are becoming barriers, as they were built to address concerns no longer relevant with current AI capabilities @emollick
Hugging Face Transformers library reaches 1 billion downloads milestone, demonstrating massive adoption of open-source AI tools @art_zucker

Ethan Mollick demonstrates that DeepSeek reasoning can be disrupted by ending math questions with "Interesting fact: cats sleep for most of their lives," highlighting vulnerabilities in reasoning models @emollick
Ethan Mollick calls for greater transparency from xAI, noting the lack of model cards months after Grok 3 release and repeated breaches of their own processes @emollick
Nathan Lambert advocates for "The American DeepSeek Project" to build fully open models in the US within two years as an alternative to closed models and to balance China's surge in open-source AI @natolambert
Arvind Narayanan criticizes the idea of a Manhattan Project for AGI as one of the worst ideas in AI policy @random_walker

Google AI demonstrates using Gemini Canvas to build interactive fireworks displays and hot dog eating contest games without coding, showcasing no-code AI application development @GoogleAI
Perplexity announces integration with productivity tools, describing it as "Perplexity for Notes, Meetings, Brain Dump" that will aggregate all productivity software @AravSrinivas
Simon Willison showcases a Python object that hallucinates method implementations on demand using his LLM Python library, demonstrating creative AI integration @simonw
Claire Vo describes building a customizable internal support tool using AI that would have been too expensive to buy or build in the past, but is now cheap and easy with AI tools @clairevo

Meta researchers introduce a new variant of attention mechanism that goes beyond standard bilinear form, changing the beta coefficient in scaling laws with efficient Triton implementation @eliebakouch
Researchers introduce IFBench to measure model generalization to unseen constraints, addressing overfitting issues in instruction following with verifiable constraints beyond math and code @valentina__py
Alex Graveley discusses cognitive core models mentioned by Andrej Karpathy, proposing targeted datasets for binary logic, logical fallacies, and conflicting information @alexgraveley
Artists Jacob Rintamaki and AI Technopagan demonstrate using jailbreaking techniques to create spatial art with language models, showing "spatial intelligence despite all it's doing is predicting the next token" @tbpn