Gold medals, chip deals & more (July 22, 2025)

A billion-dollar brain race is heating up. Google and OpenAI are now battling for gold, in math. Oracle’s supplying 2 million chips to keep it all running, and the UK just handed OpenAI a major seat at the AI policy table. Let’s break it down.

🧠 The AGI Arms Race

🥇 Google & OpenAI compete for Math Olympiad gold

Google’s Gemini Deep Think scored 35/42 at the International Math Olympiad, officially earning a gold medal. OpenAI claims the same score, but without formal IMO verification. Both models solved 5 out of 6 advanced math problems, proving that AGI-level reasoning isn’t just theoretical anymore, it’s showing up on Olympiad leaderboards.

💰 Oracle to supply OpenAI with 2 million AI chips

Oracle will deliver 2 million AI chips to OpenAI, enabling it to build a massive new supercluster for model training and inference. The deal is one of the largest infrastructure moves in OpenAI’s history. The chips will power OpenAI’s next generation of frontier models, helping scale training for future GPT versions.

💸 Meta’s $300M recruiting blitz flops

Meta reportedly offered $300M over four years to lure top OpenAI researchers, but most declined, even when Anthropic’s team got similar offers. The reason? Researchers said they prioritize mission over money, reinforcing how alignment (and pride) may now be harder to buy than GPUs.

🔁 Reality is Programmable

🔄 Mirage brings real-time livestream editing

Decart’s new Mirage model lets you reshape your webcam or livestream background in real time, think Zoom calls set in Versailles or TikToks in anime villages.
It uses autoregressive generation instead of diffusion, unlocking faster, frame-to-frame transformation with fewer resources.

🧠 Brain-inspired reasoning model outperforms big names

Sapient Intelligence's Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) beats larger models like Claude 3.7 using just 27M parameters, thanks to a design based on how our cortex works. HRM excels at solving complex tasks like Sudoku and ARC challenges, showing promise for low-data, high-efficiency deployments in fields like climate and medicine.

🇬🇧 OpenAI inks policy partnership with the UK

OpenAI is joining forces with the UK government to help shape global AI safety policy. As part of the partnership, it’ll provide access to frontier model evaluations and collaborate on global safety standards. This marks the first formal collaboration between OpenAI and a national government on frontier model oversight.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

• Mirage – Real-time video transformation model
• Yoink – Auto-logs your digital actions to finish your work

💬 Prompt of the Day: Viral Content Writer

“You're a former ghostwriter who burned out writing fake 'authentic' posts. Now you write content that triggers algorithms and feels real.”

⚡ Quick Hits

• Alibaba’s Qwen3 beats Kimi K2 and challenges Claude 4
• Netflix used generative AI for VFX in Argentina, finishing 10x faster
• Elon Musk’s xAI poaches Nvidia’s Cosmos lead researcher
• Runway’s Act-Two motion capture model now available via API
• OpenAI handles 2.5B ChatGPT requests daily, 330M from the U.S.

🧾 TLDR

The AI Olympics just got real. Google won gold, officially. OpenAI says it matched it, unofficially. Oracle’s shipping 2 million chips to fuel the future, and OpenAI now has a front-row seat to UK AI policy. Meanwhile, real-time livestream edits and brain-like models show us what’s coming next.

Till we’re all Zooming from yarn worlds,
David