AI News Roundup – July 21, 2025
Weaving reality or warping it? The personalization trap in AI systems
Source: AI News | VentureBeat | Published: 2025-07-20
AI systems are increasingly personalising our individual experiences and perceptions of reality. This personalisation risks creating fragmented worldviews among people, potentially making it harder for society to find common ground on fundamental issues and work together to solve problems.
Robotics founder Brett Adcock’s weekly round-up of AI and robotics
Source: Brett Adcock | X.com | Published: 2025-07-20
A useful summary of major news from OpenAI, xAI, Google, Cognition, Figure, AWS, Meta, UBTECH, Pollen Robotics, Agility Robotics, and more.
New embedding model leaderboard shakeup: Google takes #1 while Alibaba’s open source alternative closes gap
Source: AI News | VentureBeat | Published: 2025-07-19
Google’s Gemini Embedding model has claimed the top spot on the MTEB benchmark leaderboard. While Google leads, competitors including Alibaba’s open source solution are showing strong performance and narrowing the gap.
Can speed and safety truly coexist in the AI race?
Source: AI News | Published: 2025-07-18
An OpenAI researcher and Harvard professor, Boaz Barak, sparked debate in the AI industry by criticising xAI’s launch of the Grok model as “completely irresponsible,” highlighting tensions between rapid AI development and safety concerns. This incident reveals the ongoing struggle within the AI industry to balance innovation speed with responsible development practices.
Mistral AI gives Le Chat voice recognition and deep research tools
Source: AI News | Published: 2025-07-17
Mistral AI has enhanced its chatbot Le Chat with new features including voice recognition capabilities and deep research tools to improve its functionality as an AI assistant. The company aims to create AI tools that facilitate deeper thought exploration while maintaining conversational flow.
Zuckerberg’s $15B bet: How Meta’s ‘Superintelligence Labs’ became Silicon Valley’s most expensive AI talent war
Source: AI News | Published: 2025-07-17
After spending $46 billion on the metaverse with limited success, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now making a $15 billion investment in superintelligence AI through Meta’s ‘Superintelligence Labs’. This new venture has sparked an intense talent war in Silicon Valley as Meta aggressively pursues AI development.
Isambard-AI, the UK’s Most Powerful AI Supercomputer, Goes Live
Source: NVIDIA Blog | Published: 2025-07-17
The University of Bristol has launched Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer, which delivers 21 exaflops of AI performance using NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips. The system is not only the fastest in the United Kingdom but also ranks among the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers.
A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data
Source: Artificial intelligence – MIT Technology Review | Published: 2025-07-18
Researchers have discovered that DataComp CommonPool, a major open-source AI training dataset, contains millions of sensitive personal documents including passports, credit cards, and birth certificates. The finding raises serious privacy concerns, as the dataset used for training AI image generation models appears to include substantial amounts of personally identifiable information.
How to run an LLM on your laptop
Source: Artificial intelligence – MIT Technology Review | Published: 2025-07-17
Simon Willison demonstrates how to run open-source large language models (LLMs) locally on a USB stick. The article from MIT Technology Review’s How To series explains how to download and use publicly available LLMs on personal computers, offering a way to access AI capabilities without relying on cloud services.
These four charts show where AI companies could go next in the US
Source: Artificial intelligence – MIT Technology Review | Published: 2025-07-16
The article discusses the uncertainty surrounding AI’s future impact on society, particularly regarding jobs and communities. It references a new interactive report that appears to provide insights into potential directions for AI companies in the United States, though the full details of the report are not included in this excerpt.
Post-Labor Economics pt. I: The Rise of Automation
Source: David Shapiro’s Substack | Published: 2025-07-19
This article explores the dual nature of automation in our economic future. While automation holds the potential to create abundance and improve living standards, it also raises concerns about wealth concentration among ‘elites’ and the intensification of capitalist power structures.
🔮 Sunday edition #533: AI masters math; war scenarios; reinforcement learning critique; Shanghai’s robot movers++
Source: Exponential View | Published: 2025-07-20
The latest AI developments include a breakthrough in mathematical problem-solving capabilities and advancements in robotics, as demonstrated by Shanghai’s automated moving services. The newsletter also covers critical discussions about reinforcement learning limitations and analyzes potential war scenarios involving AI technology.
🤔 Why o3 missed what readers caught instantly
Source: Exponential View | Published: 2025-07-19
This brief post discusses how artificial intelligence models, even advanced ones, can fail at fundamental tasks like fact-checking that human readers easily catch. It highlights the current limitations and inconsistencies in AI technology, despite its sophistication.
The Sequence Radar #688: The Transparent Transformer: Monitoring AI Reasoning Before It Goes Rogue
Source: TheSequence | Published: 2025-07-20
A notable joint effort between major AI labs has produced research focused on improving transparency in transformer models’ reasoning processes. The collaboration aims to develop better methods for monitoring and understanding AI decision-making before potential problematic behaviours emerge.
The Sequence Opinion #687: The Gemini Effect: Transforming Robotics with Multimodal Foundation Models
Source: TheSequence | Published: 2025-07-17
Google’s Gemini Robotics demonstrated that multimodal foundation models can effectively control robots and understand complex tasks through different types of inputs (visual, language, etc.). This breakthrough suggests that transformer-based AI models could revolutionise robotics by making robots more versatile and capable of handling diverse tasks without specialised programming.
The Sequence Weekly Alpha #686: Kimi K2 is a Trillion Parameter Open Source Model You Must Know About
Source: TheSequence | Published: 2025-07-16
Kimi K2, a new Chinese open-source AI model, has been announced with a remarkable trillion-parameter architecture. This development represents a significant milestone in open-source AI technology, potentially challenging the dominance of existing large language models.
Microsoft, OpenAI, and a US Teachers’ Union Are Hatching a Plan to ‘Bring AI into the Classroom’
Source: Wired | Published: 2025-07-08
Microsoft and OpenAI are partnering with a major US teachers’ union to create the National Academy for AI Instruction, which aims to provide AI training for educators nationwide. The initiative’s details emerged through a leak, though official announcements have not yet been made.
Delta Air Lines is using AI to set the maximum price you’re willing to pay
Source: The Verge | Published: 2025-07-18
Delta Air Lines is implementing AI-powered dynamic pricing to determine personalised maximum airfare prices for individual customers. This strategy was revealed during the company’s recent earnings call, suggesting a shift toward more sophisticated pricing algorithms to optimize revenue.
Videos
A Free Course on Using Agents Created by ChatGPT Agent
Channel: The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News | Published: 2025-07-20
A new educational offering demonstrates the capabilities of ChatGPT’s Agent feature by using it to create a free online course. The experiment tests both ChatGPT’s Agent and Manus to evaluate their effectiveness in course creation.
Anthropic Rapid Growth Leads to a Raise at $100B
Channel: The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News | Published: 2025-07-20
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, is reportedly seeking a new funding round that would significantly increase its valuation to $100 billion. This represents a major leap in the company’s valuation and signals rapid growth in the AI sector.
This report was automatically generated by an LLM and then lightly edited by humans for presentation purposes. All content belongs to the respective creators.