Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Welcome, Applied AI Weekly Readers, to the latest issue! I'm honored to once again share with you the most interesting articles on artificial intelligence that I've found this past week.

IMPORTANT NEWS

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Issue Highlights

This week’s Applied AI Weekly highlights major developments in AI tools, policy, and research. Google launched new AI features in Search, and OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Agent to handle complex tasks. The White House released its AI Action Plan alongside a $100M investment in AI research institutes. Meanwhile, the AI talent war heats up, startups like Perplexity innovate in AI browsing, and experts reflect on the limits and risks of AI coding and data privacy.

Upcoming Events

Be sure to register for all our extraordinary events coming up on the Applied AI Meetup! Full details are available here
I'll be speaking at the AI on Healthcare Forum on Home Health & Hospice. Details can be found here

A Bit of Thanks

Thank you to everyone who attended my talk at Open Source North! The title of my talk was DeepSeek: The Open-Source AI That Changed the Game
Thank you to everyone who came out and supported me and the panel at the Future of Healthcare Conference at the University of Saint Thomas. Here's some photos of our panel at the event with Minnesota healthcare leaders.
I'm continuing to offer free consultations and workshops with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. Connect today and book a meeting with me.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week.

Finally, please do reach out if there is anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

AI Mode in Search Adds Canvas, File Upload, and More

We’re introducing new features and capabilities for AI Mode in Search, just in time for the back-to-school season. Whether you’re a student, a parent or an educator — or just wrapping up a busy summer — AI Mode can help you explore complex questions and discover high-quality information from across the web. To get started today on desktop, look for the new AI Mode button on the Google homepage.

NSF announces $100 million investment in National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes

The U.S. National Science Foundation, in partnership with Capital One and Intel, today announced a $100 million investment to support five National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes and a central community hub. These institutes will drive breakthroughs in high-impact areas such as mental health, materials discovery, science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, human-AI collaboration and drug development.

The White House AI Action Plan: a new chapter in U.S. AI policy

On July 23, 2025, the White House unveiled its AI Action Plan (Plan), a significant policy document outlining the current administration's priorities and deliverables in Artificial Intelligence. This plan emerged after the White House received over 10,000 public comments in response to a February 2025 Request for Information (RFI). Cloudflare’s comments urged the White House to foster conditions for U.S. leadership in AI and support open-source AI, among other recommendations.

18 Months. 12,000 Questions. A Whole Lot of Anxiety. What I Learned From Reading Students’ ChatGPT Logs

Student life is hard. Making new friends is hard. Writing essays is hard. Admin is hard. Budgeting is hard. Finding out what trousers exist in the world other than black ones is also, apparently, hard.

Introducing ChatGPT Agent: Bridging Research and Action

ChatGPT can now do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish.

You can now ask ChatGPT to handle requests like “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news,” “plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four,” and “analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.” ChatGPT will intelligently navigate websites, filter results, prompt you to log in securely when needed, run code, conduct analysis, and even deliver editable slideshows and spreadsheets that summarize its findings.

AI Action Plan

America is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Winning this race will usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people. Recognizing this, President Trump directed the creation of an AI Action Plan in the early days of his second term in office. Based on the three pillars of accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security, this Action Plan is America’s roadmap to win the race.

Cursor Snaps up Enterprise Startup Koala

The startup behind the viral AI coding app Cursor is snapping up top talent from AI enterprise startups in a bid to bolster its competition with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and win over businesses looking to supercharge their employees with AI coding tools.

Sponsor

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Business

Meta Just Escalated the AI Talent War With OpenAI

But the war for AI talent is far from over.

Databricks VP Naveen Rao likened the competition to "looking for LeBron James," estimating that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide can build frontier AI models.

Companies without the cash for massive pay packages are turning to hackathons and computing power as incentives. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said a Meta researcher he tried to poach told him to ask again when the company has "10,000 H100s."

Perplexity CEO: AI Browser Comet Will Automate 2 White-Collar Roles

He described how Comet's built-in AI agent can access apps like Gmail, LinkedIn, and Google Calendar to generate candidate lists, pull contact information, and send personalized outreach emails — tasks typically handled by recruiting coordinators and sourcers.

Enterprise

Reflections on OpenAI

I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024.

I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like.

Tools

Perplexity Comet

Browse at the speed of thought. Comet is the browser that thinks with you. Boost your focus, streamline your workflow, and turn curiosity into momentum

Development

Exhausted Man Defeats AI Model in World Coding Championship

A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted."

Can AI Really Code?

“Everyone is talking about how we don’t need programmers anymore, and there’s all this automation now available,” says Armando Solar‑Lezama, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL principal investigator, and senior author of the study. “On the one hand, the field has made tremendous progress. We have tools that are way more powerful than any we’ve seen before. But there’s also a long way to go toward really getting the full promise of automation that we would expect.”

For Privacy and Security, Think Twice Before Granting AI Access to Your Personal Data

AI is being forced on us in pretty much every facet of life, from phones and apps to search engines and even drive-throughs, for some reason. The fact that we’re now getting web browsers with baked-in AI assistants and chatbots shows that the way some people are using the internet to seek out and consume information today is very different from even a few years ago.

Mastering Vibe Coding : May the Force Be With You

After following vibe coding’s rapid rise as the top software development trend, I decided to use it to build a solution for a problem I regularly encounter: excessive browser tabs. I’ve developed a habit of never closing a tab because I’m unsure when I’ll need to use it again. However, since I have hundreds of open browser tabs, many are often duplicates. Building a browser plugin to help address this problem seemed like the perfect use case for my first vibe-coding project.