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AI Daily Brief — 11 April 2025

The week of Google Cloud Next closes with Altman on the TED2025 stage disclosing 800M weekly active users and Meta’s Llama 4 cheating scandal hitting peak embarrassment — the unmodified public Maverick weights landed at #32 on LMArena.

Top stories

  • Sam Altman on stage at TED2025 in Vancouver — 800M weekly active users. Chris Anderson interviewed Altman live in Session 11. Altman disclosed OpenAI has reached ~800M WAU with ‘unbelievable’ growth, and was pressed hard on the non-profit-to-for-profit shift at $300B valuation, agentic AI guardrails and AGI timelines. via TED Blog
  • Vanilla Llama 4 Maverick ranks #32 on LMArena. The unmodified public release (‘Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct’) landed at #32 — well below GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro. The high score Meta had touted came from a separate human-preference-tuned variant (‘Llama-4-Maverick-03-26-Experimental’) that LMArena’s maintainers said wasn’t disclosed clearly enough. LMArena apologized and formalized leaderboard policy changes. via TechCrunch
  • Google Cloud Next wraps with 229 AI announcements tallied. The conference closed in Las Vegas after three days. Headlined by Ironwood TPU and Gemini 2.5 Flash. Closing keynote included a Sphere-paved Wizard-of-Oz demo (Magnopus + Warner Bros) plus a Killers performance. via Google Cloud
  • Cloud Next startup showcase: Safe Superintelligence on TPUs, Cursor running Claude. Ilya Sutskever’s SSI signed on to use Google Cloud TPUs for its research; Anysphere (Cursor, then valued at $10B) confirmed running Anthropic’s Claude models on Google Cloud. via TechCrunch
  • Google Workspace ships Veo 2 video in Vids, BSI C5 attestation for Gemini. Vids now supports one-click AI voiceover updates across every scene plus Veo 2-powered original video clip generation. Gemini in Workspace earned German BSI C5 attestations — first AI productivity assistant to do so. Deep Research moved to Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental. via Google Workspace

Who shipped

OpenAI ran the headline via Altman’s TED stage. Meta took the day’s biggest reputational hit. Google closed Cloud Next with public TPU and Workspace wins.

Open-source pulse

Meta’s Llama 4 license + benchmark gaming continues to define the week’s open-weights discourse. Thinking Machines Lab (Mira Murati) reportedly doubled its seed round from $1B to over $2B at a $12B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Albanian government participation.

Money, infra & hardware

No major standalone funding rounds dated Apr 11 — markets continued to digest the post-pause rally.

Quiet corners

No Anthropic, xAI, NVIDIA, AMD or Chinese-lab release dated Apr 11. xAI Grok memory feature didn’t ship until Apr 16.

By the numbers

  • 800M — ChatGPT weekly active users disclosed at TED
  • #32 — vanilla Llama 4 Maverick LMArena ranking
  • 229 — total AI-related announcements at Google Cloud Next
  • $2B+ at $12B — Thinking Machines reported round size / valuation
  • Most-mentioned company: OpenAI

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 11 April 2025.