Hey AI Explorers,

Here’s what’s in store for you today:

• 🎨 Image & Video Generation got bold with the new Grok Imagine

• 🕵️ Perplexity Accused of Circumventing AI Scraping Blocks

• 🪄 DeepMind Unveils Genie 3 – A New Step Toward AGI

LATEST DEVELOPMENT

🎨 Grok Imagine – xAI’s Bold New Image & Video Generator

Elon Musk’s xAI has rolled out Grok Imagine, an AI-powered image and video generator now available to all SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers on iOS. The tool transforms text or image prompts into 15-second videos with native audio, and it’s making headlines for its controversial “spicy mode”, which allows users to generate NSFW content — including partial nudity.

While some prompts are blurred or moderated to prevent explicit extremes (especially for celebrity imagery), the unfiltered nature of Grok Imagine has already raised concerns about potential misuse. This comes on the heels of xAI’s recent release of a hyper-sexualized anime AI companion, reinforcing the company’s “no-holds-barred” approach.

On the creative side, Grok Imagine produces fast, high-quality images in seconds and can seamlessly animate them into stylized videos. Early output still suffers from the “uncanny valley” effect, with slightly cartoonish skin textures, but Musk says the model will “get better every day.”

With ambitions to compete against Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Runway, and others, Grok Imagine positions itself as a boundary-pushing alternative in the AI creative space — for better or worse.

🕵️ Perplexity Accused of Circumventing AI Scraping Blocks

Cloudflare has accused AI startup Perplexity of ignoring website restrictions and disguising its identity to scrape content from domains that explicitly blocked AI bots.

According to Cloudflare’s research, Perplexity allegedly:

• Bypassed “robots.txt” rules and site-specific bot blocks.

• Changed user agents to pose as a regular Google Chrome browser.

• Switched network identifiers (ASNs) to avoid detection.

Cloudflare claims it identified this behavior across tens of thousands of domains and millions of requests per day. The company has now de-listed Perplexity’s bots from its verified crawler list and implemented new blocking measures.

Perplexity disputes the allegations, calling Cloudflare’s post a “sales pitch” and denying that the bot in question belongs to them.

This isn’t Perplexity’s first brush with controversy — in 2024, outlets like Wired accused the company of plagiarizing content, raising broader questions about data ethics in AI model training.

🪄 DeepMind Unveils Genie 3 – A New Step Toward AGI

Google DeepMind has introduced Genie 3, a real-time interactive world model capable of generating both photorealistic and imaginary 3D environments from a simple text prompt. Unlike earlier models, Genie 3 keeps its simulations physically consistent over time by remembering what it has previously generated—without relying on a hard-coded physics engine.

It can produce several minutes of interactive 720p worlds at 24 FPS, enabling AI agents to train in realistic, dynamic environments. This could be key to developing embodied agents that learn by trial and error, much like humans.

Potential applications span gaming, education, creative prototyping, and advanced AI training. However, Genie 3 is still limited in interaction time, range of agent actions, and complexity of multi-agent environments.

DeepMind sees it as a stepping stone to AGI, believing that teaching agents to plan, explore, and improve in simulated worlds will accelerate progress toward human-like intelligence.

Whenever you're ready, here are ways we can support each other:

1. Promote your product or service to 100K+ global professionals, AI enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, creators, and founders. [Contact us at [email protected]]

2. Refer us to your friends and colleagues to help them stay ahead in the latest AI developments. We've helped 30K+ creators, entrepreneurs, founders, executives, and others like you.