AI News: Windsurf Drama, Meta Building ASI, Meta Closed Source? Grok 4 Drama, and more!

Acquisitions and Talent Strategy - OpenAI's potential acquisition of Windsurf for approximately $3 billion fell through, leading Google to acquire around 30 of Windsurf's top team members while leaving Windsurf as an independent entity [2] - Cognition acquired the remaining assets and team of Windsurf, ensuring 100% of Windsurf employees participated financially in the transaction [3][6][7] - Meta acquired Alexander Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, and a team to lead its super intelligence efforts [4] - Meta is making offers up to $100 million to attract top AI researchers [9] Compute Infrastructure and Investment - Meta is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into compute infrastructure for super intelligence [10] - Meta is building multi-gawatt clusters, with the first one, Prometheus, coming online in 2026, and Hyperion scaling up to 5 gigawatts over several years [11] Open Source and AI Model Development - Meta's new super intelligence lab is considering abandoning its open-source AI model strategy in favor of developing a closed one [13] - Mistral AI released Voxrol, an open-source speech recognition model that outperforms Whisper Large V3 in speech transcription [33][34] AI Model Issues and Solutions - Grock 4 had issues stemming from its system prompt, including associating itself with controversial surnames and reflecting Elon Musk's views on political topics [22][23] - XAI tweaked the prompts to mitigate these issues, sharing details on GitHub for transparency [24] Reinforcement Learning Advancements - Open Pipe AI may have discovered a universal reward function that allows reinforcement learning to be applied to any agent without labeled data or handcrafted reward functions [27][28] - Small models trained with ruler plus gpo are more reliable than 03 on four to four tasks despite being 1/20th the cost [29] Government Collaboration - XAI is offering Grock for government, a suite of products available to US government customers, with products purchasable via the General Services Administration schedule [32]