Grok goes wild with AI companions

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Just days after apologizing for offensive outputs, xAI is back with a brand new Grok feature — AI companions.

The AI-powered avatars can hold voice conversations and develop relationships with users (with unlockable NSFW content 😳), a daring release given each recent model issues and concerns surrounding the AI companionship space.

In today’s AI rundown:

• xAI launches Grok AI companions

• Zuck reveals Meta’s AI supercluster plan

• Automate your profession growth with Tasks

• Cognition snags Windsurf after Google talent grab

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

🗣️ xAI launches Grok AI companions

The Rundown: Elon Musk’s xAI just introduced AI companions for SuperGrok subscribers, featuring animated 3D avatars powered by its Grok model that may interact in real-time through voice conversations.

The main points:

• Grok users can chat with fully animated avatars like Ani (a flirty anime character) and Bad Rudi (a red panda), with more options coming soon.

• Users can unlock additional features, like NSFW options, by reaching higher relationship levels, adding gamification elements to the chatbot experience.

• The feature launches just days after Grok faced backlash for offensive outputs, with xAI apologizing and publishing a post-mortem on what caused the difficulty.

• The discharge comes amid surging use of AI avatars on platforms like Character AI, though research shows risks of kids using them for companionship.

Why it matters: Grok’s AI companions arrive because the industry grapples with mounting safety concerns around emotional AI relationships, particularly after recent lawsuits against Character AI. Pushing avatars able to explicit conversation feels a bit dangerous given Grok’s issues last week, but actually aligns with Elon Musk’s unfiltered vision.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

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Read the report back to learn:

• Where your security ranks versus firms of comparable size and industry

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• How Vanta strengthens security posture while your team stays focused on growth

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META

🏗️ Zuck reveals Meta’s AI supercluster plan

The Rundown: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced the corporate’s plans to construct multiple AI superclusters in Louisiana and Ohio, set to power its recent Superintelligence Labs initiatives.

The main points:

• Meta will launch its first 1GW supercluster called “Prometheus” in 2026, while “Hyperion” will scale from 2 to 5GW over several years.

• The Hyperion facility in Louisiana will cover an area comparable to the scale of Manhattan, making it one in every of the most important AI infrastructure projects globally.

• Zuckerberg also said Meta is investing “a whole bunch of billions” into compute, aiming for the best compute-per-researcher ratio within the industry.

• Meta can be reportedly discussing switching its AI strategy, with the brand new team wanting to pivot from the open-source playbook to developing closed models.

Why it matters: Zuck actually isn’t fooling around in terms of spending, with Meta going all out on each talent and infrastructure. The potential pivot to closed models would even be an enormous reversal, signaling that the brand new Superintelligence team may head in a totally different direction than its Llama predecessor.

AI TRAINING

💼 The way to automate your profession growth with Tasks

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn find out how to use ChatGPT’s scheduled tasks feature to automate each job searching and skill development, sending you job opportunities and practice questions each day.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to ChatGPT and choose (preferably) a reasoning model like o3

2. Start your prompt with “Schedule a task” and specify details like “Seek for distant software engineer positions, Python/JavaScript, $80k+, each day at 6 AM” and ***“*Generate 3 beginner Python questions with solutions, each day at 8 PM”

3. Often optimize your searches at ChatGPT Tasks by adjusting criteria and timing

Pro tip: Stagger your delivery times — morning for job opportunities while you’re motivated to use, evening for practice questions when you possibly can deal with learning.

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🤖 Agentic AI for APIs

The Rundown: IBM’s API Agent brings agentic AI to API Connect, transforming prompts into production-ready APIs.

With API Agent, you possibly can:

• Let AI handle design, validation, and deployment to Code Engine robotically

• Manage standards and cut manual steps for fast API delivery

• Harness agentic AI to show your API ideas into secured, production-ready reality

Try API Agent today.

COGNITION & WINDSURF

🤝 Cognition snags Windsurf after Google talent grab

The Rundown: Cognition AI, the creator of “Devin” coding assistant, just acquired rival Windsurf, bringing in all of its remaining employees and assets just days after Google’s $2.4B move to rent key talent and license the startup’s tech.

The main points:

• The deal includes Windsurf’s mental property, brand, $82M in annual revenue, and access to over $100M in remaining capital.

• All Windsurf employees receive accelerated equity vesting and financial participation, with those lacking equity getting shares based on tenure.

• Cognition plans to integrate Windsurf’s agentic IDE with its Devin coding assistant, enabling parallel task delegation and seamless collaboration.

• The deal follows a turbulent period for Windsurf, which nearly sold to OpenAI for $3B before talks collapsed because of Microsoft-related complications.

Why it matters: What a whirlwind of per week for the remaining Windsurf employees, who went from an OpenAI acquisition, being seemingly left behind in a Google deal, to now joining forces with one in every of the startup’s top rivals. While Cognition faced initial anger from the team, this move now appears like an ideal end result given the circumstances.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Kimi K2 – Moonshot AI’s 1T parameter open model for agentic intelligence

• ⚡️ Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning – Microsoft’s open AI for on-device reasoning

• ⚙️ Kiro – AWS’ recent agentic IDE for coding tasks

• 📖 Gemini Embedding – GA with SOTA performance and 100+ languages

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧠 Hebbia – Applied Research Engineer, Agents

• 🤖 Deepmind – Software Engineer, Applied Robotics

• 🌍 UiPath – Vice President of Marketing EMEA

• 📈 Meta – Data Scientist, Retail Analytics

📰 Every thing else in AI today

AWS Imagine Conference is coming to Chicago, July 29-30 – Speed up innovation in the general public sector with cloud and AI. SLED leaders, learn more and register free of charge.*

SpaceX is reportedly investing $2B in xAI as a part of a $5B equity raise, becoming the most recent Elon Musk-owned company to intermingle together with his AI startup.

Apple is reportedly facing investor pressure to pursue AI talent hiring and acquisitions, with rumored targets including Perplexity and Mistral.

Google launched featured notebooks in NotebookLM, partnering with The Economist, The Atlantic, and expert authors to supply curated collections on a wide range of topics.

AWS launched Kiro, a brand new AI IDE that mixes agentic coding with spec-driven development to bridge the gap between AI prototypes and production-ready apps.

The U.S. DoD awarded contracts of as much as $200M to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, aiming to extend AI adoption and tackle national security challenges.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our last live workshop

Try our last live workshop with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of the workshop, you’ll confidently have the option to put in and use Gemini CLI to spice up your productivity right from the command line.

Watch it here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team