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OpenAI's $3 billion deal is off the table
Google hires Windsurf team for DeepMind’s agentic push
Eddie Yoon
July 11, 2025 • Read time: 4 minutes
👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Friday.
Google just made a notable move in the AI talent race, hiring Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan along with key members of the team to join DeepMind’s agentic coding efforts.
Windsurf had previously been in talks with OpenAI for a possible $3 billion acquisition.
Instead, Google reached an agreement to bring in the talent and license parts of Windsurf’s technology. The company remains independent.
As reported by CNBC, this marks another step in how aggressively top firms are staffing up for the next phase of AI development.
The agentic coding space is moving fast, and this kind of move shows how valuable domain-specific teams are becoming.
The next wave of software won’t come from prompts alone.
It will be shaped by tight collaboration between humans and autonomous agents.
The race continues.
OK let’s keep going ↓
🔥 Creative pulse
It’s already getting easier to make games with Grok 4.
Basic FPS games can now be prototyped in under 4 hours.
So what happens a year from now?
If you really want to understand the real-world impact of AI and creativity, study the gaming industry.
Most people don’t realize this, but mobile game studios have quietly been using AI for years…generating assets, ads, even playable levels.
And now, Tim Sweeney (CEO of Epic Games) just said Grok 4 feels like AGI.
Let that sink in.
Grok 4 built this first person shooter game in 4 hours 🤯.
It's major breakthrough is being able to source game assets.
Allowing anyone to now build games as a "team of one"
— Mark Gadala-Maria (@markgadala)
2:54 PM • Jul 10, 2025
Grok 4 feels like Artificial General Intelligence to me. It is clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections, but is drawing fairly deep insights on problems it hasn’t seen before, in ways I haven’t seen elsewhere. Here’s an example:
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic)
7:55 PM • Jul 10, 2025
If you’re not on X, here’s Tim’s Grok prompt.
💡 Here’s what you should know
Goldman Sachs is actively testing an AI agent
In a major Wall Street milestone, Goldman is piloting Cognition’s AI agent Devin to join its 12,000 developers.
Indeed & Glassdoor cite AI in latest layoffs
In his internal memo, CEO Hisayuki Idekoba said the layoffs were part of a broader effort to adapt to AI’s impact on the company’s products and strategy.
Moonshot AI open-sources Kimi-K2
The trillion-parameter model outperforms rivals in coding and agentic tasks.
OpenAI’s open-weight model is delayed
💰 The numbers
xAI is in talks to raise a new round at a $170–200B valuation, with Saudi PIF potentially participating.
RealSense raised $50M as an Intel spin-out focused on AI-powered 3D vision systems for robotics and autonomous platforms.
Datafy landed $20M to automate cloud storage optimization using AI, claiming up to 50% cost savings on AWS.
Meta quietly acquires voice-AI startup PlayAI (confirmed via internal memo).
🧠 Thought starters
😂 Meme of the day
Thanks for reading,
Eddie
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