AI Daily News 20250624: ⚖️OpenAI scrubs 'io' over trademark clash 🗣️ElevenLabs debuts new voice assistant 👁️Reddit eyes Altman’s World ID for human verification 💰 Perplexity co-founder puts $100M toward AI research and a lot more
17:58 Share

Welcome to a new deep dive from AI Unraveled, created and produced by Etienne Newman, a senior engineer and passionate soccer dad from Canada. Remember to like and subscribe for more deep dives into the world of AI.

Today, we're diving deep into, well, an absolutely packed day of AI innovation and news from June 24th, 2025. Our source material, it's a daily chronicle of AI developments. So we've got news, cutting edge research, and even some surprising court filings. Yeah, it's quite the mix. Our mission today is really to distill the most important

Nuggets of knowledge and insight from this whirlwind of developments. We want to help you understand not just what happened, but why it matters for the bigger picture of AI's rapid evolution. We'll explore everything from heated legal battles and groundbreaking hardware, all

all the way to the profound societal impact of AI and even some insights into human thought itself. Okay, so let's jump right in then. We have to start with the big drama unfolding in the AI hardware space. OpenAI made this massive splash, right? The $6.5 billion acquisition of Joni Ives' AI hardware startup, IO. But then almost immediately, they were forced to pull all their promotional material, a blog post, a nine-minute video with Ive and Sam Maltman,

Gone. What in the world is going on here? Well, it looks like a trademark dispute and it seems pretty messy. This court order, it's tied to a complaint from a Google X spinout called IO. You might have heard of them. They're known for their AI powered earbuds, which they describe as a computer without a screen that runs apps via voice. OK. IO. Got it. Right. And the filing alleges that Sam Altman and Ives design firm Love From is

They met with I/O back in 2022 and then met again just before the I/O announcement earlier this spring. Now, OpenAI, for their part, they're calling the complaint utterly baseless and they insist the acquisition is still on track. Hmm. Utterly baseless. But this isn't just about a name, is it? I mean, the court filings seem to suggest something more strategic brewing. Well, yeah. It mentions love from employees allegedly purchasing I/O devices and then boom, I/O appears with a name that's, well, nearly identical.

This feels less like a simple mistake and more like, I don't know, a very aggressive maneuver in a super competitive landscape. Exactly. What's really insightful here, I think, is that this trademark battle, it isn't just about a name. It sort of reveals how established tech giants might be, maybe.

weaponizing intellectual property law against ambitious startups in this AI hardware race. It's like a land grab for the future right down to the naming conventions. And it could potentially slow innovation for everyone involved if these kinds of disputes become the norm. It really shows the cutthroat nature of this space. Right. Cutthroat is the word. And speaking of that intense competition, these court filings also apparently revealed something else.

that OpenAI and Joni Ives design firm were prototyping an AI powered consumer device long before their collaboration ever became public. That's right. So it seems the race to create the iPhone of AI is truly accelerating. It's not just talk anymore. Absolutely. It's not just some theoretical ambition now, is it?

We're seeing tangible evidence of companies sinking immense resources into building these next-gen devices. This push for integrated AI hardware, it could fundamentally reshape how we interact with artificial intelligence, moving it beyond just screens and apps. And, okay, beyond the devices themselves, the very infrastructure-powering AI is also seeing immense innovation.

We're hearing about a new wave of wafer-scale compute accelerators. Now, for those of us less familiar, what exactly are these and why are they such a big deal? Okay, think of it this way. Normally, you take a silicon wafer and cut it into lots of individual chips, right?

With these wafer-scale compute accelerators, the entire silicon wafer acts as one giant super-fast processor. This drastically boosts performance for things like AI training and inference because it cuts down on the communication bottlenecks between chips. Ah, okay. So less travel time for the data, basically. Exactly. It could fundamentally reshape the entire AI hardware stack.

And that puts immense pressure on established players like, say, NVIDIA as startups race to innovate right down at the silicon level. It's a pretty foundational shift. Wow. But it's not just about silicon and devices. It's also about the minds building them. The AI talent chase is heating up in a huge way, almost, I mean, almost to an absurd degree. I'm hearing that big tech giants like Apple and Meta are reportedly going head to head for top talent from startups like Proposal.

perplexity. And the offers for engineers are hitting, what was it, staggering $100 million? Yeah, $100 million. For one engineer. It's truly remarkable, isn't it? It just speaks volumes about the incredible value placed on top-tier AI engineering talent right now. These intense talent wars and these massive investments like Meta's reported $14.3 billion bet on scale AI.

And, you know, they also launched those new $399 smart glasses for pro athletes. It all underscores just how critical it is for these companies to close the AI gap with leaders like OpenAI and Google. It's a strategic imperative. They have to acquire the best minds. It really highlights the stake.

Now, for those of you out there listening, maybe you're finding these discussions about hardware and industry shifts really fascinating. Perhaps you're even considering a career in this rapidly evolving field, or maybe you're looking to boost your existing one. I want to quickly mention that there are fantastic resources available for you. Indeed. Gaining a strong, certified foundation in AI is becoming, well, pretty essential.

For anyone looking to validate their skills and expertise, Etienne Newman has actually created a series of highly practical study guides. That's right. These include books like the Azure AI Engineer Associate, the Google Cloud Generative AI Leader Certification, AWS Certified AI Practitioner Study Guide, Azure

Azure AI Fundamentals, and also the Google Machine Learning Certification. They're all designed specifically to help you certify at AI and boost your career. And you can find them at DJAMGateTech.com. We'll make sure to put those links directly in the show notes for you. Okay, so now let's maybe shift gears, moving from the cutthroat world of industry to maybe a more cautionary tale. But it's one that raises really crucial questions about AI's impact on how we think.

specifically how young people think. There's this MIT study suggesting chat GPT may be doing more harm than good for cognitive development, especially for younger users. The study itself sounds quite revealing. It really is. So researchers monitored 20 college students. They used EEG brain scans, you know those measure electrical activity in the brain. They watched them during SAT style essay writing and they had three groups. One used only their brain, one used Google search, and one used chat GPT. Okay, makes sense. And

And the findings for the chat GPT group were pretty stark.

By the third round of essays, these students were mostly just pasting prompts in and making really superficial edits. They spent significantly less time actually writing. Their brain activity dropped in areas tied to attention, memory, and creative thinking. And their essays were even described by the researchers as soulless. Soulless. Yeah. And what's more, most of them couldn't even really recall what they'd written afterwards. So it's like they outsourced their thinking so completely that their brains just...

disengaged. Is that the idea? That seems to be the implication. That's quite a contrast to the other groups, the brain only and Google search groups. They maintain engagement and cognitive activity. Right. They did. The major worry from the researchers was just how quickly the ChatGPT users stopped thinking for themselves. They showed a clear decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex. That's the brain region responsible for complex reasoning, decision making, planning. It's a profound concern.

This study is incredibly relevant as schools are grappling with how to integrate AI into education, right? Sometimes without fully understanding the long-term cognitive consequences of widespread adoption. The deeper insight here isn't just, you know, that students might cheat. That's part of it. But it's that outsourcing cognitive work could fundamentally impact the development of critical thinking and memory skills, especially in the

especially in developing minds. It really makes you question what we're trading for that convenience. Yeah, it absolutely does. And on a related ethical note, we're seeing continued concerns around copyright. This seems to keep coming up. Meta-Islama AI has been accused of memorizing vast portions of copyrighted works, including apparently nearly the full text of Harry Potter.

How serious is this issue and what does it mean for content creators? Well, look, this isn't a brand new issue in the world of large language models. We've heard similar things before. But the scale of it, like

allegedly memorizing an entire popular book that certainly renews the legal and ethical concerns. Concerns about how these foundational AI models are trained and the massive, often copyrighted data sets they consume. It's a very complex legal area. It has major implications for content creators, obviously, and for the very concept of intellectual property in the age of AI. It really challenges the existing framework. It feels like the law is struggling to keep up. And then there's this other pervasive challenge.

Discerning human from machine online. This is a concern I think many of us share. You read something, you interact, and you wonder, is this real? Now, Reddit is reportedly negotiating with Sam Altman's other company, Tools for Humanity. They're talking about integrating its iris scanning world ID orb system. Ah, the orb. Yes. Explain the system again. It sounds tense. It is a bid. It offers optional verification through encrypted iris scans.

The idea is that it fragments your biometric data globally, so it's not stored in one place, and it provides proof of humanity while supposedly preserving anonymity. You get a verified human status, but not necessarily tied to your real name online. And this comes, as you mentioned, as Redis CEO Steve Huffman has hinted at pretty aggressive efforts to deter the flood of AI accounts on the platform. So this directly tackles that dead internet theory people talk about. Exactly. That's the idea. The theory that, you know,

A significant portion of online content and interactions is now generated by AI or bots, not actual humans. And the very real concern about social media just being overrun with AI bots. Now, WorldID's iris scanning has definitely been met with skepticism in the past, big privacy concerns.

But the need for robust human verification is becoming incredibly pressing. You see platforms struggling with this everywhere. This potential partnership, if it happens, could position Reddit as the first major U.S. social platform to test biometric verification at this kind of scale. It would be a significant step in battling AI bot proliferation and trying to ensure that who you're talking to online is actually verified.

You know, human. Yeah. Bold move. Definitely a bold move. We'll have to see how that plays out. Now, for those of you listening who find these discussions about AI's societal impact and its integration into our daily lives fascinating, maybe you're inspired to start building your own AI project or perhaps just explore the technical foundations behind them. While Etienne Newman has put together another incredible resource for you. Yes, it's called the AI Unraveled Builders Toolkit.

And it's really designed to help you get hands-on with AI. It includes a whole series of AI tutorials in PDF format, comprehensive AI and machine learning certification guides, and even AI tutorials in audio and video formats too. It's truly a fantastic resource to start building with AI. Doesn't matter what your current skill level is. You can find more information about the AI Unraveled Builder's Toolkit and, of course, those certification books we mentioned earlier, all at djumgist.com. As always, links are in our show notes for easy access.

Okay, so amidst all the legal battles and ethical dilemmas, AI is also making incredible strides for good. We should definitely talk about that too. Let's look at a really powerful application in healthcare.

Researchers have developed an AI model that can predict which antidepressant is most likely to work for a specific patient. The current challenge, as many of us know or know someone who's experienced it, is that finding the right medication is tough. Too many people with depression don't get better on their first try, leading to months or even years of trial and error and just prolonged suffering. How does this new model change that?

Well, it's potentially a game changer, precisely because it works with existing, widely available data. That's the key here. The model was trained on information from over 9,000 adults.

but it only uses standard clinical and demographic information things doctors already collect. No expensive genetic tests or brain scans required. This is practical. Very practical. In testing, it boosted average remission rates from 43% to 54%. Now, what's truly insightful here isn't just the 11% boost, though that's significant.

It's how this pragmatic AI, using existing data, seems to outperform some of those theoretical precision medicine approaches that require specialized, expensive diagnostics. It's a crucial lesson, I think, for AI development in general. Sometimes simpler, scalable solutions that work with what's already there can have the greatest real-world impact. You could spare patients months of ineffective treatments and get them on a path to recovery much faster. That's incredibly promising. From potentially life-saving applications to everyday convenience,

Let's talk about voice assistants. They seem to be getting smarter. Eleven Labs, who are already known for their impressive speech models, right? They've debuted a new experimental alpha voice assistant. That's right. It integrates with platforms like Perplexity, Linear, Slack, Notion, allows users to manage tasks just through voice commands, and it even offers like 5,000 plus voice options and voice cloning. Yeah, the voice cloning is pretty advanced.

It signals a significant leap in usability and capability for voice assistants, I think. Eleven Labs already has some of the strongest, most natural-sounding speech models on the market. So pairing them with advanced tooling and data access could truly showcase how voice assistants can be far more useful and capable than the older versions like Siri that we're used to.

It definitely raises the bar for competitors like Apple, Google, OpenAI. They have to keep up. And we're already seeing this, actually. Amazon's generative AI-powered Alexa Plus C that's now available to over a million users, apparently. And it offers much more natural conversation, deeper smart home integration, the future of voice interaction. It feels a lot closer now. It really does. And for anyone who uses AI regularly, getting the best output often comes down to one crucial thing, the prompt.

We've all probably struggled with getting the AI to understand exactly what we want. It can be frustrating. But there's a new development that might make this much easier. OpenAI Playground has a new automatic prompt optimization tool. Oh, this is interesting. Yeah, this is a huge win for accessibility. So users can now write a basic system message like what they want the AI to do. Then they click optimize, restart.

review the suggestions, and save the improved version for better structure and clarity. So it helps you write better prompts, essentially. Exactly. As AI models become more sophisticated, the quality of your prompt becomes paramount. It often determines the quality of the output you get back. This tool kind of democratizes efficient prompt engineering.

It allows more users to achieve high performance AI outputs without needing deep technical expertise in prompt crafting. Take some of the guesswork out. That sounds incredibly useful. Okay. Okay, finally, let's talk about a significant investment in the future of AI research itself. And it's coming from a maybe unexpected corner. Andy Kamwinski, he's a co-founder of Databricks and also Perplexity AI.

He's launching a new nonprofit AI research initiative with $100 million of his own money. It's called the LOD Institute. Right. And it's structured a bit differently. How so? It's not a traditional lab. No, not exactly. It's more like a fund that backs independent research projects. It's starting with a new AI systems lab at UC Berkeley. And it will fund two types of projects. Slingshots, which are like early stage ideas, exploratory work.

And moonshots, which are aimed at large scale impact in areas like health care, civic discourse, things like that. OK, so funding external research rather than building an internal team. Precisely. And what's truly fascinating here, I think, is the philosophy behind it. It offers a crucial alternative route for AI research.

one that funds academic talent, promotes open inquiry, and tries to blend nonprofit values with practical impact. It explicitly aims to direct research toward long-term social benefit.

Trying to avoid some of the commercial first incentives that have arguably blurred the mission of many current AI research groups, even those that started as nonprofits. It's a very refreshing approach to funding foundational AI work. It really is. Wow. What an incredible deep dive today. We've covered so much ground, the rapid fire innovations, the intense industry competition, the crucial applications.

ethical debates and those truly inspiring applications of AI for good. It's just so clear that AI is not just changing, but accelerating at an unprecedented pace. It's impacting nearly every facet of our lives. Indeed. The sheer breadth of these developments from just one day really underscores the importance of staying informed.

And critically evaluating how AI integrates into our lives from how we think to how we heal, how we connect online. The landscape is shifting almost daily and knowing what to focus on, what really matters is key. Absolutely. And if you're feeling inspired by all this, if you want to delve even deeper into the world of AI, whether it's through understanding the underlying technology or maybe even building your own applications. Remember those fantastic resources from Etienne Newman we mentioned?

The AI certification prep books for Azure AI Engineer Associate, Google Cloud Generative AI Leader Certification, AWS Certified AI Practitioner Study Guide, Azure AI Fundamentals, and Google Machine Learning Certification, they're all available at djamtech.com. And don't forget that comprehensive AI Unraveled Builder's Toolkit. It includes AI tutorials, certification guides, audio-video resources, everything to help you start building with AI.

All those links are, of course, in our show notes for easy access. So after processing all of that today, what stands out to you most? What question does this spark in your mind about the future of AI and maybe your place within it? Thank you so much for joining us for this deep dive into the latest in AI. Make sure to like and subscribe to AI Unraveled so you don't miss our next exploration. Until then, keep learning, keep questioning, and stay curious.