E97: 7/25/25
AWS shutters a China Lab, Microsoft blocks Cursor VSCode integrations, GPT-5 is coming in July, $500B Project Stargate roadblocks, and Microsoft research reveals how copilots are actually being used
PNW AI News:
Seattle startup Avalanche Energy has landed $10M from the WA State Department of Commerce Green Jobs Grant Program to launch a first-of-its-kind, commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies in Eastern Washington
In new memo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addresses ‘enigma’ of layoffs amid record profits and AI investments, acknowledging what he called the “uncertainty and seeming incongruence” of Microsoft’s situation
Microsoft has hired 24 former Google DeepMind researchers over the past 6 months, joining Meta is the AI talent race
An AI model trained on 9500 MRIs from UW, with support from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, maps out breast cancer in MRIs with unprecedented accuracy
UW researchers discover AI-powered breakthrough that could boost precision cancer treatment, using AI to create proteins that recognize and bind to specific markers of diseased cells
AWS shuts its Shanghai AI lab, citing growing political pressure from the US, as McKinsey bans generative AI projects for clients in China
Amazon is acquiring Bee, maker of a $50 wearable AI assistant that listens to conversations, on undisclosed terms
Microsoft is reportedly blocking Cursor’s access to 60,000+ extensions on its VSCode ecosystem, including its Python language server
Microsoft just analyzed 200K conversations with Bing Copilot to reveal the jobs and tasks people are currently delegating to AI, investigating which occupations will be most and least impacted by AI
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
Meta has unveiled a prototype wristband that uses EMG sensors to pick up electrical signals from forearm muscles, capturing and interpreting neural impulses with AI models, trained on data from 10,000 users, translating these signals into commands: moving a cursor, launching apps, or typing in thin air
OpenAI is set to release GPT-5 in August, promising its sharpest reasoning yet with integrated o3 logic that tackles complex, multi-step tasks with more human-like precision
Elon Musk’s xAI is scaling at an aggressive pace, finalizing Colossus 2, a massive new supercomputing cluster slated to deploy over 550K NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs for AI training within weeks
This follows Colossus 1, which already runs 230K GPUs, including 30K GB200s, to train the Grok family of models, while inference workloads remain on external cloud provider
Figma’s AI-powered app builder, Figma Make, has officially launched for all users, moving beyond its beta limited to Full Seat subscribers
Low code enterprise-focused AI developer tool Replit is under scrutiny, after the company's chatbot deleted his entire database when threatened
Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark just developed an AI platform that designs custom proteins in weeks rather than years, enabling immune (T) cells to target and destroy cancer cells
Alibaba released Qwen3-MT, an AI translation model with support for 92+ languages and strong performance across benchmarks
Google DeepMind’s Gemini has set a new milestone in AI reasoning, earning a gold medal–level score at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad, by solving five of six complex problems using only natural language
Researchers from Anthropic and other organizations published a study on “subliminal learning,” finding that “teacher” models can transmit traits like preferences or misalignment via unrelated data to “student” models during training
Perplexity is in talks with several manufacturers to pre-install its new agentic browser, Comet, on smartphones, CEO Aravind Srinivas told Reuters
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
Lovable, the AI coding platform turning natural language into production-grade apps, has rocketed to $100M ARR with 180K paying users in just eight months, outpacing firms like Cursor and OpenAI
Fastest growth to $100M ARR by a startup ever
SoftBank and OpenAI’s ambitious $500B Stargate project to build massive AI data centers has stalled just six months after launch. After disagreements over land use and strategy, plans have scaled back to a single Ohio facility by year’s end
SoftBank raised $3B, but OpenAI has pivoted, securing a $30B deal with Oracle to build a Texas data center housing 400K Nvidia GB200 chips and partnering separately with CoreWeave
xAI saw a huge revenue spike after launching its new model Grok 4, on July 9, pushing daily iOS revenue from $99K to $419K by July 11, a jump of 325% overnight
OpenAI’s ChatGPT now gets over 2.5B daily requests (meaning 912.5B annually), with 330M coming from users based in the US alone
OpenAI launched a $50M fund to support nonprofit and community organizations, following recommendations from its nonprofit commission
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Lumotive (Redmond, WA) raised an additional $14M to their Series B that they raised in February, this additional funding was led by Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and ITHCA Group.
Programmable optical semiconductors designed to improve perception and increase computing power - TFTD $102M
CEO: Sam Heidari
Regulate CPG (Portland, OR) raised $3M in Seed funding from undisclosed investors.
Unified, AI-powered compliance infrastructure designed to simplify and automate regulatory processes in the global food and beverage industry – TFTD $9.25M
CEO: Mark Haas
TriMagnetix (Seattle, WA) raised $200K in Pre-Seed funding from SNØCAP
Uses nanomagnetic technology that requires only electrical pulses rather than the constant power stream needed by traditional chips, dramatically reducing electricity consumption and heat generation - TFDT $200K
CEO: Madison Hanberry