Loyalty Over Billions: Why Meta's Raid on Murati's AI Startup Failed

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempt to acquire Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, wasn’t just a standard M&A play. When Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, declined the offer, Meta switched tactics to a full-scale talent raid—and failed spectacularly. This isn’t just industry gossip; it’s a critical signal about where the real value lies in the AI talent war. Meta reportedly approached the startup’s employees with staggering offers. Co-founder and leading researcher Andrew Tulloch was allegedly offered a compensation package worth as much as $1.5 billion over six years. Other offers to researchers ranged from $200 million to a reported $1 billion for a single individual. ...

13 August, 2025 · 2 min · 323 words · Yury Akinin

Perplexity's 'Imperfect' Launch: The Right Strategy for the AI Era

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas’s launch of the Comet web browser is a critical case study in product strategy for the current AI landscape. He launched it knowing the underlying models weren’t ready for his full vision of an “operating system for the AI era.” This wasn’t a mistake; it was the entire point. The New Go-to-Market: Build for the Future Model The core insight here is a fundamental shift in product development. As Srinivas states, “You’ve got to position your product and your technology with the assumption that the models are eventually going to be great and also going to be affordable.” ...

13 August, 2025 · 3 min · 499 words · Yury Akinin

Engineering Microbes: Norway's Breakthrough in Converting CO2 to High-Purity Biomethane

Scientists at the Norwegian Institute of BIOeconomy Research (NIBIO) have achieved a significant milestone in sustainable energy, converting carbon-based gases like CO2 directly into biomethane with 96% purity. The core of their innovation is the strategic engineering of biofilms—complex communities of microorganisms that adhere to a surface. Unlike traditional biogas plants that rely on general decomposition, this process uses the biofilm to perform a targeted conversion of gas streams into nearly pure methane. ...

13 August, 2025 · 2 min · 277 words · Yury Akinin

OpenAI's GPT-OSS: A Major Step Back Towards 'Open'

OpenAI just made a significant move by releasing GPT-OSS, its first truly open-source large language model family since GPT-2. With a permissive Apache 2.0 license, this isn’t just a minor release; it’s a fundamental shift that puts real power back into the hands of developers. The family includes two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b, designed for high-performance inference with strong reasoning capabilities. Why This Is a Game-Changer For years, the most powerful models from OpenAI have been locked behind APIs. This meant dealing with rate limits, opaque pricing, and sending potentially sensitive data to a third party. GPT-OSS changes that equation entirely. ...

13 August, 2025 · 2 min · 418 words · Yury Akinin

Vector Search Is Reaching Its Limits. Here’s What Comes Next.

Vector databases have become a core component in modern AI, particularly for powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) through similarity search. However, as we build more sophisticated applications, the limitations of relying solely on vector representations are becoming clear. From my perspective, the core issue is that advanced AI systems need to understand more than just semantic similarity. They require a richer grasp of data that includes structured attributes, textual precision, and the relationships within and across different modalities like text, images, and video. Relying on basic vector search alone creates significant blind spots. ...

13 August, 2025 · 4 min · 694 words · Yury Akinin

Grok-4 vs. ChatGPT-5: Musk Claims Victory with New Benchmarks

Elon Musk has once again stirred the AI world, making a bold claim against OpenAI and Microsoft shortly after the ChatGPT-5 release. He asserts that his Grok-4 Heavy model from xAI already outperforms its new competitor. The Benchmark Battle According to Musk, the numbers speak for themselves: Grok-4 reportedly scored 15.9% on the Arc-AGI2 test, while ChatGPT-5 achieved 9.9%. He also noted that his model was already “smarter” two weeks before the GPT-5 launch, a sentiment he claims is echoed in positive user feedback. ...

13 August, 2025 · 2 min · 259 words · Yury Akinin

My Take on GPT-5, OpenAI's Strategy, and the Dawn of 'AI Time'

A recent Forbes article by John Sviokla put a name to something many of us in the AI space have been feeling: the shift to AI Time. It’s the idea that the tempo of innovation and organizational operations is no longer dictated by human speed, but by the near-instantaneous cycle of silicon intelligence. OpenAI’s GPT-5 launch is a masterclass in this new reality. It wasn’t a simple model update; it was a multi-front strategic deployment that reshapes the competitive landscape. I see it as a “quadruple play” that establishes a new baseline for the industry. ...

13 August, 2025 · 3 min · 582 words · Yury Akinin

OpenAI's Hand Was Forced: Why the AI Race is No Longer Won in Secret

For years, the AI frontier was defined by closed doors and proprietary models. That era is officially over. OpenAI’s recent pivot to open-source isn’t just a strategic shift; it’s a direct response to a new reality: the center of AI innovation has gone public, and China is leading the charge. The Open-Source Tipping Point The catalyst was the surprise release of high-performance models by Chinese startup DeepSeek. As a recent Fortune article aptly pointed out, this move exposed a critical vulnerability in the “closed-garden” strategy of Western AI labs. By making powerful AI openly accessible, DeepSeek didn’t just win goodwill; it ignited an explosion of development across China. Companies from Baidu to Alibaba quickly followed suit, creating a tidal wave of open innovation. ...

13 August, 2025 · 3 min · 447 words · Yury Akinin

MIT's Quantum Experiment: Redefining the Observer Effect Beyond Einstein and Bohr

A recent MIT experiment has provided one of the cleanest and most elegant demonstrations of a core quantum principle, revisiting the famous double-slit experiment and the historic debates between Einstein and Bohr. This wasn’t about proving Einstein ‘wrong,’ but about refining our understanding of measurement itself. The findings confirm a foundational concept: the act of observation is not passive. Gaining information about one property of a quantum system, like a photon’s path, directly impacts and even erases another, like its wave-like nature. ...

13 August, 2025 · 3 min · 499 words · Yury Akinin

Google's AI Coding Agent 'Jules' Launches Publicly, Powered by Gemini 2.5

Google has officially moved its asynchronous coding agent, Jules, out of beta and into public availability. The key upgrade is its new engine: Gemini 2.5 Pro, which Google claims enhances its ability to generate high-quality code by first developing a structured plan. From Beta to Public Launch The public launch follows a substantial beta period where thousands of developers tackled tens of thousands of tasks, resulting in over 140,000 code improvements. This feedback has been used to refine the platform, leading to several key enhancements: ...

13 August, 2025 · 2 min · 256 words · Yury Akinin