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AI Daily Brief — 29 July 2025

A busy Tuesday dominated by two stories. OpenAI shipped Study Mode in ChatGPT — Socratic tutor that pushes back instead of giving answers. Apple lost its fourth AFM researcher in a month to Meta. WAIC aftermath kept rolling.

Top stories

  • OpenAI launches Study Mode in ChatGPT. Rolled out to logged-in Free, Plus, Pro and Team users. Socratic tutor that asks guiding questions and refuses to hand over direct answers. Edu subscribers get it “in coming weeks”. Co-designed with 40+ pedagogy partners. via OpenAI
  • TechCrunch + CNBC frame Study Mode as anti-cheating pivot. Same-day pieces framing Study Mode as OpenAI’s pitch to reposition ChatGPT as a “learning tool, not an answer engine” and a direct response to growing global concern about students using AI for cheating. via TechCrunch
  • Apple loses fourth AFM researcher in a month to Meta. Bowen Zhang, multimodal AI researcher in Apple’s Foundation Models group, resigned for Meta Superintelligence. Fourth AFM defection in a month after Pang ($200M+ package), Tom Gunter and Mark Lee. Apple AI brain drain accelerates. via Bloomberg
  • WAIC 2025 closes with record turnout. 800+ exhibitors, 3,000+ products, 100+ global debuts, 350,000+ visitor visits. Beijing released AI Global Governance Action Plan, launched Global AI Innovation Governance Center, and the International Open Source AI Cooperation Initiative. via Global Times
  • Zhipu AI unveils GLM-4.5 open-source models at post-WAIC online event. Full-scale GLM-4.5 (355B total / 32B active params, MoE) and GLM-4.5-Air (106B/12B). Hybrid “thinking + non-thinking” reasoning, 128K context, targeted at agent applications. via CometAPI

Who shipped

OpenAI shipped Study Mode. Apple shipped a researcher (to Meta). Zhipu shipped GLM-4.5.

Open-source pulse

Alibaba’s WAIC cascade kept rolling — Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507, Qwen-MT (92 languages), Qwen3-Coder + Qwen Code CLI, plus Quark AI glasses. 380B yuan (~$53B) over three years for cloud + AI infrastructure pledge. via Alibaba Group Tencent’s Hunyuan 3D World Model 1.0 — first openly licensed interactive 3D scene generator — kept circulating with Hunyuan-Large-Vision #1 on LMArena Vision Arena.

Money, infra & hardware

150+ humanoid robots at WAIC including Unitree R1 Intelligent Companion (25 kg, multimodal voice+vision LLM, open to customisation) plus boxing-robot demos. Microsoft Education detailed Copilot Studio NLU+, Fabric data-agents integration, and Microsoft Learning Zone (formerly Project Spark) — free AI app for adaptive activities with NASA and Kahoot content partners.

Quiet corners

Trump AI Action Plan analysis continued — law-firm coverage dissecting 90+ federal policy actions across the three pillars. Mississippi federal court ruled in Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle Media, adopting “server test” interpretation in growing AI/copyright circuit split. PlayerZero $15M Series A capped a July with $12.66B in disclosed AI rounds.

By the numbers

  • 40+ — pedagogy partners shaping Study Mode
  • 4 — Apple AFM defections to Meta in one month
  • 355B / 32B / 106B / 12B — GLM-4.5 / GLM-4.5-Air total / active params
  • ~$53B / 3 years — Alibaba cloud+AI infra pledge
  • $12.66B — July total disclosed AI funding

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 29 July 2025.