🚀 Elon Musk confirms Grok 4 Launch for July 9 🚀
xAI's flagship model to livestream with enhanced capabilities

Elon Musk has officially confirmed that xAI will launch Grok 4 on July 9 at 8 PM PT via livestream on X. The announcement comes after Musk indicated the model would arrive "just after July 4th," skipping the previously promised Grok 3.5 release.

Grok 4 promises significant improvements in natural language understanding, mathematical reasoning, and coding support, with early references suggesting two variants: "grok-4-prod-mimic" for general use and "Grok 4 Code" for developers.

The model will initially support text modality with vision and image generation coming soon. Built using xAI's Colossus supercomputer with over 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, Grok 4 aims to directly compete with ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

The launch follows controversy over bias issues in previous versions, with Musk promising enhanced accuracy and "truth-seeking" capabilities in the new flagship

🎤 Vogent Launches VoiceLab in Public Beta 🎤
Ultra-fast API platform for state-of-the-art text-to-speech models

Vogent has announced the public beta launch of VoiceLab, a fast and scalable API platform providing access to cutting-edge text-to-speech models including Sesame CSM-1B, Dia, Chatterbox, and Orpheus. The platform offers sub-200ms time-to-first-token and optimized compute for real-time inference, making it suitable for voice agents and production applications. VoiceLab features zero-shot voice cloning and fine-tuning capabilities with hosting on Vogent's infrastructure.

🧠2 new Google AI tools for Mental Health Research & Treatment🧠
AI Field Guide and Research Partnership for Mental Health

Google has unveiled two new AI initiatives to support mental health organizations and advance treatment research for anxiety, depression, and psychosis. The first is a comprehensive 73-page field guide developed with Grand Challenges Canada and McKinsey Health Institute, providing practical guidance for scaling evidence-based mental health interventions using AI.

The second initiative is a multi-year research partnership between Google for Health, DeepMind, and the Wellcome Trust focused on developing better measurement and treatment methods for mental health conditions using machine learning, potentially leading to novel medications.

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🍎 Apple loses Top AI Models Executive to Meta 🍎

Apple has lost Ruoming Pang, its distinguished engineer and head of the Apple Foundation Models team, to Meta's aggressive AI talent acquisition campaign. Pang, who managed a 100-person team responsible for Apple's large language models powering Apple Intelligence features like email summaries and Genmoji, joined Apple from Google in 2021. Meta offered Pang a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year to join its new superintelligence group led by Mark Zuckerberg.

🎓 Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI fund new AI Academy for Teachers 🎓

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has announced the launch of the National Academy for AI Instruction, a $23 million initiative backed by Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI to educate teachers on safely implementing AI in classrooms. OpenAI committed $10 million over five years, Microsoft pledged $12.5 million, and Anthropic contributed $500,000 for the first year. The academy will provide workshops, online courses, and hands-on training sessions designed by AI experts and educators, starting this fall at the United Federation of Teachers' facility in Manhattan.