🤖 Google rolls out Gemini 2.5 Pro preview, 100 AI startups from 2024 killing it, 🗞️ Particle’s AI turns news into tweets

Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro code vibes are 🔥🔥🔥

Google quietly previewed Gemini 2.5 Pro (I/O edition) ahead of next week’s developer conference. The upgraded model tops coding and web‑dev benchmarks. It’s particularly good at vibe coding. Instructions vague or detailed, it’s set off a chain reaction of demos.

Fun Fact: DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis says Google plans to merge Gemini’s text skills with its Veo video‑generation model. Imagine prompting one model for text and storyboard snippets.

🚨 CB Insights just dropped the 2024 AI 100

Some standout highlights:

• 🧬 Sakana AI: Achieved a $200M valuation with just 3 employees, focusing on “nature-inspired” AI architectures.

• 🖼️ Midjourney: Reached $200M in ARR without raising any outside equity.

• 🧠 Hugging Face: Boasts a 150x revenue multiple, with $30M in 2023 revenue at a $4.5B valuation.

• 🔍 Perplexity: Developing an alternative to traditional search engines, with a 65x revenue multiple based on a $520M valuation and $8M in 2024 ARR.

• 🌍 Lelapa AI: Based in South Africa, developing language processing tools for sub-Saharan African languages like Afrikaans, isiZulu, and Sesotho.

• 🎨 Ideogram: Tackling the challenge of generating images with legible text.

Full list here.

🗞️ Particle’s AI turns news into tweet-sized summaries

Startup Particle, founded by ex‑Twitter vets, took its AI‑powered news summarizer from mobile to the open web. Readers get instant AI digests, clickable entity pages, and links that actually drive traffic back to publishers. Think of it as CliffsNotes for news, but with publishers actually getting love.

Fun Fact: They also offer Wikipedia-style links for extra context when you’re not sure who or what that is.

Best from community

Google’s Veo, a generative AI video maker, is making waves. Literally, if you ask for a shot of the ocean.

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