What changed in the week of 7 July 2025

Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a groundbreaking open-source large language model built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with one trillion total parameters and 32 billion activated parameters. Trained on over 15.5 trillion tokens, Kimi K2 excels at complex task decomposition, native tool integration, coding, and frontier knowledge reasoning—outperforming leading open-source peers like DeepSeek’s V3 and rivaling proprietary U.S. models in key benchmarks. Two variants are available: Kimi-K2-Base for researchers and developers seeking full fine-tuning control, and Kimi-K2-Instruct for drop-in, general-purpose chat and agentic workflows. Released under a permissive MIT-style license, the model is freely accessible via web and mobile applications, inviting the global developer community to innovate, extend, and deploy advanced AI capabilities without barriers.

Google DeepMind (via Google) introduced GenAI Processors, an open‑source Python library released on July 10, 2025. This toolkit offers a unified Processor interface for handling asynchronous, stream‑based AI workflows—spanning input pre‑processing, model calls, and post‑processing. It supports concurrent execution of multimodal streams (e.g., audio, video, text), enabling low-latency pipelines like live AI agents with the Gemini API. The library is available under Apache 2.0 on GitHub.

Perplexity has unveiled Comet, an AI-powered web browser built on Chromium and offered to its Perplexity Max subscribers. With a hefty $200/month introductory price, Comet transforms browsing into an interactive, conversational experience—integrating its AI sidebar for tasks like booking meetings, sending emails, or shopping. The browser also features first-party support for natural-language querying of browsing history and cross-session memory. Comet is available now on Windows and Mac, with broader access planned soon via an invite system.

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI firm, officially launched Grok 4 (and a premium “Heavy” variant) on July 9 2025, positioning it as a major leap in reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and coding assistance. Built on the Colossus supercomputer, Grok 4 boasts PhD‑level performance on academic benchmarks, a massive 256k‑token context window, real‑time web search via X integration, and a specialized Grok 4 Code model for developers. The release follows hot on the heels of controversies around hate‑speech outputs from previous versions—xAI emphasized updated content‑moderation safeguards. Pricing starts at $30/mo, with “Heavy” at $300/mo.