What changed in the week of 24 March 2025

xAI has acquired X in an all-stock deal valuing the combined entity at $113B, bringing together xAI’s cutting-edge AI models and infrastructure with X’s massive 600M+ user base and real-time content ecosystem. The merger integrates data, distribution, compute power, and top-tier talent to build a platform that not only reflects the world but actively drives innovation and accelerates human progress.

Alibaba introduced Qwen2, an open-source AI model designed to power cost-effective AI agents. Qwen2 supports multiple languages and can run on low-resource environments, making it ideal for startups and developers building scalable AI tools.

Databricks and Anthropic have announced a five-year partnership. This will bring Anthropic's Claude models directly to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. This integration will allow over 10,000 customers to build and deploy AI agents that can understand and process their own business data. The latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet model is now available on Databricks across major cloud platforms. The partnership aims to help businesses get more value from their AI investments by making it easier to create, use, and manage AI agents securely. Key advantages include the ability to build specialised AI agents, seamless integration of Claude models into the Databricks platform, and unified governance for data and AI development. This collaboration seeks to unlock the full potential of enterprise data through AI.

Gemini 2.5 Pro, which Google DeepMind considers their most intelligent AI model. It improves upon the existing Gemini models by including native multimodality and a long context window. A key feature is the models' ability to reason through their thoughts before generating a response, which leads to better performance and accuracy. The Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental version is specifically highlighted as being excellent for coding and handling complex prompts, and is currently their most advanced coding model. This model achieves significantly improved results across various benchmarks, reaching state-of-the-art in maths and science evaluations. It also offers a 1-million token context window. Developers can access and experiment with Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental via Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. The model supports a wide range of inputs, including text, images, video, and audio, with text being the output format.

OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o's native image generation feature, marking a significant advancement in AI-driven content creation. This integration allows GPT-4o to produce precise, accurate, and photorealistic images directly within ChatGPT, enhancing the model's multimodal capabilities. Users can now generate and edit images seamlessly through natural language prompts, facilitating applications in design, education, and creative storytelling. This development underscores OpenAI's commitment to creating versatile AI tools that cater to a broad spectrum of user needs.