Meta bets big on AI while Lovable reaches $2 billion valuation: AI news roundup

It’s all go at Meta and MS unveils a medical diagnostic tool – our roundup of the AI news stories that grabbed our attention in the past week.

Meta bets big with Superintelligence Labs

There have been lots of reports about the eye-watering salaries offered to AI experts going to Meta in recent weeks. The company has significantly ramped up its investment in AI, both financially and through a high-profile hiring push. Most significantly it has established a division called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), to be led by Scale AI’s former CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross is also joining Meta to lead its AI products division. Meta has also poached high-profile staff from OpenAI and DeepMind, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saying Meta was offering “crazy” signing bonuses.

Meta paid over $14 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI in mid June and the company recently raised its capital expenditure forecast for the year from $65 billion to $72 billion as it invests in infrastructure to support AI services. Mark Zuckerberg is spending big in order to supercharge these efforts because he sees AI as foundational to the company’s long-term competitiveness. If it doesn't lead in AI, it runs the risk of becoming dependent on rivals like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Anthropic to power future products. Meta ultimately wants to build artificial general intelligence — systems that can reason, plan, remember, and act autonomously in the world.

MSL aims to bring Meta’s product AI teams, like Llama development, and its research arm together to form a unified front. Its past efforts have suffered from high staff turnover, fragmented teams, and underwhelming output, say observers, and by putting its AI efforts together in one division Meta will hope to unify its vision and centralise leadership.

As Axios points out, in his approach to AI, Zuckerberg is repeating a past winning playbook. In 2012, when he realised Facebook was falling behind on the mobile web, he redirected the efforts of the entire company towards it. Then, with the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, the company bought itself a dominant position.  Time will tell if it works a second time.

Microsoft develops AI diagnostic tool to support doctors

Microsoft has developed an AI powered medical tool which it says accurately diagnosed over 85% of 304 complex cases from the New England Journal of Medicine, compared to just 20% by a group of 21 doctors.

The Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator is still in the early stages of research and not ready for clinical deployment. It is intended to support rather than supplant human doctors, especially those handling complex diagnostics. It is underpinned by an orchestrator that creates virtual panels of five AI agents acting as “doctors” and mimics clinical reasoning by simulating question prompts and test ordering in a step-by-step “chain of debate” approach.

Microsoft also announced this week that it is laying off up to 9,000 staff, its largest round of layoffs since 2023 when it reduced staff numbers by 10,000. The company said it is reducing managerial layers and using new technologies to make staff more productive.

Grammarly buys Superhuman

Writing assistant Grammarly is to acquire AI-powered email client Superhuman, as part of its strategy to become an AI productivity platform.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Superhuman was valued at $825 million in August 2021, following its Series C funding round led by IVP and Tiger Global.

Grammarly is looking to transition from a grammar tool into a full productivity AI platform, integrating with emails via Superhuman, documents  – via Coda, which it acquired in December last year –  and chat systems.

AI startup Lovable reaches $2 billion valuation

Swedish AI startup Lovable, whose “vibe coding” tech enables users to create apps and websites through simple text prompts, is on track to raise over $150 million in its latest round of funding, according to the Financial Times. The funding round values the company at $2 billion just a few short months after its $15 million pre-Series A round in February.

Several other European companies are emerging as strong players in the vibe coding or natural language-to-software space, where users can build apps with minimal or no traditional code. French startup Dust, for example, which provides customisable AI agents to automate tasks and build workflows, has just done a joint-venture deal with Anthropic to help companies create AI agents using Claude and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is an open standard to connect external data sources with AI tools.

Perplexity launches $200 a month subscription

Perplexity has launched a $200 a month subscription tier, Perplexity Max, that offers subscribers unlimited access to its report generation tools and early access to new features and products. OpenAI launched a $200 a month subscription for ChatGPT last December. Anthropic launched a $200 a month subscription for Claude in April this year, while Google’s AI Ultra $250 a month subscription tier was launched last month.