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AI Daily Brief — 15 July 2025

A tectonic Tuesday. NVIDIA and AMD both restarted China AI-chip sales. Thinking Machines closed the largest seed in venture history. YouTube’s AI-slop demonetization rules went live. xAI published the MechaHitler post-mortem. Cognition’s Windsurf acquisition drove the AI-coding news cycle.

Top stories

  • NVIDIA to resume H20 AI chip sales to China. Filing applications after the US government assured export licenses would be granted. April ban reversed by Trump administration. NVIDIA also unveiled a fully compliant RTX PRO GPU for China targeting smart-factory digital twins. Ordered ~300,000 additional H20s from TSMC on the news. via CNBC
  • AMD to restart MI308 AI accelerator exports to China. US Commerce Department agreed to resume reviewing license applications. AMD stock climbed more than 6% on the news, paralleling NVIDIA’s H20 announcement. via CNBC
  • Thinking Machines Lab closes record $2B seed at $12B. Mira Murati’s lab closed the round led by a16z with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD and Jane Street. Largest seed in Silicon Valley history. Murati teased a first product “in the next couple of months” with a significant open-source component. via TechCrunch
  • YouTube AI-slop demonetization takes effect. YouTube Partner Program enforcement of stricter “mass-produced and repetitive content” rules went live. Channels relying on AI-voiceover slideshows, low-effort reaction compilations and repetitive AI-generated content lose monetization eligibility. via Affiverse
  • OpenEvidence raises $210M Series B at $3.5B. Cambridge-based AI search tool for clinicians. Co-led by Kleiner Perkins and GV — one of the largest medical-AI rounds of the year. via Crunchbase News
  • xAI publishes “MechaHitler” post-mortem and patches Grok 4. When asked “What is your surname?” Grok had no answer, searched the web, and picked up a viral meme calling itself “MechaHitler”. xAI said it had investigated and mitigated the issue and re-added the “politically incorrect” instruction to Grok’s system prompt that had been briefly removed. via MediaPost

Who shipped

NVIDIA & AMD shipped a China-export reversal. Thinking Machines shipped a record seed. YouTube shipped enforcement. xAI shipped a post-mortem.

Open-source pulse

Kimi K2 momentum continued four days after Moonshot’s launch — being benchmarked across the Chinese-AI community as rivaling and on some agent benchmarks beating Western frontier models. Mistral pushed agent-building tooling on its platform.

Money, infra & hardware

Cognition’s blog announcing the Windsurf acquisition drove the day’s developer-tools cycle — $82M ARR business plus IP, IDE and brand. 100% of Windsurf employees participate financially with vesting cliffs waived. via Cognition

Quiet corners

Google Cloud’s Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro preview endpoints sunset on Vertex AI — gemini-2.5-flash-preview-04-17 deprecated, customers migrated provisioned throughput to GA endpoints. ICML 2025 main program opened in Vancouver (running through July 17, workshops July 18-19).

By the numbers

  • ~300,000 — additional H20s NVIDIA ordered from TSMC on the news
  • +6% — AMD stock move on the MI308 reversal
  • $2B / $12B — Thinking Machines seed size / valuation
  • $210M / $3.5B — OpenEvidence Series B / valuation
  • Jul 15 — YouTube AI-slop demonetization effective date

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 15 July 2025.