AI Updates on 2025-07-30

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg announces the company has seen glimpses of AI systems improving themselves and states "Developing superintelligence is now in sight" in a new letter outlining Meta's vision for personal superintelligence @AIatMeta
Qwen releases Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, a medium-size model with reasoning capabilities that performs well on math, science, and code tasks with native 256K-token context support @Alibaba_Qwen
Google DeepMind announces AlphaEarth Foundations, an AI model for mapping the planet with 24% lower error rates than other methods and 16x more storage-efficient observation summaries @GoogleDeepMind
Mistral AI releases Codestral 25.08 and introduces the Complete Mistral Coding Stack for Enterprises @MistralAI
OpenAI introduces study mode in ChatGPT that provides step-by-step guidance for students rather than quick answers @gdb

Amazon pays the New York Times $20 million annually for training data, which is about one-third of what OpenAI and Google pay Reddit for similar data access @AndrewCurran_
Morgan Stanley raises industry targets across the board and sees current AI bottlenecks easing by end of year, citing huge cloud demand @AndrewCurran_
Gen AI apps doubled their revenue and grew to 1.7 billion downloads in the first half of 2025, showing significant market growth @TechCrunch
Meta reportedly offered $1 billion over 4 years to some Thinking Machines team members, representing the highest individual contributor compensation in tech history @deedydas
Box CEO reports that AI has fundamentally changed how he thinks about work, with expectations for more research, bigger projects, and faster output across all functions @levie

Ethan Mollick notes that AI-generated images and videos now lack obvious tells like six fingers, making them increasingly difficult to distinguish from real content @emollick
Zuckerberg signals that Meta will not necessarily open source future models, with implications for the availability of frontier open-weight models from US companies @emollick
Anthropic joins the UK AI Security Institute's Alignment Project, contributing compute resources to advance critical research on ensuring AI systems behave predictably and align with human values @AnthropicAI
Stanford HAI research argues that AI alignment requires deeper exploration of ontological assumptions built into system architectures, not just human values @StanfordHAI

Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser that can plan complex routes and handle tasks autonomously in browser tabs @AravSrinivas
Anthropic introduces new mobile features allowing users to draft and send emails, messages, and calendar invites directly from the Claude app @AnthropicAI
Google DeepMind's AlphaEarth Foundations is already being used by organizations like the United Nations FAO and MapBiomas to create custom maps and drive real-world insights @GoogleDeepMind
Qwen3-Coder becomes the default model powering Anycoder, providing a massive boost to productivity and creativity for coding tasks @Alibaba_Qwen
Microsoft's Copilot Mode in Edge is designed to help "tab hoarders" maintain productivity by keeping distractions down and work flow up @mustafasuleyman

MIT CSAIL research finds that language models don't track state changes step by step but use mathematical shortcuts that can be controlled to boost prediction skills @MIT_CSAIL
Chris Olah publishes research on interference weights in mechanistic interpretability, demonstrating similar phenomenology between toy models and real transformer circuits @ch402
Buddhist scholars study an LLM-generated sutra in a provocative paper, finding that despite being "AI slop," the text's density of symbolism and richness of allusion repay closer reading @emollick
Research shows that o3 was used in generating the AI-created Buddhist sutra, demonstrating advanced model capabilities in religious text generation @AndrewCurran_
Simon Willison notes that July has been an incredible month for model releases from Chinese AI labs, with the best available open weight models now coming from Chinese companies @simonw