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AI Daily Brief — 15 August 2025

An OpenAI-shaped Friday. Altman dinner: trillions in infra spend + GPT-5 mea culpa. Perplexity Chrome bid lapsed. Hawley opened Meta AI probe. Mistral Medium 3.1 + distillation allegation.

Top stories

  • Altman: OpenAI will spend “trillions” on data centers. At on-the-record SF dinner with ~12 reporters: “you should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars” on data-center construction in the “not very distant future”. Warned investors overexcited about AI in ways resembling a bubble. Also confirmed OpenAI funding brain-computer-interface project to rival Neuralink; would “take a look” at buying Chrome if regulators forced Google divestiture. via Bloomberg
  • Altman admits OpenAI “totally screwed up” GPT-5 launch. At same dinner: conceded mishandling Aug 7 rollout — pulled GPT-4o without warning Plus users, auto-router broken on day one, famous “chart crime” slide. Future model deprecations will get explicit transition window. Reiterated GPT-4o back in picker for Plus. via TechCrunch
  • Perplexity’s $34.5B Chrome bid deadline expires at 6 PM PT. Perplexity’s Aug 12 offer letter to Sundar Pichai demanded Google sign “no later than 6:00 p.m. (Pacific time) on August 15, 2025”. Google did not accept; bid lapses but keeps Chrome divestiture in public conversation as DOJ pushes antitrust remedy. via CNBC
  • Sen. Hawley opens probe into Meta AI chatbots. Following Reuters report surfacing internal Meta policy document permitting AI to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual”. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced formal Senate investigation into whether Meta’s generative-AI products enable exploitation of children. Meta confirmed document authenticity but said it had removed offending passages. via CNBC
  • Mistral launches Medium 3.1 (mistral-medium-2508). Upgrade to mid-tier model focused on coding, STEM reasoning and new “tone adaptation layer” for enterprise brand voice, plus improved multimodal text+image inputs. Available via Le Chat and the API. via Aibase

Who shipped

Altman shipped a mea culpa and an infra forecast. Hawley shipped a probe. Mistral shipped Medium 3.1.

Open-source pulse

Mistral hit with internal accusation that Medium 3.1 was distilled from DeepSeek — former Mistral employee publicly alleged secretly distilled, benchmark results misrepresented as pure-RL training win. OECD.AI logged incident; became reputation story of Friday news cycle as model went live. via OECD.AI

Money, infra & hardware

Axios captured Altman saying he is “comfortable making that bet” on hundreds-of-billions-to-trillions of infrastructure investment, while defending GPT-5’s real-world performance. via Axios

Quiet corners

Google teased Pixel 10 / Made by Google event with first Gemini-on-device clip — kicking off run-up to Aug 20 event where Pixel 10 series, Tensor G5, Pixel Watch 4 and on-device Gemini features unveiled. via Android Central GPT-4o restoration and model picker continued rolling out to Plus through Aug 11-15 week. Anthropic Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4 1M-token context remained week’s headline Anthropic moves.

By the numbers

  • Trillions of dollars — OpenAI projected data-center spend
  • 6 PM PT Aug 15 — Perplexity Chrome bid deadline (lapsed)
  • $34.5B — Perplexity unsolicited Chrome offer
  • “Charismatic” — Apple new OS codename (revealed Aug 13)
  • Aug 20 — Made by Google event with Pixel 10 + Tensor G5

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