Good morning, AI enthusiast.

The race to build powerful AI agents is intensifying, as Chinese firm DeepSeek announces plans for a new model set to launch by the end of the year. The move positions the company as a direct competitor to Western AI leaders like OpenAI.

Building on its history of cost-effective model training, DeepSeek's entry could accelerate the industry's shift towards autonomous AI. With this new challenger entering the agent race, will the open-source community once again prove it can keep pace with proprietary giants?

In today’s AI recap:

• DeepSeek’s plan for new agentic AI

• Google’s growing AI energy demands

• Hollywood’s escalating war on Midjourney

• 8 trending AI Tools

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The Agent Race Heats Up

The Recap: Chinese AI firm DeepSeek is developing a new agentic model for release by year-end, directly challenging Western rivals like OpenAI. The company teased the move as a first step toward the agent era following its latest model update.

Unpacked:

• The new agent aims to perform complex, multi-step operations on your behalf with minimal instructions and will improve itself based on past tasks.

• This follows DeepSeek’s history of disruption with its previous reasoning model, which claimed a 30-fold reduction in training costs compared to its U.S. competitors.

• The launch fuels the ongoing U.S.-China AI race, raising national security questions about data privacy and the global distribution of advanced AI technology.

Bottom line: DeepSeek's entry accelerates the market's shift toward autonomous AI that can complete tasks independently. This move also underscores the growing power of open-source models to challenge established, proprietary systems on a global scale.

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AI's Energy Bill Comes Due

The Recap: Google has quietly removed its high-profile pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030 from its main sustainability website. The change reflects the soaring energy demands required to power its expanding AI data centers.

Unpacked:

• The company edited its "Operating Sustainably" page in June, rebranding it to "Operations" and replacing the entire section on net-zero carbon with a new priority area: Energy.

• Google's electricity consumption rose by 26 percent in 2024 to 32.2 terawatt-hours, a figure nearly equal to the annual energy consumption of Ireland.

• This move reflects a massive industry trend, as the exploding demand for computing power is expected to drive about 70 percent of new electricity needs by 2030.

Bottom line: The rapid expansion of AI is colliding with the physical limits of our energy infrastructure, forcing even the largest tech companies to reassess major environmental commitments. This signals a critical challenge ahead for the industry: balancing immense computational power with sustainable energy consumption.

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Hollywood's Copyright War Escalates

The Recap: Warner Bros. Discovery filed a major copyright lawsuit against AI image generator Midjourney. The suit alleges the company illegally trained its model on iconic characters like Batman, Superman, and Bugs Bunny.

Unpacked:

• This legal challenge isn't happening in a vacuum; it directly follows a similar lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against Midjourney in June.

• Warner Bros. points to Midjourney’s recent video tool as evidence, claiming the company knew it was infringing when it initially blocked character animations and then lifted that protection last month.

• The case hinges on the pivotal legal argument of fair use, with potential damages of $150,000 per infringed work threatening the company's future.

Bottom line: This growing coalition of media giants puts immense pressure on Midjourney and the broader generative AI space. The outcome of these lawsuits will help define the legal boundaries for training AI models on copyrighted data for years to come.

The Shortlist

Mistral updated its Le Chat assistant with a beta directory of over 20 enterprise connectors and a new "Memories" feature that carries context across conversations for more personalized responses.

African Next Voices launched as the largest known AI-ready dataset for African languages, featuring 9,000 hours of real-life speech across 18 languages to help close the continent's digital language gap.

Google shipped its new Pixel 10 Pro with Pro Res Zoom, a camera feature that uses generative AI to clean up and enhance digitally zoomed images up to 100x.

Slashy launched out of YC's S25 batch with a general AI agent that connects to over 15 services like G-Suite and Notion to perform actions and automate cross-app workflows.

Signing off,

David, Lucas, Mitchell — The Recap editorial team