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🦹‍♂️OpenAI Said “Let’s Not Be the Villain”

Along with: Gemini 2.5 Pro gets an update ahead of I/O

Hey đź‘‹

This week, OpenAI basically looked in the mirror and said, “Let’s not be the villain.”

They’ve handed more power back to their nonprofit arm and made their for-profit side legally responsible for serving the public good- not just chasing cash. In a world where most tech giants double down on profits, this move raised eyebrows… and maybe expectations.

Let’s see who else made bold moves this week 👇

What would be the format? Every week, we will break the newsletter into the following sections:

  • The Input - All about recent developments in AI

  • The Tools - Interesting finds and launches

  • The Algorithm - Resources for learning

  • The Output - Our reflection

Table of Contents

Just ahead of I/O, Google dropped a preview update to Gemini 2.5 Pro focused entirely on making developers’ lives easier and their code better. From smarter UI generation to transforming YouTube videos into working apps, it’s clear Gemini is aiming to own the coding arena.

What’s New:

  • Web Dev-Ready: Gemini now ranks #1 on the WebDev Arena leaderboard, with big upgrades in UI building, code editing, and following visual design patterns.

  • Code from Video: One standout trick? It can turn a YouTube tutorial into a working app, thanks to better video understanding and multimodal reasoning.

  • Cleaner Function Calls: Fewer hallucinated functions, more reliable execution, a big win for anyone building agent workflows or tools on top.

  • Available Now: You can try the preview version today in Google AI Studio, or via Vertex AI if you're on the enterprise side. It’s a developer-first update, shipped early to get feedback before the I/O spotlight.

The full I/O show is still coming, but this preview gives devs a head start and a solid reason to take Gemini seriously. (source)

Mistral just dropped Medium 3, the latest in its “Medium” series and it’s a clear step up. Compared to earlier versions, it’s more powerful, now multimodal, and tuned specifically for business use cases. Think Claude-level reasoning at a fraction of the cost.

What’s New:

Top-Tier Performance, Low Cost: Medium 3 scores over 90% of Claude Sonnet 3.7’s benchmark numbers -  but costs just $0.40 per million input tokens and $2 per million output. That's a serious value for enterprise-scale usage.

Now Multimodal: Medium 3 can now handle both text and images, making it useful for tasks like image captioning, visual Q&A, and document analysis, a first for the Medium series.

Flexible Deployment: Use it however you want: on-prem, in your VPC, or hybrid. Great for teams with sensitive data or strict infrastructure needs.

Ecosystem-Ready: Already available on Mistral’s API and Amazon SageMaker, with Google Vertex AI, IBM Watsonx, and Azure AI Foundry coming soon.

Medium 3 shows Mistral’s serious play for the enterprise AI market -  solid reasoning, flexible setups, and pricing that won’t make your CFO nervous. (source)

OpenAI is changing up how it’s structured. It’s turning its for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation -  which means it can still make money, but has to prioritize public good too. The nonprofit side will now officially stay in control.

What’s New:

  • Public Benefit Corporation (PBC): The for-profit part of OpenAI is becoming a PBC -  it’ll still take investments and build products, but with a legal responsibility to do what’s best for society, not just shareholders.

  • Nonprofit Takes the Lead: The nonprofit will now own the majority and have final say on big decisions. This move locks in OpenAI’s original mission: building safe AI that benefits everyone.

  • Sam Altman’s Letter: Altman shared an open letter saying this change is about staying focused on the long-term -  keeping AGI safe, useful, and aligned with human values. He also admitted we’re still figuring out how to do that.

OpenAI is growing fast, and so are the concerns. This restructure is their way of showing they’re serious about safety and not just chasing profit. (source)

🦜Nvidia Releases Open-Source Speech Recognition Model Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2

NVIDIA just dropped a new automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that’s turning heads: Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2. It’s a 600M parameter model that’s already topping Hugging Face’s Open ASR leaderboard and it’s fully open-source under CC-BY-4.0.

What’s New:

  • Super Fast Transcription: Parakeet transcribes an hour of audio in just over a second on an A100 GPU - that’s faster than Whisper Large v3 and most commercial ASR tools.

  • Surprisingly Accurate: Despite being lightweight, it hits a 6.05% average word error rate across major benchmarks like LibriSpeech, TED-LIUM, and VoxPopuli.

  • Dev-Ready Features: Supports punctuation, capitalization, and word-level timestamps out of the box. Easy to run using NVIDIA’s NeMo toolkit or directly on Hugging Face. 👉 Try the demo

  • Handles Long Audio Too:
    Not fully streaming-ready yet, but it can transcribe long clips (up to 24 minutes) in one go. Chunked inference scripts are also available.

Parakeet shows you don’t need billions of parameters to build a top-tier speech model -  it’s fast, open, and easy to plug into real-world tools. (source)

Windsurf’s Wave 8 update is here (and still rolling out), and it’s all about giving teams more say in how AI fits into their workflows from code reviews to custom rules.

What’s New:

  • Custom Workflows & Rules: You can now build reusable rulebooks that trigger in Cascade via slash commands or attach logic to specific files using a .windsurf/rules file. It’s a simple way to bake best practices directly into how your team works, no extra process meetings required.

  • Smarter Cascade: Run multiple conversations at once (like browser tabs), and manage plugins with a new UI panel for installing and customizing MCP tools.

  • Pull Request Review Automation: A new GitHub app (beta) automatically edits pull request titles and descriptions based on your own rules making reviews cleaner and more consistent.

  • Docs as Knowledge Base: Connect Google Docs directly to Windsurf, letting Cascade reference your team’s internal docs for debugging, onboarding, or process help.

  • Deploy & Share: Push internal tools to your company’s Netlify account and share successful Cascade sessions across your team. This helps document decisions, speed up delivery, and keep everyone on the same page.

  • Admin & Access: Get fresh analytics on how AI is helping your team (like lines suggested vs. accepted), and add SSO and access controls starting at $10/user/month.

With rumors swirling about OpenAI taking interest, Wave 8 feels like Windsurf’s way of showing it’s ready for the big leagues with or without a new logo. 

FutureHouse, the nonprofit backed by Eric Schmidt, just dropped a new platform full of AI agents built to speed up scientific discovery. The goal? Automate the grunt work of research , reading papers, planning experiments, and connecting dots across datasets -  all through one clean web interface or API.

What’s New:

Four Agents, Four Superpowers:

  • Crow handles general scholarly Q&A and API-powered literature searches.

  • Falcon does deep-dive reviews using sources like OpenTargets.

  • Owl answers the age-old research question: “Has anyone done this before?”

  • Phoenix (experimental) supports chemistry tasks like lab planning and compound analysis, built on ChemCrow.

Smarter Than Your Average Lit Review: These agents reportedly outperform human researchers in benchmark tasks like literature retrieval and synthesis and they show their reasoning steps so you can trace how they got there.

Access: Use it via platform.futurehouse.org or connect directly through their public API -  no waitlist, no installation needed.

Indian startup Sarvam AI has released Bulbul-v2, a next-gen text-to-speech (TTS) model built specifically for 11 Indian languages, delivering authentic accents, real-time synthesis, and fine-grained voice control.

What’s New:

  • Local Languages, Local Sound: Bulbul V2 supports Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia, and more with native accents and natural-sounding voices.

  • Make the Voice Yours: You can change pitch, speed, and volume to match your brand or app’s vibe.

  • Fast Enough for Live Use: It responds in under half a second, so it’s perfect for chatbots, voice assistants, and learning apps.

  • Flexible Audio Quality: Choose from different audio quality levels depending on what you need -  from phone bots to high-quality voiceovers.

  • Understands Mixed Text: It handles tricky inputs like numbers, dates, and even sentences that mix English and Indian languages.

Bulbul V2 is available now through Sarvam’s API - built in India, for India, and ready to voice your next app. (source)

I checked out Notis this week -  a voice-powered productivity assistant that turns your ideas into structured output, so you can work without even opening your laptop.

What It Does
Notis takes your voice notes, texts, or forwarded content and transforms them into tasks, meeting minutes, drafts, or organized notes -  all synced with Notion (minus the usual complexity). It works directly from your favorite messaging apps like WhatsApp, acting like an on-the-go second brain.

How to Use It:

  • Step 1: Create a free Notis account and enter your WhatsApp number.

  • Step 2: Duplicate this Notion template into your workspace: Notion AI Starter Template.

  • Step 3: Drag and drop your template into the Notis Second Brain System page and ask Notis to sync your databases.

  • Anthropic launches 'AI for Science' Program under which it is offering free API credits to researchers tackling high-impact scientific challenges, especially in biology and life sciences. The goal? Accelerate discovery using advanced AI tools to analyze data, design experiments, and unlock new insights faster than ever.

  • Andrew Ng spotlights how AI tools like Kira Learning are helping non-CS teachers bring coding into K-12 classrooms. From auto-grading to personalized debugging help, AI is stepping in to fill the CS teacher gap and make computer science education more accessible for all.

  • This podcast episode by 9To5Mac compares three AI voice assistants – Siri, ChatGPT, and Perplexity – on an iPhone, focusing on their free versions. The host tests their knowledge, real-world navigation, research and summarization capabilities, problem-solving skills, complex reasoning, and app integrations.

  • Last week, we launched more free AI & data courses to help you sharpen your technical skills and explore powerful tools in practice- 

    • Exploring OpenAI o3 and o4-mini – Get a full walkthrough of OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models. Learn how to compare capabilities, understand performance benchmarks, and integrate them into your apps using APIs. Ideal for devs and AI tinkerers looking to work confidently with the latest LLMs.

    • Data Analysis with Apache Hive – Dive into big data with this hands-on Hive course. Learn to write HiveQL queries, manage databases, and analyze large datasets with a SQL-like interface- perfect for anyone working with distributed data systems.

If this week had a mood, it’d be “professional glow-up.”

The same AI players that once showed off with cool demos are now quietly sliding into your workflows - polished, production-ready, and enterprise-approved. Whether it’s Gemini coding from videos, Mistral delivering top-tier reasoning at startup prices, or Sarvam making AI voices sound truly local, one thing’s clear: the experimentation phase is over.

Now it’s all about showing up -  and scaling up.

Until next week đź‘‹

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