AI news and funding updates from the last 24 hours(23nd April 2025):

✅ OpenAI

- Chrome acquisition interest: At Google’s antitrust trial, an OpenAI executive testified the company would buy Google Chrome if forced divestiture occurs, underscoring the browser’s strategic value citeturn17search0.

- Washington Post partnership: Launched a content deal to have ChatGPT summarize and link to Post reporting, expanding OpenAI’s media collaborations to over 20 partners citeturn9news10.

- Image API (gpt-image-1): Made its advanced multimodal image-generation model available to developers via the new Images API, integrated into Adobe Firefly, Figma, and soon Canva and Instacart citeturn18news10.

- GPT-4.1 model release: Debuted GPT-4.1 (and smaller variants), boasting major gains in coding (21%↑ over GPT-4o), instruction following, and a 1-million-token context window citeturn18search0.

✅ Google

- Antitrust trial remedies: DOJ seeks remedies such as selling Chrome and ending default-search deals; Google warns divestiture risks security, while DOJ highlights AI’s synergy with search dominance citeturn17news7.

- Gemini usage stats: Internal data revealed Gemini had 350 million monthly active users in March—up from 9 million daily in October—though it still trails ChatGPT (≈600 million MAU) and Meta AI (≈500 million)

✅ BMW & DeepSeek

- BMW: Will integrate Chinese AI provider DeepSeek’s technology into vehicles sold in China later this year, highlighting the shift toward smart cockpit features.

- DeepSeek: Its AI goes beyond automotive—used in legal drafting and healthcare—and it plans to launch the next-gen R2 model soon.

✅ Descript

- Agentic video editor: Introduced an “AI co-editor” that applies judgment and reasoning to video tasks—scriptwriting, editing, audio fixes, and multilingual versions—akin to a “vibecoding” tool.

✅ LTIMindtree

- Q4 FY25 results: Reported modest profit/revenue growth; dollar revenue dipped slightly, but AI-led order inflows and a Google partnership for Agentic AI underpinned performance.

✅ Ziroh Labs

- Kompact AI: Launched a platform to run large language models efficiently on CPUs (no compression needed), optimizing the math core to maintain quality and speed; IIT Madras partnership boosted model support.

✅ Sand AI

- Magi-1 video model: Released an openly licensed AI for video generation; hosted version censors politically sensitive content (e.g., Xi Jinping, Tiananmen Square) to comply with Chinese regulations.

✅ Anysphere

- Rejected offers: The maker of the Cursor coding assistant turned down acquisition approaches (including from OpenAI) and is now exploring other funding, while OpenAI pursues Windsurf for ~$3 billion.

✅ xAI

- Grok Vision: Added smartphone-camera image analysis, multilingual audio, and real-time search to its Grok chatbot on iOS; available in Voice Mode for Android SuperGrok subscribers.

✅ Noxtua

- €80.7 M Series B: Formerly Xayn, raised a round led by C.H. Beck to build a sovereign European legal AI (“Beck-Noxtua”) trained on German law, hosted on EU cloud infrastructure.

✅ Endor Labs

- $93 M Series B: Pivoted from open-source security to securing AI-generated code, integrating with tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, and protecting millions of applications with over 1 M weekly scans.

✅ Fireflies.ai

- 200+ mini apps: Released domain-specific “mini apps” (e.g., BANT Sales, Agent Performance Feedback) to automatically extract actionable insights from meeting transcripts, with integrations into Salesforce, Slack.

✅ TSMC

- A14 manufacturing & System on Wafer-X: Unveiled 2028 chip tech promising 15% faster performance or 30% lower power vs. N2, plus wafer-scale integration of ≥16 chips and memory for AI workloads; new Arizona fabs planned.

✅ Meta

- Ray-Ban smart glasses: Expanded its Meta AI assistant to seven more EU countries (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland), adding voice Q&A, live translation, and a visual assistant feature.