Weekly AI Newsletter
As the world of AI evolves at breakneck speed, our weekly newsletter cuts through the noise to bring you the developments that matter. We help businesses navigate this rapidly changing landscape by spotlighting practical tools, uncovering emerging opportunities, and delivering the insights you need to make informed decisions. Each week, we curate the most compelling stats, breakthrough innovations, and strategic talking points, keeping you ahead of the curve and ready to shape tomorrow with confidence.
1. AI News (Macro, Economic & Geopolitical Events)
AI Becomes Strategic Imperative Driving M&A Activity Despite Market Headwinds
While U.S. M&A transactions declined 18% year-over-year according to Dealogic, AI-driven deals are bucking the trend, spurring significant activity. Companies like Meta’s $14.8 billion Scale AI investment and AMD’s Untether AI acquisition demonstrate how firms are using M&A to rapidly acquire AI talent and capabilities to avoid disruption. M&A Market Trends: How AI Is Shaping Deal Activity
Perplexity AI Valuation Soars to $18bn in Record Time
AI search engine Perplexity has reached an $18 billion valuation, marking extraordinary growth just months after its previous funding round. The startup, which challenges traditional search with conversational AI, continues to attract massive investor interest as it competes with tech giants in reimagining how users discover information online. https://www.ft.com/content/4e05a5c5-84ad-4f8a-991a-d7f3842de76d
US Congress Passes Historic GENIUS Act - First Major Crypto Legislation
Congress passed the GENIUS Act with 308-122 bipartisan support, marking America’s first major standalone crypto legislation. The bill regulates stablecoins by mandating full reserve backing, monthly audits, and anti-money laundering compliance. Treasury Secretary Bessent predicts the US stablecoin market could grow to $2 trillion positioning America as a global crypto leader. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-vote-crypto-genius-act-stablecoin-regulations/
Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch
Swedish AI vibe coding startup Lovable raised $200 million led by Accel at a $1.8 billion valuation, just eight months after launch. The platform helps users create websites and apps using natural language, claiming 2.3 million active users, 180,000 paying subscribers, and $75 million ARR in record-breaking growth. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/17/lovable-becomes-a-unicorn-with-200m-series-a-just-8-months-after-launch
Chatbots in the classroom: how AI is reshaping higher education
While institutions grapple with the pace of change, technology companies are moving quickly to offer custom learning products https://on.ft.com/3GV9Xx7
Tech AI News & Developments
xAI Launches Grok 4—A New “Truth-Seeking” Model Surpassing Benchmarks
Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok 4, claiming it to be “the world’s most intelligent AI model“. Leveraging a massive GPU cluster, Grok 4 introduces advanced reinforcement learning and native tool capabilities, and is now available to subscribers and via API. The model is positioned as a direct rival to OpenAI’s future GPT-5 and pushes the frontier for “truth-seeking” AI. We’ve had a look at Grok 4 and we like Grok 4 Heavy – which tasks 4 agents to look at your task and then they compare notes and come back with the most reasoned response. https://x.ai/news/grok-4
OpenAI Releases ChatGPT Agent to Automate Complex Multi-Step Tasks
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Agent, an “agentic” AI feature able to browse the web, execute actions, and create PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets from simple prompts. Available to Pro, Plus, and Team users, the agent combines web search, code execution, and document generation while allowing human oversight at each workflow stage. This only landed today (18th July) but we do like the excel integration – so far this has been an undercooked area in AI, we have given it some large sheets to analyse and the early results are promising better than we’ve seen before (other than with Grok 4 which was also successful).https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/709158/openai-new-release-chatgpt-agent-operator-deep-research
Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K2: Open-Source Model Outperforms GPT-4.1, Claude 4 Opus in Coding
Chinese startup Moonshot AI released Kimi K2, an open-source language model boasting 1 trillion total parameters and state-of-the-art results in coding and agent tasks. Serving as a formidable challenger to Western proprietary models, Kimi K2 delivers top performance on SWE-bench and LiveCodeBench, while remaining freely available to the research community. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02275-6
AWS “Agentic AI” for Enterprise Automation
At the AWS Summit, Amazon introduced new “agentic AI” capabilities designed to automate complex, multi-step business processes. These AI agents can perform tasks across apps, respond to changing conditions, and make decisions with minimal human input. The updates aim to reduce operational overhead and accelerate innovation. AWS calls this the next leap in enterprise automation. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-summit-agentic-ai-innovations-2025
Microsoft is rolling out Desktop Share for Copilot Vision to Windows
Microsoft is rolling out Desktop Share for Copilot Vision to Windows Insiders, allowing Copilot to see and analyze your entire desktop in real-time. The AI can provide insights, answer questions, and coach users through tasks like creative projects, resume improvements, or game navigation, with privacy controls requiring explicit user permission. Copilot on Windows: Vision Desktop Share begins rolling out to Windows Insiders | Windows Insider Blog
HeyGen Video Agent Launches
HeyGen introduced a multi-agent system for fully automated AI video creation—heralded as the “first creative OS. https://imobisoft.co.uk/ai-breakthroughs-july-2025/
Weekly AI Spotlight: Google Flow
What is Google Flow?
Google Flow is an AI filmmaking tool custom-designed for Google’s most advanced models, Veo, Imagen and Gemini that helps storytellers create cinematic clips and scenes. It offers intuitive scene creation, camera control features, asset management capabilities, and the ability to generate both video and audio content.
Why is it is revolutionary?
Flow combines Veo’s cinematic outputs with Google AI’s – Gemini prompting, allowing users to describe their vision in everyday language. Google AI Ultra subscribers get access to Veo 3’s native audio generation, bringing environmental sounds and character dialogue directly into video creation. Ultra when released was pricy but Grok 4 access is even more expensive and all new models (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini Ultra and Perplexity) are converging on the $200 per month price point.
Business applications
Teams can produce professional 1080p video with audio for marketing campaigns, social content, and training materials. It’s ideal for storyboard development, quickly visualising creative ideas through AI-generated scenes before actual production.
Market impact
Flow democratises filmmaking by removing technical barriers, enabling non-professionals to create professional-quality content. This will likely flood the market with AI-generated content while pushing traditional creators to focus on unique human storytelling.
Quick Example
In the right creative hands the results are extremely good, for some Friday entertainment see this advert created using these tools – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-qe4y6MBus