The most important news pieces from the AI world are here for you, whether you’re an AI enthusiast or just wish to keep an eye on what’s going on.
Focus Topic: When cheaper models become the real AI disruption
This week, the AI race looks less like a competition over who has the smartest model and more like a competition over who can make powerful AI cheap enough to use everywhere.
Claude Opus 4.8 raised the quality bar again, especially in coding, agentic tasks and demanding knowledge work. But at the same time, DeepSeek cut the price of its V4-Pro model by 75%, Google introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash as a 4x faster model at half the price, and Xiaomi dropped MiMo-V2.5 API prices by up to 99%. That is a very different kind of AI progress. It is not just more intelligence, but cheaper intelligence.
For companies, this changes the calculation. A year ago, advanced AI use often meant carefully choosing where to spend tokens, because the best models were expensive. Now, more teams can test AI in customer support, coding, analysis, document workflows and internal tools without every experiment becoming a budget discussion. Lower costs make AI less of a premium feature and more of a basic layer in software.
For users, this means faster tools, more AI features inside everyday products and more pressure on the big AI companies to prove why their most expensive models are worth it. The next phase of AI may not be won only by the model with the highest benchmark score, but by the one that delivers good enough intelligence at a price people and businesses can actually use every day.
LLMs & AI Models
- Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8, its strongest model yet for coding, agents and complex knowledge work.
- DeepSeek cut V4-Pro prices by 75%, making its flagship model far cheaper than closed competitors.
- Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash, described as 4x faster and available at half the previous price.
- Grok V9-Medium finished training, while Grok Build entered beta for SuperGrok and X Premium+ users.
- Xiaomi cut MiMo-V2.5 API prices by up to 99% and expanded token capacity by 5-8x.
- Perplexity Computer now works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for enterprise workflows.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot got a faster, cleaner redesign, with usage rising across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
New Tools
- Apple’s AI-Siri may be rebuilt on Google Gemini, with AI search, chat, iOS tasks and third-party agent support.
- Robinhood now lets AI agents trade stocks, rebalance portfolios and automate actions through its MCP connection.
- Meta is planning an AI pendant and new smart glasses that can sense context, remember details and support workplace use.
- YouTube will automatically label photorealistic AI videos when its systems detect significant AI-generated content.
- DuckDuckGo saw downloads rise as some users reacted against Google’s more AI-heavy search experience.
👉 Explore these tools: Robinhood Agentic Trading | YouTube AI Labels | DuckDuckGo
Other Quick Picks
- China launched digital IDs for humanoid robots, with over 28,000 robots already registered.
- Waymo deployed Ojai, a Zeekr-built robotaxi, for free rides in LA, Phoenix and San Francisco.
- DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis says AGI could arrive around 2030, but memory and world models remain gaps.
- FT reports tools can strip safeguards from open models, creating thousands of uncensored variants.
- A Stanford study found racial bias in AI hiring tools across 4M applications and 156 employers.
- Cursor says AI has more than doubled developer output, but gains are concentrated among top users.
- China now requires top AI scientists at firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek to get approval before foreign travel.
- Cognition raised over $1B at a $26B valuation as Devin adoption surged with enterprise customers.
- AI is pushing consulting firms toward outcome-based pricing instead of billing mainly by hours.
- ElevenLabs launched Music v2 and Dubbing V2, improving music generation and 90-language dubbing.
🇪🇪 AI News from Estonia
- AWS says Europe risks overregulating itself in the AI era, while Estonia still has an edge through its startup ecosystem.
- Google Cloud sees Estonia as an Eastern European innovation island and wants to grow its local presence.
- Riigi Teataja plans AI features so users can ask legal questions and get relevant laws, explanations and cases.
- Reformierakond proposed a Tallinn AI working group to simplify city services and prepare pilot projects.
- President Alar Karis says AI can strengthen cyber defence, but human judgment must remain central.
- Uptime says companies win with AI when they manage risks, limit agent permissions and keep actions logged.
- Andres Kostiv warns that poor UX helps cybercriminals, as AI tools make scam pages faster and easier to build.
🎙️ Inside Finance Podcast dropped a new episode with Gerlyn Tiigemäe, an AI practitioner, discussing May’s key AI news.
🎙️ Watch Inside Finance Podcast on YouTube and Spotify.
🎧 Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcast.
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