😺 Kimi Researcher Beats OpenAI as Huawei Faces Model Theft Accusations

PLUS: Meta steals Apple's top AI researcher

Welcome, humans.

Now this is just cruel: to add insult to Apple Intelligence, Meta has now reportedly recruited the head of AI models at Apple, Ruoming Pang.

Really Meta? You had to go and swipe AI researchers from Apple? The company everyone in the industry sees as LAST place in the big tech AI race?

What’s next, is Meta going to recruit the one the guy who knows how to make AI agents with N8N at every midsize enterprise? If that’s the case, I got 10 tutorials to share with y’all… maybe we’ll do a segment on it tomorrow! Let’s hear it in the feedback if you’re interested. Who wants to learn AI agents even if Meta isn’t recruiting you?!

In all seriousness, Ruoming Pang has some legit credibility at making small AI models that can run on a phone… perhaps Meta is planning to cook up something special for its next-gen AI glasses?

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Chinese AI joins the US industry in going all out to win.
Samsung’s profits to drop due to weak AI demand.
AI coder Cursor confessed expensive new AI models are hurting its business.
Coreweave (AI data center) snapped up a major bitcoin miner for $9B.

China’s Kimi drops an AI bomb while its rivals brawl

You can tell AI progress is heating up in China because the gloves have come FULL OFF. Deep Dive: Here’s an overview on how AI development is going in China.

First, the cool stuff: Moonshot AI out of China just launched Kimi Researcher, and it's not your average chatbot upgrade:

This thing performs 23 reasoning steps and crawls through 200+ URLs per query, delivering research reports that would make your college thesis advisor weep with joy.
It beat OpenAI's o3 (with search tools!) on key benchmarks, achieving a state-of-the-art 26.9% on Humanity's Last Exam.
Check out these demos of it in action or test it out yourself here.

Now here's where it gets spicy: While Kimi was quietly revolutionizing AI research, the rest of the industry devolved into a middle school cafeteria food fight.

Hours before Kimi's launch, Huawei was forced to deny allegations that its Pangu models are just Alibaba's Qwen in a trench coat. An anonymous whistleblower claimed Huawei “cloned” Qwen-1.5, added some layers, and called it original. GitHub analyses showed suspiciously similar code. Yikes. (here’s a full breakdown).

This is not such an unfamiliar story in the AI industry… While American AI giants might not be stealing each other’s models, they are certainly stealing each other’s researchers.

Meta's been offering $100M signing bonuses to steal OpenAI talent. Zuckerberg personally WhatsApped researchers through his ”Recruiting Party 🎉” chat (yes, with the emoji). Result? At least 10 OpenAI researchers jumped ship, including the entire Zurich office (this site aims to track all his poaches so far).

OpenAI has already reported to investors that its stock paid to employees soared to 119% of last year’s revenue. And that was BEFORE Meta poached 10 of its top people.

The thing is, OpenAI can't afford to lose any more talent… not with its biggest launch looming, anyway. Whether its woes continue or are left in the dust depends on how the rest of July goes for the company.

Back in April, OpenAI delayed the launch of GPT-5 until the summer, and it’s expected any day now. Meanwhile, Elon promised Grok 4 “just after July 4th.” Industry insiders think they're both waiting to see who blinks first.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Want to make better use of meeting time? Rather than having AI summarize meetings you skip, Ethan Mollick suggests you use it to make the meetings you attend actually worth attending.

He shared this prompt to facilitate better meetings that generates custom “tarot cards” with questions to rescue your stuck meetings.

He says to feed Claude your meeting transcript halfway through with this prompt, and it’ll create 5-6 targeted questions like “What pattern keeps bringing us back to this topic?” to actually make progress on your most important topics.

Instead of endless circles, you get focused breakthrough questions that actually move conversations forward.

Check out all of our Prompt Tips of the Day from June here.

P.S: Completely new to AI? Start here!

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Freepik now has text to speech powered by ElevenLabs available for you to add 30+ different voices to your creations (demo).
Genstash creative prompts and style references in one browser extension, then randomly mixes them to spark new creative ideas (demo)—waitlist only atm.
Orchids builds professional websites through chat that look human-designed, w/ templates for everything from space tech landing pages to artisan e-commerce stores.
Context plugs into Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive to instantly create presentations, documents, and spreadsheets using your actual data (new launch, so might be some kinks to work out).
LTX Studio transforms product photos into commercial videos, replacing backgrounds with fantasy landscapes, adding branded text and logos, and building complete scenes
SciArena shows you two AI responses to your scientific question side-by-side, then you vote on which answer (with citations) is better (dataset here).

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

Anyone else see this new “Study together” feature? Looks like GPT’s answer to Google’s LearnLM.

Samsung projected its Q2 2025 operating profit to plunge 56% year-over-year to 4.6 trillion won ($3.4 billion), missing analyst expectations due to sluggish AI memory chip sales, failure to secure NVIDIA certification for its HBM3E chips, and US export restrictions on China.
Anthropic proposed a transparency framework that would require the largest AI developers (those with $100M+ annual revenue or $1B+ R&D spending) to publicly disclose their safety practices through Secure Development Frameworks and system cards.
Cursor’s pricing change last month cause a backlash that prompted the company’s CEO to apologize, explaining newer AI models cost more due to higher token usage on complex tasks (some requests cost 10x more now), making flat monthly fees unsustainable.
Xbox producer Matt Turnbull suggested laid off employees should use AI to “reduce the emotional and cognitive load” from being laid off; he wasn’t being catty, he genuinely thought it was helpful advice worth sharing with others… well, here’s a paper that explains why that’s not a good idea.
CoreWeave (AI data center provider) announced it will buy Bitcoin miner Core Scientific in an all stock $9B deal to expand its data center capacity.
Here are the top AI papers from last week according to the AI Timeline.

For the latest AI deep dives, check out our Explainer articles here!

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Tuesday Ticker

We rounded up all the trivia questions and answers from last month and put them in one place so you can check out how you compared against your peers. Check it out here!