The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
SpaceX has agreed to acquire the AI coding company Cursor in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion, days after SpaceX's own stock market debut. Cursor was midway through raising at around a $50 billion valuation; SpaceX is folding it into its AI division alongside its Grok-based tools. With Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic already owning the other major coding assistants, the deal effectively ends the era of independent AI coding tools. For teams picking a coding assistant, the field is now controlled by a handful of large platforms.
Read moreAI inference company Baseten is closing about $1.5 billion in new funding at a valuation of up to $13 billion, structured in tiers at $11 billion and $13 billion. Its annualised revenue run-rate has roughly tripled from $200 million to $600 million, and the valuation is up from $5 billion in January. The raise shows how much money is now moving into the business of running models cheaply, not just training them. More competition in inference should keep pushing down the cost of running AI in production.
Read morePerplexity has launched Brain, a memory system that lets its Computer agents learn from their own past work rather than only remembering user preferences. Brain builds a graph of what an agent did, what worked and what failed, then reviews it overnight to improve later tasks. It is rolling out to Max and Enterprise Max subscribers in research preview. The aim is for agents to stop repeating the same setup and dead ends on every new job.
Read moreFrom 18 June, Google has stopped serving consumer requests through its Gemini CLI and Code Assist extensions, moving developers to its new Antigravity CLI. The replacement is a faster, Go-based multi-agent tool that keeps existing hooks, subagents and extensions, though some automation built on the old tool will break. Paid Cloud and enterprise API users keep access to the old CLI for now. Anyone running scripts on Gemini CLI should check what still works.
Read morePwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analysed more than a billion job ads across 27 countries including Australia, found workers with AI skills now command a 62% wage premium, up from 57% a year earlier. Jobs needing those skills are growing almost eight times faster than the market overall, and the most AI-exposed companies have grown headcount 52% since 2018. The data cuts against the idea that AI is simply cutting jobs. For workers, specific AI skills are turning into measurable pay and demand.
Read moreA bipartisan pair of US representatives has released a 269-page discussion draft of the Great American AI Act, the first attempt at a comprehensive federal AI framework. It would set binding rules for large frontier developers, defined as companies with over $500 million in revenue that have trained a frontier model, covering safety-incident reporting, transparency and whistleblower protections. It is a draft seeking feedback, not yet law. Because it would govern the major labs, any rules would shape how AI products behave for users worldwide, including in Australia.
Read moreOpenAI has confidentially filed for a US stock market listing, reportedly targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion, with a debut possible as early as September. The company is generating around $2 billion in monthly revenue and has more than 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, though it has signalled the listing may not be rushed. Going public would force OpenAI to disclose its finances in detail for the first time. That would give a much clearer read on whether the economics of frontier AI actually work.
Read moreNAVER and NVIDIA have set out a plan to build gigawatt-scale sovereign AI data centres in South Korea, starting at 55 megawatts and scaling to 200 megawatts by 2028 on NVIDIA's DSX platform. The aim is to keep Korean government, business and manufacturing data on home soil rather than on US-based clouds. It is part of a wider move by countries to control their own AI infrastructure. For businesses outside the US, where data is processed is becoming a real factor in which AI services they can use.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.