The Sequence Radar #880: Last Week in AI: A $60B Cursor Deal, Google's Brain Drain, and Midjourney's Body Scanner
A week of really unexpected turns in the AI market.
TL;DR
- SpaceX acquired AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock to strengthen its xAI division.
- Google experienced a "brain drain" as key AI researchers Noam Shazeer and John Jumper left for OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively.
- Midjourney announced a "Midjourney Medical" initiative and a prototype ultrasonic CT scanner for full-body imaging.
- The article suggests a trend of AI leaking out of traditional models and APIs into hardware, biology, and physical product companies.
- LifeSciBench was introduced to evaluate language models on realistic, expert-level tasks in life sciences.
- FastContext aims to improve coding agents by separating repository exploration from code solving.
- Qwen-RobotWorld presents a language-conditioned video world model for embodied intelligence.
- Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL) is proposed to correct structural failures in flow- and score-matching models.
- Several AI companies announced significant funding rounds, including Baseten, General Intuition, Odyssey, Pramaana Labs, and Sarvam.