Relevant AI news in June 2025
What you need to know from last month in AI
The AI industry is finally slowing down, just kidding, it’s moving faster than ever. Let’s make sure to cover the important stories of June 2025…
Midjourney released its first Video model, only one week after being sued by Disney and Universal for allowing its AI generated images on their IP. Video is getting amazing, with Google’s VEO 3 as the front runner (as it includes audio too). In other image/video generation projects, Topaz Labs released Bloom which can actually “enhance” an image by 8x without losing details. ManusAI surprisingly shifted from machine use to Video generation. Luma AI partnered with Modem to build a Dream recorder to change dreams to videos. HeyGen allowed people to copy voices. While Midjourney has been making advances, it’s hard to compete with Google’s Imagen 4 and OpenAI’s image generation.
ElevenLabs released a computer use product called 11ai, which is a voice assistant that can connect to your email and messages, and can take actions on your behalf. This is really where things are going so it’s nice to see a company actually try to roll something out now.
Base44 sold to Wix for $80M. It’s one of the first AI companies and biggest acquisitions from only six employees (it was going off of “one” for a while when it hit $3.5M ARR). It’s also proof that a small team leveraging AI to build something with immense value. We’ll likely see more and more small person teams hitting 7 figure ARR.
Meta “invested” $14.3B to Scale AI to hire Alexandr Wang, as well as pulling quite a few team members with it. This marks the most expensive acquihire of all time. Meta has also been making $100M offers to OpenAI research engineer stars and has successfully gotten 7 of them, and recently an internal email shows he might have gotten all the main players who created the latest models. Meanwhile, they have also taken SSI’s CEO Daniel Gross after failing to acquire the entire company from Ilya Sutskevar. Zuck also hired Nat Friedman, previous CEO of Github, by buying out their entire venture fund, which could cost Meta nother $1B. These are not small numbers, Zuck is signaling that he’s not going to take any chances to gain back the lead in this AI race.
Nvidia is building a 10k GPU cluster in Germany, putting it in competition with other cloud providers. It always had its own cloud but not at this scale yet. On the other hand, the cloud providers are also building with their own GPUs too, breaking off dependency on Nvidia. There are new build outs of Amazon’s Trainium and Google’s TPUs. As with the rest of the AI industry, everyone is starting to overlap services more and more.
Salesforce changed its terms of services to block AI products to utilize Slack data, putting companies like Glean at risk. More and more we are starting to see companies pick sides between open or closed ecosystems. We also saw Atlassian and Notion start to put their guard up as well.
Anthropic won a lawsuit on AI Copyright saying that processing data counts as fair use as long as the output is interpreting and creating unique outputs. The data under fair use includes pirated and scanned books and lawfully purchased books into digital form, but it did NOT follow laws by downloading and retaining a library of pirated books. Meta won a copyright case shortly after. Meanwhile, Claude Code, its CLI coding tool, started gaining market traction.
Google released their version of Claude Code called Gemini CLI, and they’ve made it completely free, Google isn’t messing around! The coding space is perhaps the most competitive arena right now. Cursor also raised at a whopping $9B valuation (it’s already rumored that an $18B round is near complete).
OpenAIreleased o3-pro and dropped the price of its o3 model to GPT-4o, an 80% drop! Note, o3 is very powerful but it does take time to think as it is a reasoning model. It also upgraded its voice to sound more natural. They also rolled out a suite of new Enterprise features designed to connect to your own internal docs and data. OpenAI also won a $200M Pentagon deal and appointed CPO Kevin Weil as a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Reserves, which was symbolic to him joining the Executive Innovation Corps. This also included the CTO of Meta and Palantir. OpenAI was also hit with a trademark dispute from iyO, which moved OpenAI to take down their io materials. Finally, Microsoft and OpenAI are still in negotiations on how to reduce their dependencies on each other and allow OpenAI to convert to a company that can go IPO.