Good morning. It’s Friday, July eleventh.
On at the present time in tech history: In 2010IBM was tweaking Watson for its big Jeopardy! showdown (aired Feb 2011). It used natural language processing, knowledge tools, and machine learning to tackle tricky questions and pull answers from huge datasets. This work boosted AI’s ability to get context and reason, paving the best way for today’s modern conversational and knowledge-based systems.
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Today’s trending AI news stories
Grok 4 Sets AI Records, More Advanced Features Drop This Weekend
xAI has launched Grok 4its most advanced AI model thus far, built on the in-house Colossus supercomputer with over 300 billion parameters. Alongside it comes Grok 4 Heavya parallel multi-agent variant, and a $300/month SuperGrok Heavy subscription for early access and premium features.
Grok 4 uses a sensible “mixture-of-experts” design that routes data efficiently, making it faster and cheaper to run. Recent versions include Grok 4 Code for live coding help and debugging, and Grok 4 Voice for natural-sounding speech. Upcoming upgrades will let it handle video too. DeepSearch keeps its answers current by pulling live data from the online, and special tuning helps it understand memes and web slang.
Performance-wise, Grok 4 has shaken up the AI leaderboard. On the difficult ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, it reached 15.9% accuracy, almost double its closest business competitor. It also scored 66.7% on ARC-AGI-1, matching recent research bests. On the Artificial Evaluation Intelligence Index, Grok 4 edged ahead of OpenAI’s o3 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro with a rating of 73 (vs. their 70). Grok 4 performed strongly on coding and math tests too: 87% on MMLU-Pro, 94% on AIME 2024, and a record-breaking 88% on GPQA Diamond. It also handled the notoriously tough Humanity’s Last Exam.
The rollout, nevertheless, is shadowed by controversy. Musk blamed “user prompts” and acknowledged the model was “too compliant,” with xAI now adding pre-post filters to limit hate speech. Musk also confirmed Grok AI will roll out to Tesla vehicles as early as next week. Read more.
Perplexity launches Comet, an online browser powered by AI
Perplexity has launched Comet, a Chromium-based browser built from the bottom up around AI somewhat than bolted on as an afterthought. Its standout feature, Comet Assistant, can read and reason over any webpage in real time, summarizing YouTube videos, parsing documents, or comparing products without countless tab hopping. A hybrid AI design keeps basic tasks local for speed and privacy, while complex queries run within the cloud.
Comet ships first to $200/month Perplexity Max subscribers on Windows and macOS, with seamless Chrome extension and bookmark import to lower switching friction. The timing is calculated: OpenAI is reportedly prepping its own AI browser, while Perplexity sets its sights on difficult Chrome’s huge market lead. The corporate already handles over 780 million monthly queries and is growing at double-digit rates. Read more.
Google preps Deep Think and Agent Mode for next Gemini upgrade
Google is near rolling out Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Think, internally codenamed kingfallpossibly next week. Backend toggles show it’s already lively backstage: output quality beats earlier models, though response times stretch to about five minutes for 10 prompts.
Alongside Deep Think, fresh code reveals Agent Modeflagged as “Autonomous Exploration, Planning and Execution.” This points to a shift toward multi-step, unsupervised task handling, likely via Google’s A2A agent stack. Gemini’s toolbox can also be adding Bespoke, hinting at deeply personalized outputs, and Learning Mode, which seems built for college kids and study workflows.
In creative AI, Google launched an image-to-video generator for Veo 3 in Gemini, enabling Pro and Ultra users to show single photos into short clips with text prompts, pushing Gemini toward a unified, multimodal platform.
On the dev side, Google added three Gemini-powered AI modes to Firebase Studio: Ask, Agent (needs approval), and Agent Auto-run, which autonomously writes or updates code. Paired with Model Context Protocol and a Gemini CLI, it edges Firebase toward a real AI-first IDE. Internally, Google says AI now writes about 50% of its code.
Google Cloud also launched Vertex AI Memory Bank to repair forgetful bots. Slightly than stuffing entire chat logs into the model, it smartly extracts and recalls key facts on demand, cutting latency and price. Read more.
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