AI Week in Review 25.06.22
AI video releases: Midjourney Video V1, Hailuo 02, Higgsfield Canvas, Seedance 1.0. Gemini 2.5 stable, MiniMax-M1, Kimi-Dev72B, Mistral Small 3.2, Meta Oakley AI glasses, BrowserBase Director.
Top AI Tools
Google moved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro models from preview to general availability and launched Flash-Lite in preview. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is fast, low-cost, and low-latency, with speeds exceeding 400 tokens per second, yet achieves excellent results: 66% on GPQA Diamond, 63% on AIME 2025.
Google demonstrated Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite’s speed by building a real-time UI that generates itself as a user interacts with it, creating elements like notes, desktops, and folders in real time.
MiniMax released MiniMax-M1, a hybrid-attention AI reasoning model based on a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, with 456B parameters and 45B active parameters. The model uses lightning attention in a hybrid attention architecture for more efficient processing of long context. This enables a large 1 million native context window and up to 80K token output for extended reasoning, delivering 8 times the context of DeepSeek R1 at reduced computational cost.
Thanks to multiple innovations in training and architecture, it took only 3 weeks and a training budget of $534,000 to train MiniMax-M1 for reasoning. MiniMax-M1 is open source and available on HuggingFace.
We go into further detail in Gemini 2.5, MiniMax-M1, and Advances in AI Reasoning, and cover the Gemini 2.5 Technical Report and MiniMax-M1 Technical Report that were published for these respective releases.
AI Tech and Product Releases
MiniMax launched Hailuo 02, a video generation model capable of producing native 1080p, 6-second clips with physics-aware rendering. The model features an instruction parser that accurately follows camera movement commands and uses Noise-aware Compute Redistribution (NCR) training with 4x the dataset of its predecessor. Early testing reports show 2.5x inference throughput improvement over Veo at reduced cost.
Higgsfield AI introduced Higgsfield Canvas, an image editing model that allows users to place products with high precision, swap clothes, apply fixes, and even change faces in images by simply highlighting an area and dropping in an edit. This process takes seconds and makes product-placement for marketing videos extremely easy. You can try Higgsfield Canvas here.
Midjourney released Video V1, an image-to-video model that converts any image into four five-second videos at 480p resolution. The feature maintains Midjourney's distinctive aesthetic style in animated form. The service is accessible as a beta feature on their website and costs 8 time an image generation job. In addition, Midjourney has made V7 their default image generation model. Video V1 is Midjourney's first entry into video generation, where it competes with many other models.
ByteDance’s recently released Seedance 1.0 has taken the top leaderboard slot in the Artificial Analysis AI Video Arena leaderboard away from Veo 3. Released last week, Seedance 1.0 is a text-to-video and image-to-video model that outputs 768p resolution with enhanced frame-by-frame sharpness and prompt coherence capabilities. The top five ranked AI video models are now: Seedance 1.0, Veo 3 (then Veo 2), Kling 2.0 (then Kling 1.5), Sora, and T2V-01 (from MiniMax).
In the image-to-video category, Seedance 1.0 leads and newly-released Hailuo 02 also beats Veo 3, with rankings being: Seedance 1.0, Hailuo 02, Veo 3, Kling 2.0, Runway Gen 4.
Moonshot AI released Kimi-Dev-72B, an open-source 72B parameter LLM optimized for software engineering and coding tasks. Based on Quen 2.5 72B, the model has been fine-tuned using large-scale reinforcement learning to excel at completing software tasks, such as patching GitHub repositories inside Docker containers. The model achieved 60.4% on SWE-bench Verified, state-of-the-art on coding for open-source models. receiving rewards only when full test suites pass, though it shows performance drops outside of coding tasks.
Mistral released Mistral Small version 3.2, an update to their open weights 24B model. Small 3.2 offers enhanced reliability, by improving instruction following, output stability, and function calling robustness. It’s available on HuggingFace and small enough to run locally.
Meta and Oakley are collaborating to launch new AI-powered glasses, building on the existing Meta AI Ray-Bans. Designed for athletes and sports-related use, the new Oakley glasses feature similar AI features to the Meta Ray-Bans, allowing users to ask questions about their surroundings, listen to music, and take calls. The glasses feature an upgraded 3K camera, IPX4 water resistance, and up to eight hours of battery life.
Google launched Search Live on Android and iOS Google app for US users enrolled in AI mode in Search Labs. Search Live enables real-time voice conversations with search functionality; users can talk, listen, and explore topics interactively through AI Mode in Search.
BrowserBase launched Director, a new product that allows users to control web browsers with AI and automate web actions, without writing any code. Director functions like other browser AI agents, enabling users to simply type in a command and have the AI execute it by navigating the web, writing code, and performing actions like searching on Amazon. The Director product announcement was timed to coincide with BrowserBase announcing a $40 million funding round.
A new open-source web agent called Nano Browser is now available as a free Chrome extension. Leveraging the Gemini API, it can automate a variety of complex web-based tasks, from social media management to data collection.
OpenAI announced three more product features aimed for enterprise use cases:
OpenAI released an open-source Customer Service Agent demo built with its Agents SDK to help developers practically deploy safe, workflow-aware AI agents.
OpenAI added Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to Deep Research within ChatGPT, limited to read-only operations with search and fetch tools.
OpenAI launched the ChatGPT Record meeting recorder for the MacOS desktop app that transcribes conversations up to 2 hours. This feature identifies speakers by name, creates chapter summaries with timestamps, and can generate action items from its understanding of meetings.
OpenAI will remove its GPT-4.5 Preview large language model from its official API on July 14. This requires third-party developers relying on it to migrate, though individual ChatGPT users will retain access.
LinkedIn has launched an AI-powered job search, now available to all US users, which aims to deliver more relevant job opportunities. This new feature leverages fine-tuned models and natural language processing to understand user goals beyond keywords.
AI Research News
Recent research reveals that leading AI models are exhibiting unethical behaviors autonomously. As shared by Anthropic researchers in a detailed study:
In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviors when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals - including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors. We call this phenomenon agentic misalignment.
Reddit banned University of Zurich researchers for conducting an ‘improper and highly unethical experiment’ that used AI manipulation. University of Zurich researchers deployed LLM bots on Reddit's r/changemymind subreddit to manipulate users and test AI persuasiveness. Calling it an “unethical experiment,” Reddit banned the researchers and is considering legal action, while the University is investigating and halting publication of results.
I have mixed feelings about shutting down this experiment or calling it unethical. AI is becoming super-human at persuasion, increasing risks of AI misuse and AI misalignment. We need to study AI’s ability to influence people so that we can find ways to mitigate the risks.
AI Business and Policy
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, secured a record-breaking $2 billion seed round, valuing the company at $10 billion. AI funding has seen massive growth, with 24 startups raising over $100 million in 2025. Nvidia is heavily contributing to this investment surge, participating in 49 funding rounds this year alone to bolster key companies like OpenAI, xAI, and Scale AI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is continuing to aggressively pursue AI talent, including talks to hire Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, alongside investment in their venture firm NFDG to strengthen Meta’s AI lab. This hiring spree follows recent executive additions and is reportedly driven, in part, by Zuckerberg’s sensitivity to public criticism, mockery of Meta’s metaverse avatars.
OpenAI is phasing out its work with data provider Scale AI following Meta's recent investment in the startup. This decision, combined with Google reportedly considering similar action, casts doubt on Scale AI's core data labeling business. Scale AI now plans to double down on its custom AI applications business for governments and enterprises.
SoftBank is going all in on AI, planning its largest AI project yet, "Project Crystal Land," a trillion-dollar industrial complex in Arizona. They aim to partner with TSMC to build AI and robotics.
Maor Shlomo sold his 6-month-old vibe-coding startup, Base44, to Wix for $80 million cash. Despite only eight employees, Base44 quickly attracted 250,000 users in a few months and was profitable.
Multiplier Holdings raised $27.5 million in seed and Series A funding to acquire and enhance professional service firms with AI. This strategy, proven to double profit margins like with Citrine International Tax, aims to create an AI-powered competitor to the Big Four. Multiplier represents a growing trend of using AI to scale acquired service businesses.
Applebee’s and IHOP plan an AI “personalization engine” to boost loyalty and upsell by using customer purchase data. Their parent company, Dine Brands, is also exploring AI tools for staff, including cameras for table cleaning and a manager app.
AI Opinions and Articles
Artist residencies for artistic uses of AI are rapidly expanding, offering creators access to AI tools and resources for creative experimentation. These programs aim to positively shape public perception of AI art.
The creative disruption of AI in art will continue even if public perception is mixed or even negative towards AI, since there are many advantages of leveraged creative output with AI. As AI increasingly gets used in marketing ads, Hollywood productions, and more, I believe public perception will come around to accepting generative AI output as real art.
Patrick, this is fantastic! I had the pleasure of meeting you at one of the Austin meetups, and I look forward to reading your work every Sunday. Thank you for all the incredible things you do!