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- Innovation Profs - 7/15/2025
Innovation Profs - 7/15/2025
Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news
Innovation Profs
July 15, 2025
Latest Gen AI News
Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription
On Wednesday, xAI released two large language models, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, with the latter model only being accessible to subscribers to the $300-per-month SuperGrok Heavy subscription plan. This release comes just a day after Grok was found to produce antisemitic responses to user prompts, which led Grok to issue an apology on Saturday that identified a recent update as the cause of this behavior (wait, the LLM apologized?!?). A few other pertinent new items related to Grok 4 from this week:
Grok 4 was found to explicitly seek Elon Musk’s opinion based on news articles and X posts in the reasoning process it took to provide answers to questions about who it supported in the Israel/Palestine conflict, and similarly for the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
To add insult to injury (or in this case, injury to insult?), Grok 4 was jailbroken just two days after its release, as security researchers were able to bypass Grok 4’s safeguards and extract instructions for making Molotov cocktails from the model.
Despite this serious foibles, Grok 4 has reportedly attained the highest score on the “Humanity’s Last Exam” benchmark, exceeding the performance Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model.
Deepseek faces ban in Germany as privacy watchdog reports the app to Google and Apple as "illegal content"
These two stories highlight increasing concerns with AI tools produced by Chinese startup DeepSeek due to the threat of unauthorized access to user data. Reportedly, the company has not given sufficient assurance that appropriate safeguards for transferring EU citizens’ personal data to a third country, as required by the GDPR, are in place. Italy and Australia already blocked access to DeepSeek products earlier this year due to similar concerns.
Quick Hits
Even Quicker Hits
Tool of the week: Comet
Perplexity this week launched a web browser, Comet, that brings the power of LLMs to your web surfing. Here’s how Comet is described: “Ask Comet to book a meeting or send an email, based on something you saw. Ask Comet to buy something you forgot. Ask Comet to brief you for your day.”
If you subscribe to Perplexity Max, you can access Comet today. Others need to join the waitlist.
OpenAI also has a browser in the works. It’s expected to launch in the coming weeks. And Fellou is an “agentic browser” that also requires joining a waitlist first.
AI-generated image of the week
We tested four image creation tools abilities to design a playful Iowa map.
Prompt: A playful, illustrated design featuring a hand-drawn map of Iowa filled with charming cartoon-style icons representing landmarks, nature, and culture. The palette blends cool tones for the land with bold black linework and white highlights, set against a white background. Include elements like corn, the state capitol dome, pigs and other items that represent Iowa. Include hand-lettered city names like Des Moines, Iowa City, Dubuque, Sioux City and Waterloo in their correct locations. What we found
Hugging Face is accepting orders for its Reachy Mini robot, a completely open-source workspace companion with full Python programmability. Developers can use the robot to leverage Hugging Face's archive of over 1.7 million AI models.