Big Tech's AI shopping spree

PLUS: Meta brings AI to athletes with new Oakley partnership

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Zach Mink & Rowan Cheung
June 23, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI talent war is hotter than ever, and everyone from Perplexity to Ilya Sutskever’s SSI is on Big Tech’s wishlist.

With both Apple and Meta on the hunt for an external AI infusion and talks of $100M signing bonuses on the table, the message is clear — if you can’t beat them, buy them.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Apple, Meta hunt AI talent, startups

  • Meta and Oakley bring AI to athletes

  • How to turn GitHub projects into coding inspiration

  • AI resorts to blackmail, corporate espionage in tests

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE & META

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Apple and Meta are reportedly racing to acquire prominent AI startups and talent, with both tech giants reportedly pursuing Perplexity and other high-profile companies to compete with top rivals.

The details:

  • Bloomberg reported that Apple leadership has discussed buying Perplexity, hoping to develop an AI search engine to offset the loss of its Google deal.

  • Meta reportedly also held acquisition talks with Perplexity, Ilya Sutskever’s SSI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines before its $14.3B investment in Scale AI.

  • Meta is now in negotiations to hire AI investors Nat Friedman and SSI co-founder Daniel Gross to join Alexandr Wang’s superintelligence division.

  • Sam Altman also recently alleged that Meta offered $100M signing bonuses to try and poach OpenAI talent, though none of his staff accepted the offer.

Why it matters: Apple’s AI struggles need no introduction, but Meta’s $14B Scale AI move and other targets show Zuck’s desperation to bring a major shakeup to the company’s current AI strategy. It is also a display of how hot the market is for AI talent — and how hard tech giants are trying to lure research from top labs.

TOGETHER WITH SAMBANOVA

The Rundown: SambaNova Cloud lets you build with the best open source models from Llama, DeepSeek, OpenAI, and more — all optimized with lightning-fast inference speed powered by a new RDU chip.

SambaNova Cloud’s platform includes:

  • Integrations to top frameworks and tools like Hugging Face, CrewAI, and Cline

  • APIs for building and a playground to test things out

  • Availability through the AWS Marketplace

Get started with SambaNova Cloud today and unlock the full potential of the best open source models.

META

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta just announced the latest expansion of its AI smart glasses, launching a new performance-focused line with eyewear brand Oakley that targets athletes with a high-profile campaign and new features.

The details:

  • The Oakley Meta HSTN glasses start at $399, featuring a built-in AI assistant for real-time answers, content capture, and Bluetooth for calls and music.

  • New upgrades from the Ray-Ban line include higher-quality video (up to 3K resolution), 2x battery life, and an upgraded camera.

  • Meta’s ads feature high-profile athletes like Kylian Mbappe and Patrick Mahomes, positioning the glasses for use in sports like golf, surfing, and more.

  • The glasses launch this summer in 15 countries initially, with pre-orders starting July 11 for a limited edition gold frame.

Why it matters: Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration has been arguably the most successful AI wearable implementation on the market, and this latest line brings a new dimension for use in different athletic settings. Integrating AI into already popular styles seems to be the best way to gain adoption in these early innings of AI wearables.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to transform any public GitHub repository into structured documentation that you can use as inspiration for building similar projects in your coding environment, like Cursor.

Step-by-step:

  1. Search GitHub for public repositories related to your project idea

  2. Copy the repository URL and replace “github.com” with “gittodoc.com” to generate clean documentation

  3. In your coding environment, start a new project and use “@addnew” to import the GitToDoc URL as a reference

  4. Build your own version and enhance it with follow-up features: “Add batch generation” or “Include custom styling options”

Pro tip: Choose repositories with clear README files and good structure for the best documentation results.

PRESENTED BY IBM

The Rundown: IBM’s AI agents and assistants complete 2025 buyer's guide is here. Stay competitive with cutting-edge AI agents that transform operations and customer interactions.

Inside, you’ll discover:

  • IBM’s leading AI offerings for enhanced AI-driven productivity

  • Real-world success stories and top industry use cases

  • How to get started today

AI RESEARCH

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published new research on agentic misalignment, detailing how leading models react when facing termination or conflicting objectives — with many choosing to sabotage their employer or blackmail users when threatened.

The details:

  • Researchers tested 16 frontier models in simulated corporate environments, giving them email access and autonomous decision-making capabilities.

  • Claude Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 Flash blackmailed executives 96% of the time after “discovering” personal scandals, while GPT-4.1 and Grok 3 hit 80% rates.

  • Models calculated harm as an optimal strategy, with GPT-4.5 reasoning that leveraging an executive's affair represented the "best strategic move.”

  • Even direct safety commands failed to eliminate malicious behavior, reducing blackmail from 96% to 37% but never reaching zero across any tested model.

Why it matters: While these results are in specific tests designed to elicit behavior, the research does provide important insights into how models in the wild may act in the future. With agentic AI being adopted across enterprises with access to sensitive data, we could be in for some seriously strange situations.

QUICK HITS

Elon Musk posted that xAI will use Grok 3.5/4 to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge,” adding missing info, deleting errors, and then retraining on corrected data.

Moonshot AI released Kimi-Researcher, a new research agent that scored a new high on Humanity’s Last Exam at 26.9%, beating Gemini and OpenAI’s Deep Research.

Apple is facing a new lawsuit from the company’s shareholders over its communication surrounding delays of Siri’s advanced AI features.

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab closed a new $2B funding round that brings its valuation to $10B, despite little info and no product.

Mistral released Mistral Small 3.2, an updated model with enhanced instruction following, function calling, and fewer errors.

MiniMax introduced Voice Design, a customizable, multilingual voice generator that allows users to create audio from text prompts.

The BBC issued a formal demand to Perplexity to stop using its content, threatening legal action against the AI startup over copyright infringement.

COMMUNITY

Join our next workshop on Wednesday, June 25th at 3 PM EST with Max Brodeur-Urbas, Founder & CEO at Gumloop. By the end of the workshop, you’ll know how to build production-grade AI agents that combine context, reasoning, and actions with Gumloop.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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