👾 OpenAI Delays, Windsurf Acquisition & More
Everything you need to know about AI this week.
Welcome back to another edition of The AI Upload!
This week, we need to talk about how OpenAI has slammed the breaks on its first open-weight model… again.
When OpenAI first teased its open-weight model in the spring, Altman said it would land “in the coming months,” a rare chance to actually download an OpenAI system instead of renting it by the prompt. That target slipped on June 10, when he told X followers the release would come “later this summer,” and slipped again on July 11 when he pressed the pause button and admitted the launch window is now open-ended.
In Friday’s note Altman framed the holdup as a one-way-door problem: “once weights are out, they can’t be pulled back.” Translation, if the model ends up super-charging jailbreak tools, OpenAI cannot patch it the way it patches a cloud API. The team says it wants extra red-team passes and a deeper look at “high-risk areas” before giving the internet a permanent copy.
But safety is only part of the stress test. A Business Insider deep-dive paints a company juggling burnout (engineers clocking 80-hour weeks), a scrapped $3 billion Windsurf acquisition, and fraying nerves with Microsoft over profit-sharing, all while trying to keep its lead in the model-quality arms race.
My critique: OpenAI’s public timelines have started to look like a kid asking for “five more minutes” at bedtime. Repeated soft deadlines cloaked in vague safety language erode trust, especially when the company continues to ship flashy closed-weight demos on schedule. The Verge summed it up bluntly: OpenAI’s release dates “often change like the wind”, and that’s becoming part of the brand.
Either way, I’m excited to see it, of course, and I’d prefer that it take longer and be done right than rushed and flawed. So, I will remain patient.
Let’s explore,
Cory
/// Patch Notes
A log of new tools, major announcements, and news worth knowing, compressed for fast parsing.
OpenAI Preps A Browser War
Reuters reports OpenAI is weeks away from launching a Chromium-based browser with an embedded chat interface and hooks for agentic plugins, taking direct aim at Google Chrome’s 3 billion-user moat and the lucrative ad data it supplies.
Windsurf’s $2 Billion Talent Check
Semafor broke the story that Google spent $2.4 billion hiring the leadership of AI-coding startup Windsurf into DeepMind, a soccer-style “transfer fee” that underscores how fierce the AI talent race has become as Meta and others dangle nine-figure packages.
Then, hours after Google’s poach, Cognition—the team behind the Devin coding agent—announced it will acquire Windsurf’s remaining 250 employees plus its IDE and IP, cementing an arms race for autonomous-coding tech that posted $82 million ARR last quarter.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/cognition-maker-of-the-ai-coding-agent-devin-acquires-windsurf/
Perplexity Launches Comet, An AI Browser Built For Speed
Perplexity’s new browser bakes its answer-engine directly into the address bar, ships an agent SDK, and positions the startup squarely against both OpenAI’s rumored browser and Google Search dominance. Early access opened July 9.
NotebookLM Adds “Featured Notebooks” From The Economist & The Atlantic
Google’s AI study buddy now ships curated, pre-filled notebooks complete with embedded sources and podcast-style audio overviews, showing off how public sharing (140 k notebooks in four weeks) can turn into a browsable library.
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