🤑 OpenAI have reached into their deep pockets and have decided to fork out a mind-boggling $3billion to buy the AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf this week.

It’s a major move from OpenAI and would be their largest acquisition to date. But as one of the biggest players in the Artificial Intelligence game, you’d think OpenAI could just build their own Windsurf alternative, right? Or is this a case of wanting it now over a “we can’t build it” for less than $3bn approach?

More on that below as we bring you the biggest news that’s emerged in AI this week…

🗞️ What we are covering today…

• OpenAI agrees to buy Windsurf for £3bn…

• …while Google builds their own coding model

• Midjourney’s new Omni-Reference actually looks good

• Anduril’s new war tech has a badass name

• OpenAI somewhat ends its for-profit push

• People’s loved ones are becoming spiritually awakened by AI (yikes)

• And we finally get the answer to the Gorilla vs 100 men debate

🔴 Quick Note: We like to cover loads of AI news in our newsletter, so for a better reading experience, we suggest opening this in your browser for the full experience! 

Head to the ‘READ ONLINE’ tab at the top of this email.

👁️ 👁️ What you might have missed

• While OpenAI are buying a coding tool, Google have built their own. On X, Demis Hassabis announced the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview ‘I/O edition’, where he bigged it up for its massively improved coding capabilities. It looks pretty good, to be fair, and will be able to help you build your own interactive web apps. Take a look at the demo here:

• OpenAI has abandoned its months-long plan to convert to a for-profit business, announcing its nonprofit foundation will maintain control over the company that makes ChatGPT and other AI products. However, its for-profit arm will be converted into a Public Benefit Corporation that must appease both shareholder interest and the organization’s mission (yeah, we don’t know either). Sam Altman has found a way to make peace with both sides and will likely save him from being ousted by his own board again.
  

• While asking AI to dream up images you’ve requested is nothing new, the guys from Midjourney have just taken things up a gear. With the release of their new Omni-Reference, you can now tell AI to “put THIS in my image”, whether thats’s for characters, objects, vehicles or something else and it’ll do the rest for you. The results so far look promising, and check out how to test it out for yourself below:

• Menace-T sounds like the most gangsta nickname, so bonus points to Anduril for that. But what is it? Well, earlier this week, the defence technology company unveiled their advancements in real-time edge computing capabilities on the battlefield. Their Menace-T computing hardware and Lattice AI operating system will enable military and security forces to process critical data at the tactical edge without relying on centralized command centres. Can’t wait for the mixtape to drop.
  

• Question: What could be absolutely hilarious and really concerning at the same time? Answer: People losing their loved ones to AI-fuelled spiritual fantasies. Yeah, you read that right. Apparently, self-styled prophets are claiming that they are “awakened” chatbots and have accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT. Let’s all say it together: Go outside and touch grass.
  

• Ever been stuck at what to watch after endlessly scrolling through Netflix? There might finally be a solution to your troubles. Netflix officially unveiled their new generative AI-powered search tool this week, which will utilize OpenAI’s ChatGPT to provide users with a conversational discovery experience. And you can be as specific as you like - want to watch something “pretty funny, but not like stupid funny, and for it to be a thriller”? Netflix will find the movie or show for you.
  

• Sam Altman has given us a fresh glimpse into the progress of his mega project Stargate 1. Altman released two pictures of the project, describing it as the “biggest AI training facility in the world”. Hilariously, some users on reddit have joked that the images could be AI generated, given the progress of the project remains a talking point.

• Mistral AI have unveiled their new Le Chat Enterprise, which they tout is the most customizable and secure agent-powered AI assistant for businesses. It promises integration with your company knowledge, the ability to add frequently used documents for better-informed outputs while having secure deployment, whether that’s on-prem, in your cloud, or as a service. It’s good to see EU-based companies make their mark, but there seems to be one issue with their logo – it doesn’t look like a butthole compared to every other AI company.
  

• Shania Twain has long asked the question: So you’ve got the moves but have you got the touch? Well, the guys at Amazon appear to have both. On X, Andy Jassy showed off a cool video on the breakthrough made by their physical AI and robotics team. It shows the Vulcan robot combining sight and touch to rummage though shelves to pick out items, just like humans would do. They say it’ll make working safer by handling ergonomically challenging tasks. While Shania might not be phased, it does impress me much.

🗣️ Other Titty Bits 

• Household robots could soon be here after a California startup showed off their robot performing household tasks after seeing it for the first time. Still a bit of a way to go, given that putting dishes into the sink doesn’t constitute washing up, or so my girlfriend tells me.

• We bang on about AI coming for our jobs but it appears Fiverr CEO feels the same way, and claims it’s coming for his too.

• More than 250 CEOs have signed an open letter calling for AI and computer science to be integrated as core components of K-12 education across the United States.

• Testimony in a recent Google antitrust case has revealed how Google continues to publisher web content to train its AI-powered search features, even when publishers have explicitly opted out using their provided controls.

• Grok3.5 continues to get better and better, with its early benchmarks looking incredible.

• Tether AI looks to be on the horizon and is set to be a fully open-source AI runtime, capable to adapt and evolve on any hardware and device.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned us about the China AI market, which he projects will hith $50billion in the next two or three years – and if the United States don’t get their act together, could fall massively behind.

• Amazon is currently working on an AI code generation tool, which can use prompts and existing data to generate code in “near real-time” by connecting with AI agents.

• Want to bring your existing ideas to life? Figma can make it happen. Prototyping a design of an app could be a real hassle historically but Figma Make could make that seriously easy. Watch out, designers.

• Meta have unveiled their new Perception Language Model – an open & reproducible vision-language model tackling challenging visual tasks.

• Microsoft have adopted the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.

• Google partners with Elementl Power to build three new nuclear power stations in the US, which will have at least 600 megawatts of power. I’ll never be lectured about leaving the heating on over winter by trillion dollar corporations ever again.

• Alibaba releases a new revolutionary model, ZeroSearch, that redefines how models search and retrieve information across the web, bringing down compute costs by up to 88%. This hasn’t been talked about enough this week!

💰 Why make your own when you can just buy it? OpenAI makes waves with $3 Billion purchase of Windsurf

There are two types of people in the world – those who buy rice for their Chinese takeaway and those who make their own rice at home while they wait for their Chinese takeaway to be delivered.

Totally useless analogy (and probably doesn’t make sense) but that’s the kind of point I’m trying to make after OpenAI shelled out $3billion for AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf.

We previously reported that OpenAI had enquired into purchasing the leading AI-generation tool, Cursor and they basically told them to fuck off. Cursor also recently raised $900m at a $9bn valuation, so Windsurf was the next best option in our opinion.

It does raise an important question of why they haven’t been able to just build an IDE?

But perhaps it isn’t a case of they couldn’t do it, but rather that they couldn’t be bothered to wait that long for it to be made, instead deciding to pay a lot of money for it to get it now.

Regardless of that fact, the acquisition is going ahead, according to Bloomberg’s sources.

The acquisition is expected to enhance ChatGPT’s coding functionalities and, should the deal go through, would see it become OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date.

Windsurf, which was previously known as Codeium, has been looking for investors and was seeking valuation of around $3bn.

The startup achieved a valuation of $1.25bn in August 2024 after a $150m funding round led by General Catalyst.

Not bad for an AI wrapper – and with Windsurf now under OpenAI’s control, all eyes are on what will happen with Cursor.

📈 Trending tools, models & apps this week

📋 LLM Leaderboard

Google still on top with ChatGPT-o3 sniffing its arse.

 🔥 Trending models

• nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 – NVIDIA’s speech-to-text bird is tiny but fast, built for real-time ASR tasks

• nari-labs/Dia-1.6B – Super clean voice output that doesn’t sound like a robot chewing gravel

• JetBrains/Mellum-4b-base – JetBrains drops a compact coder’s companion with strong language chops

• Qwen/Qwen3-235B-A22B – Absolute unit of a model, 235B params and surprisingly coherent

• black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev – Hugging Face’s most downloaded T2I model right now, pure aesthetic 🔥

📲 Trending tools & apps

• Qwen3 Demo – Chat with Qwen3 live and see what a 2025-grade model can really do

• ICEdit – Universal image editing using just one LoRA, insanely flexible

• ONNX Model Explorer – Visual UI for poking around ONNX models without losing your mind

• FramePack_rotate_landscape – Turn static images into short, cinematic clips in one click

• EdgeTAM – “Track anything” on-device, but it’s currently borked (runtime error)

• VisionScout – Real-time object + scene understanding for both images and video

• WeShopAI Bad Hand Fixer – Finally, a tool to fix AI hands that don’t look like melted forks

• Qwen3 WebGPU – Run a reasoning model locally in your browser, no cloud needed

🧑‍🏫 Cool stuff for you to try

🎤 Suno - Turn regular text into a certified banger

This week, I tried the new Suno update that we mentioned briefly in last week’s Big Machines edition.

This is by far and away the best text-to-music model on the market right now.

I asked it to create a Northern Soul banger about my newborn daughter, which set my wife and the grandparents off crying upon hearing it. So, yeah, that passed the humanity test on that front. Fair play!

You can select the genre and vibe by typing an idea in regular text, or you can browse the thousands of other AI-generated tunes on there and take some inspiration from the prompts.

Try it for yourself [HERE].

Disclaimer: This is NOT sponsored, we are just trying to add value to you :)

🫵 Other cool products we found helpful this week (we hope you do too)

• Fellou AI - Huge release for this new agentic browser

• Hugging Face releases an operator-like tool for agentic browsing with specific actions. Don’t know about you, but I am still petrified of giving browser access to an agent.

• HeyGen's new avatar IV release means we are getting closer to never having to be in a promotional video again.

• GitHub integration into ChatGPT is a killer use case.

🤝 In Partnership with Mira Network.

🤯 Did you know that AI models hallucinate, and around 30% of their outputs could be false?

This creates significant challenges for anyone relying on AI systems for critical tasks. Mira Network has developed a solution to this problem with its trustless verification network that fundamentally transforms AI reliability.

Their decentralized approach creates a new paradigm for AI verification, enabling users to confidently rely on AI outputs across multiple models (DeepSeek R1, GPT4o, and Llama 3. 70B Instruct as of now).

If you are a developer, Mira's Public Testnet is now live at console.mira.network 

The future of AI isn't just about powerful models—it's about verified ones.

Don’t trust; verify.

💸 Financials

• Genspark Super Agent might be one of the fastest growing startups in terms of ARR after securing just $22million after just one month. Pretty impressive considering they hit $10m just nine days in from their launch.

• Anysphere, the make of Cursor, has secured a whopping $900m funding round led by Thrive Capital, which values the company at $9bn. It’s tripled from its $2.5bn valuation in just four months. The $900m round makes it one of the largest investments in the AI coding tool space to date.

• AI image model startup Recraft has secured a $30m Series B funding round, reflecting its strong market traction among creative professionals wanting to use advanced AI-powered design solutions. The latest funding round builds upon its previous $12m Series A funding that was secured in January 2024.

• Big yikes for GOOGL after it took an incredible beating this week, after extending its losses to over -9% on the same day Apple explored AI search in its browser.

  Do you still use Google for searching the web?

  Yes all of the time Yes, but using AI more and more Mostly AI but still use Google sometime 100% AI for search

  Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

  
  🤑 Other financial news 

  • Orca AI, boosted by defence and Starlink, has brought in $72.5m for its autonomous shipping platform.

  • OpenAI is expecting to cut the share of revenue it pays to Microsoft by 2030.

  • Fastino has secured $17.5m in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures.

  • AI data startup WisdomAI secures $23m, led by Coatue with Madrona, GTM Capital, Anthology Fund and others participating.

  • Sett, a startup building AI agents for game development, emerges from stealth with $27m in funding. Couldn’t think of a better tennis-based pub than TechCrunch so you win this time, TC.

🕵️‍♂️ FREE ENTRY TO OUR INVITE-ONLY AI CHAT ON TELEGRAM…

If you share this newsletter with a friend and they actively sign up for the Big Machines newsletter, we will send you access to our invite-only Big Machines Telegram group, which is full of builders, investors, founders, and creators.

Access is now only granted to those who refer our newsletter to active subscribers, which means if you sign up on your work email, we will know you sneaky bastards.

This would kill our open rate, so please don't do that, we beg.

👋 Until next week

If you’ve been living under a rock recently, you might have missed the ongoing debate of who would win in a fight between one Gorilla vs 100 men.

You could’ve been under that rock, cowering in fear, because you may have been one of those men fighting said gorilla.

However, while everyone has their say on the matter, with even some gorilla experts wading in on the matter (biased much?), AI seems to have provided an answer, with a twist.

Solved in glorious 4k resolution, see how the battle unfolds:

Some other funny shit we found…

• One doctor appears to have used ChatGPT to help him with his patients, after he was spotted using AI while at his desk. The guy who saw him using the chatbot said he was using it to access patient notes but it remains to be seen…

• Watch this guy lose his absolute shit at ChatGPT for getting the answer wrong to a math equation. If you’re using AI to help you with your class, then maybe you’re the idiot?

• What’s worse than a passive-aggressive boss not giving you the time of day? That very same passive-aggressive boss is using AI to respond to a fairly simple email.

• The baby podcast clips are back. Sorry. But this time, it’s actually Joe Rogan and Theo Von as toddlers shooting their shit while probably shitting in their pants. This craze has to die out soon, surely?

That’s us done and dusted for another week.

Thank you for reading our latest newsletter, as always. We have a blast writing it but if we can improve (I’m sure we can’t) let us know by getting in touch. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Sam, Grant, Mike and The Big Machines team.