OpenAI shuts down its Sora video app and ends its $1 billion Disney deal, as Elon Musk's xAI races to capture the AI video market with Grok Imagine — but faces lawsuits, EU probes, and fierce competition from Google, Runway, and ByteDance.
Disney cancels its $1 billion OpenAI licensing deal after Sora's shutdown, though no money ever changed hands, and both companies are still exploring alternative partnership opportunities even as Hollywood's AI concerns shift toward rival platforms like SeeDance 2.0.
Granola raises $125M at a $1.5B valuation — six times its previous worth — as the AI meeting notetaker launches enterprise collaboration features and new APIs to outpace rivals like Read AI and Fireflies in the rapidly commoditizing AI note-taking market.
Meta launches AI-powered shopping features on Facebook and Instagram, offering one-tap checkout via Stripe and PayPal partnerships, AI-generated product summaries and discounts, and an expanded creator affiliate program now including Amazon, eBay, and Temu across 22 countries.
Charlotte robotics startup Lucid Bots raises $20M in Series B funding, bringing total investment to $34M, as its window-cleaning drones and robots surge from 100 to nearly 1,000 units sold while expanding into painting, waterproofing, and sealing markets.
Legal AI startup Harvey secures $200 million in new funding, skyrocketing its valuation to $11 billion as its platform now serves over 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organizations with $190 million in annual recurring revenue.
Mistral launches Voxtral TTS, a groundbreaking 3-billion parameter open-weight text-to-speech model that outperforms ElevenLabs, adapts to any voice in five seconds, and runs directly on smartwatches.
Google launches Lyria 3 Pro, a powerful new AI music model that generates full 3-minute songs with structural awareness, letting users prompt for specific elements like verses and choruses, while rolling out across Vertex AI, Google AI Studio, and the Gemini app with built-in SynthID watermarking and responsible content safeguards.
Salesforce integrates Agentforce AI agents directly into Slack, letting teams interact with AI via DMs or @mentions, deploy ready-made HR, sales, and marketing templates, or build custom agents — all without ever leaving the app.
Google's new TurboQuant AI compression algorithm, which slashes memory requirements by up to 6x, is sending memory stocks tumbling, with SanDisk plunging 5.7%, Western Digital down 4.7%, Seagate sliding 4%, and Micron dropping 3%, as investors fear reduced long-term demand for DRAM and flash memory.