Google steals Windsurf, Meta snipes PlayAI & more (July 14, 2025)

Happy Monday!

Tech’s biggest summer love triangle just added another twist: OpenAI lost its $3B Windsurf deal to Google, Meta scooped up a stealthy voice AI startup, and Moonshot AI is making big waves in open-source land. Let’s dive in.

🧠 Big Tech Moves

🌀 Google Snatches Windsurf from OpenAI

The AI coding startup Windsurf was this close to sealing a $3B deal with OpenAI, until Microsoft refused to budge on IP-sharing rules. That opened the door for Google, who swooped in with a $2.4B licensing agreement and hired Windsurf’s co-founders. Windsurf will remain independent, but this is a big Gemini win and another OpenAI headache.

🗣️ Meta Acquires Voice Startup PlayAI

Meta quietly acquired PlayAI, a voice AI company previously flying under the radar. The whole team joins Meta this week and reports directly to Johan Schalkwyk, formerly of Sesame AI. No flashy announcements, just more puzzle pieces for Meta's agentic future.

🧠 Moonshot AI Drops Open-Weights Titan

Chinese startup Moonshot AI released “Kimi-K2,” a 1T parameter open-weights model outperforming frontier models like GPT-4.1 and Claude 4 on code, math, and agentic tasks. They even built their own training tool to stabilize performance. It’s not multimodal yet, but it’s a beast in raw performance.

⚙️ Tools, Tricks, and Trials

🔁 n8n Auto-Switches Models on the Fly

The latest upgrade to n8n lets workflows automatically select the best AI model per task. Want to route poems to Gemini and code to ChatGPT? Now it’s just a few clicks away.

🧪 Devs Slower With AI?

According to new METR research, experienced developers were actually 19% slower when using AI coding assistants like Cursor Pro. Why? More time spent prompting and reviewing code, less time writing it. Interestingly, devs still thought they were 20% faster. Perception: undefeated.

🚗 Tesla Cars Now Ship With Grok Built-In

Tesla has officially embedded xAI’s Grok assistant into all new vehicles, with over-the-air updates coming for older models. Your car just got a chatbot co-pilot, whether you asked for one or not.

🛠 Tools of the Day

• BioEmu – Predict protein states with Microsoft’s open model
• Qwen Chat – Alibaba’s desktop AI assistant
• Speech in Flow – Animate images with Google’s Flow
• Devstral – Mistral’s open-source agentic coding model

🧠 Prompt of the Day

“You’re an expert workflow architect. Design a system that auto-routes different tasks to the best AI models, with cost and speed as priority variables.”

⚡ Quick Hits

• Microsoft releases Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning, a compact on-device open model for reasoning
• OpenAI delays its open-weight model to focus on safety
• Grok 4 had been pulling answers from Musk’s tweets, xAI just patched that
• xAI blames Grok-3’s offensive posts on “deprecated instructions”

📌 TLDR

Google scooped Windsurf after OpenAI’s $3B deal collapsed, exposing new Microsoft friction. Meta acquired stealth voice startup PlayAI. Moonshot AI’s new model, Kimi-K2, dominates coding benchmarks as an open-weight challenger. Tesla now ships cars with Grok, n8n lets you route tasks by model, and METR research says AI slows down senior devs (but makes them feel faster).

Until tomorrow,
David