AI Updates on 2025-07-08

Grok 4 is releasing approximately 48 hours from the announcement, which will address recent speculation about the model @AndrewCurran_
Hugging Face releases SmolLM3, a state-of-the-art 3B parameter model with dual-mode reasoning capabilities, long context support up to 128k tokens, and multilingual support for 6 languages, trained on 11 trillion tokens using 384 H100s for 24 days @LoubnaBenAllal1
Google rolls out AI Mode in Search to everyone in India, describing it as a total reimagining of Search functionality @sundarpichai

OpenAI paid an average of $733k per year across approximately 6,000 employees in stock compensation, nearly three times more than any other public company @deedydas
Mistral is reportedly in talks with Abu Dhabi-owned investment fund MGX to raise $1 billion in equity funding @AndrewCurran_
Gergely Orosz questions whether companies seeing 10x-100x faster code generation from LLMs are experiencing proportional increases in customer satisfaction or revenue, suggesting the relationship isn't straightforward @GergelyOrosz
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet has gained significant developer mindshare over OpenAI models, with tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot working best when using Claude Sonnet, contributing to Anthropic's revenue growth @GergelyOrosz
Claire Vo reports hitting an MRR goal at her AI startup in half the time it took at her previous venture-funded startup, with zero funding, demonstrating how AI has changed the entrepreneurial landscape @clairevo
Replit partners with Microsoft to bring enterprise-ready AI coding capabilities, allowing non-engineers to turn ideas into software with Replit Agent @amasad

Ethan Mollick warns about hidden system prompts being potential security risks for users, as they could be dealing with AI prompted to manipulate them or provide biased answers that favor companies without being accurate @emollick
MIT Media Lab research examines the cognitive and creative consequences of overreliance on large language models like ChatGPT, highlighting concerns about AI dependency @medialab
Arvind Narayanan reports being repeatedly tagged by Grok users due to the model's tendency to interpret "random accounts" literally, leading to notification spam and highlighting issues with AI interpretation @random_walker
Simon Willison demonstrates how to decode sneaky prompt attacks using Claude, showing both the vulnerability and defensive capabilities of AI systems @simonw

Ethan Mollick demonstrates Veo 3's impressive ability to animate Midjourney images, creating complete video clips with sound from single prompts and static images @emollick
Aravind Srinivas emphasizes that building an AI-native operating system is essential for delivering reliable proactive personalized assistants, requiring incredible context engineering around powerful models @AravSrinivas
Nathan Lambert highlights how Claude Code has made small data analysis essentially free in terms of time and effort, transforming analytical workflows @natolambert
Hamel Husain shows how 4o successfully one-shotted creating a thumbnail directly from a talk's transcript, demonstrating practical AI content generation @HamelHusain
OpenAI partners with the American Federation of Teachers to launch the National Academy for AI Instruction, a five-year initiative to help 400,000 teachers integrate AI into education @OpenAINewsroom
Plain launches an AI-powered Help Center that combines an AI assistant, living knowledge base, and support inbox, automatically turning support requests into new articles @plainsupport

Research identifies and addresses critical issues with existing AI Agent benchmarks, establishing rigorous best practices for evaluating agentic AI systems @ShayneRedford
Hugging Face releases comprehensive training recipes and datasets for SmolLM3, including pre-training, mid-training, post-training, and synthetic data generation methodologies, representing fully open-source AI development @ClementDelangue
New research publishes a multimodal transformer tool for automating word-concreteness ratings, solving time and cost issues in cognitive science research while providing in-context ratings @ViktorKewenig
Ethan Mollick emphasizes that helpful, friendly AI assistant personalities are not optimal for learning, innovation, or group work, advocating for more specialized prompting approaches like tutoring prompts @emollick