Google AI Sees Major Leadership Shake-Up: Hassabis Steps Down as DeepMind CEO, Chief Scientist Dean Departs
Google announced on August 5 that Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, will transition to Chairman of the division and Chief Scientist at Alphabet. Korey Kavukcuoglu, Google’s current Chief AI Architect and Hassabis’s longtime deputy, will step up as Senior Vice President to take over most of Hassabis’s responsibilities. Google also revealed that Jeff Dean, who has been instrumental in shaping the company’s AI strategy for 27 years, is leaving to co-found an independent venture with Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat. Their goal? To accelerate breakthroughs in machine learning, science, and engineering.
Meta Rolls Out Beta of Its First AI Agent, Muse Code
Meta officially unveiled the beta version of its first coding agent, Muse Code, on August 5. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to X to share the news, saying: “It’s a terminal-based coding agent that can handle full software engineering tasks on large codebases—from planning code changes to writing code and verifying outputs.”
Unitree’s Wang Xingxing Poised to See Net Worth Surpass 20 Billion Yuan
On August 6, according to Yicai, Unitree released its initial public offering announcement on the STAR Market. The IPO price is set at 150.80 yuan per share, with 40.4464 million shares being offered, bringing the total share count to 404.5 million after the offering. That puts Unitree’s initial market cap at nearly 61 billion yuan. The prospectus shows that founder Wang Xingxing holds a combined direct and indirect stake of 33.3583% before the offering. Do the math, and his personal net worth hits 20.35 billion yuan.
Sequoia Capital Completes $10B Fundraise, Decides to Pump Another $2.5B into Anthropic
Reports indicate that in the first fundraising round since Roelof Botha and Pat Grady took over global leadership at Sequoia Capital, the firm raised $10 billion for its growth and expansion funds. So far this year, Sequoia has already returned over $5 billion to its investors—and that’s not even counting its investment in SpaceX. Sources also say that after joining Anthropic’s funding round back in January, Sequoia began discussing an additional investment in the AI company in May. Partners reportedly debated committing an extra $1 billion, but ultimately settled on a consensus to invest $2.5 billion.
DeepSeek to Raise API Service Pricing, Expect Significant Increases
On August 6, DeepSeek issued a notice stating: “We plan to raise the pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, and the increase is expected to be substantial. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific details will be announced via official notice.”
Zhang Yiming: ByteDance “Refuses to Distill,” Won’t Trade Others’ Output for Leaderboard Rankings
On August 6, according to The Paper, sources inside ByteDance revealed that the rapid progress of open-source models from domestic competitors this year has put mounting pressure on the company. At a recent internal meeting, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming made his stance clear: building models requires long-term thinking and delayed gratification—not using someone else’s output to chase a fleeting leaderboard position. Interestingly, Zhang rarely speaks at Seed team meetings, but this time he was unequivocal: ByteDance “should be willing to sacrifice some short-term gains for long-term goals.” Internally, ByteDance strictly prohibits distillation of open-source models, even enforcing restrictions through API detection and other measures. Zhang believes distillation undermines genuine, long-term technological breakthroughs.
OpenAI Asks US Judge to Dismiss Apple’s Lawsuit, Calls Trade Secret Theft Claims “Baseless”
Reports say OpenAI requested on August 5 that a US judge throw out Apple’s lawsuit alleging trade secret theft, calling the claims “baseless.” Last month, Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets through coordinated efforts to obtain information about Apple’s unreleased products. Apple claims OpenAI encouraged its employees to share details, components, blueprints, and other materials about unreleased products to help develop its own full line of hardware.
