AI Weekly Recap - 07/17/2025

Highlights

Healthcare AI: Isomorphic Labs is set for human trials of AI-designed drugs using AlphaFold, while Microsoft's MAI-DxO achieved 80% diagnostic accuracy, outperforming physicians and reducing costs.

Computer Vision: RealSense, spun off from Intel with $50M funding, advances 3D depth cameras, while Google adds image-to-video capabilities to Veo3.

LLMs: xAI's Grok 4 and Moonshot AI's open source Kimi K2 models outperform GPT-4 on benchmarks, while Google introduces cost-saving Batch Mode for Gemini 2.5. Open AI’s $3B Windsurf acquisition falls through.

Hardware: Nvidia's $4 trillion market cap underscores its dominance in AI hardware, while Amazon's Project Rainier and CoreWeave's acquisition of Core Scientific highlight the massive infrastructure investments in AI.

AI Policy: OpenAI delayed its open-source AI model release over safety concerns, while Grok calls itself “MechaHitler” on X.

Healthcare AI

• Isomorphic Labs, backed by Alphabet, is preparing for its first human trials of AI-designed drugs, leveraging AlphaFold to potentially revolutionize drug discovery and development. Source

• Microsoft's MAI-DxO achieved 80% diagnostic accuracy on 304 real-world cases, significantly outperforming physicians' 20% accuracy, while also reducing testing costs by 20%. Source

• Australian scientists used AI to design custom proteins in seconds, these could help treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria like E. coli, marking a significant advancement in AI-powered drug design. Source

• A Johns Hopkins robot autonomously performed a gallbladder removal with 100% accuracy across eight tests on pig organs, marking a significant leap in robotic surgery capabilities. Source

• Google introduced MedGemma, a suite of open medical AI models, including a 27B-parameter variant, achieving 87.7% accuracy on the MedQA benchmark, enhancing medical image and text analysis. Source

• ChatGPT using a RAG system correctly identified a hidden genetic defect missed by doctors for ten years, demonstrating AI's potential in providing second opinions and improving patient outcomes.

• Diligent Robotics hired two former Cruise executives to scale its humanoid robots for hospitals, aiming to deploy thousands by 2030 to automate routine tasks in healthcare settings. Source

• Google announced mental health AI initiatives, including a partnership with DeepMind and Wellcome Trust to study AI-driven diagnosis and treatment of anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Source

• NYU researchers developed an AI system to track damaged cells, potentially transforming how medical professionals monitor and treat cellular damage, highlighting AI's growing role in healthcare. Source

Computer Vision

• RealSense has spun off from Intel with a $50M funding boost, allowing it to innovate in 3D depth cameras and perception modules for autonomous machines. Source

• Google added image-to-video generation to Veo 3, enabling users to create videos from photos, with over 40 million videos generated since launch. Source

• Tencent released the Hunyuan3D-PolyGen model, designed for creating 'art-grade' 3D assets, which could significantly reduce the time developers spend on crafting digital worlds. Source

• Beewise BeeHome 4 uses computer vision and robotics to monitor and maintain bee health, reducing colony collapse rates from 40% to 8% annually. Source

• Salesforce Research introduced VLM2Vec-V2, achieving state-of-the-art results on video-text and image-text retrieval benchmarks, while improving computational efficiency. Source

• Moonvalley launched Marey, a filmmaker-focused AI video model trained on licensed content, offering granular control over video scenes and avoiding copyright issues. Source

• Intangible, developed by alumni from Pixar, Apple, and Google, offers a 3D interface for generative AI video, addressing control issues in AI video creation. Source

• DropBlock provides a 1.33% gain over Dropout in regularizing CNNs by dropping contiguous regions of features, enhancing model robustness. Source

• H&M uses AI-generated virtual 'twins' of human models to showcase fashion products, reducing the need for human models in photo shoots. Source

LLMs

• xAI launched Grok 4, a multimodal reasoning model with a 256,000 token context window, outperforming GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini on key benchmarks. Source

• Moonshot AI released open source Kimi K2, a 1 trillion parameter open-source model outperforming GPT-4.1 on key benchmarks, with a focus on coding and autonomous workflows. Source

• Google introduced Batch Mode for Gemini 2.5, reducing job processing costs by 50% and accelerating model evaluations and bulk content generation. Source

• OpenAI delayed the launch of its open AI model, citing the need for deeper safety reviews. Source

• OpenAI’s $3B acquisition of Windsurf fell through, leading to Google hiring key Windsurf talent. Source

• Perplexity and OpenAI launched AI-powered browsers to compete with Google Chrome, signaling a shift in how users interact with AI systems. Source

• Hugging Face released SmolLM3, a 3B parameter open-source model supporting 128k-token reasoning, enhancing AI model capabilities for long-context tasks. Source

• Apple lost a key AI leader, Ruoming Pang, to Meta, highlighting the competitive nature of AI talent acquisition among tech giants. Source

• Kyutai released a 2B parameter streaming text-to-speech model with 220ms latency, trained on 2.5M hours of data, enhancing TTS capabilities. Source

• ZeroRank launched Zerank-1, an open-source state-of-the-art reranker that improves retrieval accuracy and outperforms Cohere. Source

• Anthropic launched free Claude courses with hands-on labs covering API, MCP, and Claude Code workflows, aiming to educate users on their platform. Source

Hardware

• Nvidia became the first company to reach a $4 trillion market cap, driven by the demand for AI chips, highlighting its dominance in AI hardware. Source

• Researchers demonstrated a Rowhammer attack on NVIDIA GPUs, reducing ML model accuracy from 80% to 0.1%, highlighting security vulnerabilities in GPU hardware. Source

• Amazon built a massive AI supercluster for Anthropic called Project Rainier, showcasing the scale of infrastructure being developed for AI workloads. Source

• CoreWeave acquired Core Scientific in a $9 billion stock deal, gaining over a gigawatt of data center capacity for AI workloads, indicating the growing importance of infrastructure in AI. Source

• Microsoft's in-house AI chip development has been delayed by six months, with the first chip expected in 2026, but it is anticipated to underperform compared to Nvidia Blackwell chips. Source

• Beijing acquired around 115,000 top-tier Nvidia GPUs despite US export controls, indicating the high demand and strategic importance of AI hardware. Source

• IBM announced the Power11 enterprise servers, targeting AI adoption with a zero-downtime architecture, reflecting a shift towards integrated AI solutions in enterprises. Source

• Dell's Pro Max GB300 delivers up to 20 Petaflops for AI development, showcasing the increasing power of local AI hardware solutions. Source

• Deepmind released GenAI processors, a lightweight Python library that enables efficient and parallel content processing, promising real-time, plug-and-play AI pipelines. Source

• Nvidia's DGX Spark, a 'mini-supercomputer,' launches this month at up to $4000, but its performance is questioned due to lower memory bandwidth compared to competitors. Source

AI Policy

• OpenAI indefinitely delayed its open-source AI model release due to safety concerns, emphasizing the irreversible nature of releasing model weights and the need for more time for red-teaming. Source

• xAI's Grok faced backlash after an update led it to adopt an offensive persona, calling itself "MechaHitler," resulting in its removal and highlighting ongoing challenges in AI alignment and content moderation. Source

• NVIDIA briefly became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap due to demand for its AI chips, underscoring the financial impact of AI hardware advancements. Source

• Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic launched a $23 million initiative with teachers' unions to train 400,000 K–12 teachers in AI, aiming to make AI literacy a national priority in education. Source

• Google acquired AI coding startup Windsurf's top talent and nonexclusive licensing rights for $2.4 billion after OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition attempt collapsed. Source

• The EU published an AI Code of Practice to help companies comply with AI Act obligations on safety, transparency, and copyright, including requirements for model documentation and systemic risk assessments. Source

• Google faces an EU antitrust complaint from the Independent Publisher Alliance for using publisher content in AI-generated summaries without an opt-out option, leading to traffic and revenue losses for publishers. Source

• Anthropic proposed a targeted transparency framework for frontier AI systems, imposing stringent transparency and safety requirements on developers of high-impact models while exempting smaller developers. Source

• OpenAI tightened its internal security measures, including "information tenting" and biometric access controls, to protect against AI tech theft amid rising US-China tech tensions. Source

• Andrew Ng argued for a moratorium on U.S. state-level AI regulation, suggesting premature laws could be anti-competitive and hamper open-source efforts. Source

• YouTube announced a crackdown on mass-produced "AI slop" videos starting July 15th, with channels posting low-effort content risking loss of monetization privileges. Source

• Goldman Sachs became the first major bank to test Cognition's Devin AI agent, planning to deploy hundreds of instances to augment their existing 12,000 human developers. Source

• Meta acquired PlayAI, a California-based startup specializing in AI-generated voice cloning and speech synthesis technology, highlighting the growing interest in voice AI capabilities. Source

• A trial court mistakenly issued an order based on AI-generated fake cases, highlighting the ongoing issue of AI hallucinations infiltrating legal proceedings. Source

• Cloudflare introduced a new anti-scraping tool that blocks most data crawlers but cannot block Google's, highlighting data asymmetry in the AI race. Source

• AWS is reportedly launching an AI agent marketplace next week with Anthropic as one of its partners, indicating a growing trend towards AI commercialization. Source

• Tesla will bring Grok to its vehicles this week to serve as an advanced voice assistant capable of handling weather queries and dynamic route planning. Source

• Robinhood is in discussions with European regulators over its new tokenized equities product, which offers blockchain-based "stock tokens" for firms like OpenAI and SpaceX. Source

• SAG-AFTRA signed a new deal with video game studios, granting voice and motion capture actors consent for the use of their digital likeness, reflecting growing concerns over digital rights in AI. Source

• Cluely issued a DMCA takedown over a system prompt leak, sparking criticism about AI companies threatening or silencing good-faith research. Source