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  • đŸ˜± Perplexity wants to buy Chrome for $34.5B and Google’s not happy!

đŸ˜± Perplexity wants to buy Chrome for $34.5B and Google’s not happy!

This bid could rewrite how WE access the internet — here’s why👇

Author

Avinash Mada
August 14, 2025

In partnership with

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👋 Hello , the AI Enthusiast.

In this week’s edition, we brought AI updates backed by high-quality research and data to give you deeper insights. You'll find the Top AI Breakthrough of the Week, a featured AI tool with a mini-tutorial, learning resources to help you master these tools, the top 3 AI news stories, and more.

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⌛ Read Time: 5m:28s

Big investors are buying this “unlisted” stock

When the founder who sold his last company to Zillow for $120M starts a new venture, people notice. That’s why the same VCs who backed Uber, Venmo, and eBay also invested in Pacaso.

Disrupting the real estate industry once again, Pacaso’s streamlined platform offers co-ownership of premier properties, revamping the $1.3T vacation home market.

And it works. By handing keys to 2,000+ happy homeowners, Pacaso has already made $110M+ in gross profits in their operating history.

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An in-depth look at a major AI development, its industry impact, how it could affect your career, and a bold future prediction.

❝

Sam Altman Backs Merge Labs to Challenge Neuralink Head-On

Merge Labs is entering the brain-computer interface arena with ambition, aiming to close a $250 million raise at an $850 million valuation. Co-founded by Sam Altman and Alex Blania, the company targets high-bandwidth neural links capable of translating thought to action with minimal latency. This isn’t incremental—it’s a bid to move human-AI interaction from devices into the mind itself. Neuralink’s $9 billion lead and ongoing human trials set the competitive bar high, but Merge Labs’ AI-first strategy positions it to compress R&D cycles, scale precision, and expand applications faster. The stakes are not about gadgets—they’re about who defines the architecture of human-machine integration.

Potential Impact

High-bandwidth BCIs could transform assistive care for paralysis and neurodegenerative conditions, enabling control at the speed of thought. Industries from robotics to military training could integrate brain-directed control systems, eliminating traditional input delays. Creative industries might see thought-to-design workflows, collapsing the gap between concept and execution.

Implications for People/Careers

Neurotech engineers, AI-neuroscience specialists, and implant design experts become strategic hires. Conventional UI/UX roles risk erosion as BCIs bypass visual and tactile interfaces. Routine operational roles dependent on manual input could vanish, replaced by direct cognitive control. Across all levels, literacy in neural data interpretation and ethical implications becomes a differentiator, not a niche skill.

Our Future//Take

This is a threshold moment—AI’s migration from screen-based tools to embedded, always-on neural systems. Those who understand both the technical pipeline and the human factors of BCI will own the next decade of innovation. The race is less about hardware and more about data ownership, neural signal fidelity, and trust infrastructure. Start building expertise in neuro-AI convergence now; the real competition will be in how seamlessly, safely, and profitably we merge biological and synthetic intelligence.

Quick summaries of this week's top AI news, their relevance to your career, and our expert opinions.

Perplexity has put forward an unsolicited thirty four point five billion all-cash offer to acquire Google’s Chrome, aligning the move with a looming federal court decision that could force Google to divest the browser. Chrome controls over sixty percent of the global market and serves roughly three and a half billion users, making it the most dominant gateway to the internet. Perplexity’s proposal includes three billion in funding over two years to maintain Chromium as open source and keep Google as the default search engine, while using Chrome to accelerate adoption of its own AI-driven Comet browser. The offer would nearly double Perplexity’s valuation and insert it into the center of the battle over who controls the primary entry point to online activity.

Why It Matters to You

Distribution is everything. If Chrome changes hands, the path between users and your product could shift overnight. Even without a sale, the bid challenges Google’s dominance in search defaults and speeds up the adoption of AI-first browsing. Now is the time to test AI-native browsers for research, shopping, and workflow integrations. Diversify traffic away from Google toward owned channels. Optimize content and products for AI-driven assistants that answer directly inside browsers, not just on search results pages.

Our Take

This is a direct attempt to control the “operating system of attention.” A forced Chrome sale remains uncertain, but regulators could still disrupt default search arrangements, opening the door for AI browsers to capture intent earlier in the journey. Expect to see browsers integrating shopping, research, and automation at the core. You should be preparing structured, machine-readable content, forging partnerships with emerging AI browsers, and shifting acquisition strategies toward email, communities, and apps under your control. The moment defaults move, the competitive landscape changes be ready to move with it.

Meta’s Brain and AI team built TRIBE, a one-billion-parameter trimodal brain encoder predicting whole-brain fMRI responses to movies by combining Llama 3.2 for text, Wav2Vec2-BERT for audio, and Video-JEPA 2 for video. It placed first in the Algonauts 2025 challenge, accurately mapping activity across 1,000 cortical regions with up to 30% gains over single-modality models. The system excelled in brain areas where sight, sound, and language merge. Training used the Courtois NeuroMod dataset with over 80 hours of scans per subject, and both feature extraction and model training completed in about 24 hours each. Code is public for replication and extension.

Why It Matters to You

You can now test content, products, or interfaces against neural responses, not just clicks. TRIBE-style encoders let you identify which visuals, sounds, or language patterns maximize attention and comprehension before launch. Healthcare, accessibility, and creative teams can build faster, more targeted solutions aligned with real brain dynamics.

Our Take

This signals the rise of neuro-grounded AI products. Soon, personalized brain encoders will power adaptive media, education, and rehab. Start building neuro-AI talent pipelines, set up evaluation frameworks, and create consent structures for neural data now. The edge will belong to teams that merge multimodal foundation models with brain-response prediction to optimize attention, understanding, and memory from day one. 👉 Do Not Delay Anymore - Master AI Before Its Too Late.

Andrew Tulloch, a renowned Australian machine learning expert, walked away from a staggering six-year, $1.5 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. He co-founded Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025 with former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Their startup, valued at roughly $12 billion despite no product launch, focuses on building multimodal AI that aligns with natural human interaction. Tulloch’s background includes a University of Sydney medal in mathematics, graduate studies at Cambridge and Berkeley, and pivotal roles at Goldman Sachs, Facebook/Meta, and OpenAI—where he contributed to GPT-4. His rejection of the offer has sparked viral attention, becoming a symbol of AI talent prioritizing independence and long-term vision over enormous corporate pay packages.

Why It Matters to You

You’re seeing a shift: the brightest minds in AI now choose autonomy and impact over corporate wealth. That means culture, ownership, and mission will increasingly drive recruitment and retention—not just compensation. If you're building a startup or leading an innovation team, this example shows real talent values creative control as much as cash. Embed meaningful purpose into your vision—or risk losing out.

Our Take

This moment signals a turning point. Exceptional talent no longer chases fat paydays—they follow clear missions, aligned incentives, and agile teams. If you're raising capital or recruiting, anchor your pitch in long-term influence and craftsmanship. Start structuring equity, governance, and culture to reward shared ownership and impact—not just salaries. The AI race is now as much about vision as it is about resources. ⚡AI Mastery for FREE (Sign up Now).

Discover a comprehensive guide to an AI tool, exploring its features, practical use cases, and learning resources to help you master it.

Kombai acts like an expert frontend teammate that translates Figma, image, or text designs into high-quality frontend code—HTML, CSS, or React—right inside your IDE. It understands your codebase, works with your stack, plans tasks, previews UI, and helps you build faster without breaking production standards.

⭐ Top Features

  • Design-to-Code Intelligence: Combines deep learning and heuristics to interpret Figma designs visually—no tagging, naming, or layout constraints needed.

  • Full Repo Awareness: Indexes your codebase to know components, styles, and libraries. Generates code that fits your stack and coding standards.

  • Smart Task Planning & Preview: Outlines a task plan before coding and lets you preview the code live before committing anything.

  • Error Fix Automation: Catches TypeScript, lint, and runtime errors post-generation and applies fixes automatically.

  • Flexible Input Modalities: Accepts design context from Figma files, screenshots, or text—works across states, flows, and UI variations.

  • Trimmed Scope, Built for Frontend: Operates solely on frontend logic—won’t touch your backend or data flow, keeping focus sharp and safe.

  • Email-Ready Output: Converts designs into production-ready email HTML that renders reliably across clients (Outlook, Gmail, etc.).

  • Scalable Pricing Tiers: Free tier available; Plus starts at $20/month (2,000 credits), Pro at $40/month (4,200 credits), Premium at $100/month (11,000 credits)—designed to grow with your usage.

A curated list of noteworthy AI tools and their key details to help you stay ahead in your field.

MemeClip turns your text or image ideas into viral-ready memes and videos in seconds. It analyzes your input and matches it to trending templates—across image and video—and even handles face swaps, speech bubbles, and animations. Instant social content creation. Supports batch generation, multilingual captions, and offers an API for integration.

The Librarian is your AI assistant inside WhatsApp, Slack, or the web. It drafts and replies to emails, summarizes conversations, schedules or reschedules meetings, and extracts info from files or images. It remembers your preferences (like signature, Zoom link, addresses) and delivers daily briefs so you focus on decisions, not inbox clutter.

Outwrite is an AI writing assistant that raises your writing from basic to smart. It checks grammar, style, readability, and voice across Gmail, docs, browsers, and more. The free version covers spelling and grammar. The Pro tier brings paraphrasing, structure suggestions, and plagiarism checks. It helps you craft clear, engaging sentences—across marketing, academic, or business contexts.

Stakly.dev is your AI product co-pilot for building web apps without writing code. Describe your idea, and it spins up production-ready code in real time—complete with live previews, GitHub integration, and Supabase deployment. Build SaaS platforms, e-commerce sites, or dashboards fast, especially if you don’t want to get into the weeds of coding.

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