July 2025 AI Roundup

OpenAI launches o3-pro, its most capable AI reasoning model yet. This upgraded version of o3 excels in math, science, coding & writing by working through problems step-by-step. Available for ChatGPT Pro/Team users, replacing o1-pro.

Elon Musk's xAI launched Grok 4, its latest AI model competing with ChatGPT and Gemini. The release includes a $300/month SuperGrok Heavy subscription - the most expensive among major AI providers. Grok 4 shows strong performance on academic benchmarks, with plans for coding, multi-modal, and video models coming soon.

Anthropic updated Claude Artifacts with a dedicated workspace and the ability to embed AI capabilities directly into creations, turning simple artifacts into interactive, shareable apps. Users can now browse curated artifacts, customize existing creations, or build AI-powered tools through conversation without coding.

The American Federation of Teachers partnered with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to launch a $23 million National Academy for AI Instruction, providing free AI training to help 1.8 million educators safely integrate artificial intelligence into their classrooms.

Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome is the first AI model to analyze 1 million DNA letters at high resolution, predicting how genetic variants affect gene regulation to help researchers better understand diseases and genome function.

Google launches Gemini CLI, an open-source AI agent that brings Gemini 2.5 Pro directly to developers' terminals with 60 requests/minute and 1,000 daily requests for free. Features coding assistance, web search, extensibility, and integrates with VS Code through Gemini Code Assist.

Midjourney released its first video model V1, enabling users to animate images into 5-second videos with automatic and manual animation modes, high/low motion settings, and 4-second extensions up to 4 times for 21-second clips total. Video generation costs 8x more than images but offers significantly cheaper pricing than competitors, generating 4 video variations per job.

Comet is Perplexity's new AI-powered web browser that transforms browsing with intelligent conversation, featuring an AI assistant that can see webpage content, answer questions, and complete tasks anywhere. Available to Perplexity Max subscribers ($200/month) with waitlist access.

Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta Superintelligence Labs, consolidating all of Meta's AI teams under former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The initiative recruits top talent from OpenAI, Google, and other firms to develop next-generation foundation models and compete in the AI race.

Federal judge ruled Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train Claude AI constituted 'fair use', marking a significant victory for AI companies facing copyright lawsuits. A separate trial will address Anthropic's alleged use of pirated books in its training process.

Our latest robotics statistics report reveals significant growth in factory automation and service robotics worldwide, with detailed analysis of market trends, regional breakdowns, job opportunities, and robot adoption across manufacturing and other key industries.

We've collected all previous editions of our AI Roundups in one place, so you can easily catch up on any important updates you might've missed.