xAI acquires X 🤝, Perplexity addresses rumors 🗣️, ARC-AGI-2 & ARC Prize 2025 💰

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has denied financial trouble rumors, stating the company has healthy funding and no IPO plans before 2028. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR AI 2025-03-31 👀 AI Power Users Are Leaving—And That's a Problem (Sponsor) New research from Betterworks shows that AI-savvy employees are 4x more likely to be job-hunting than their AI-resistant peers. While these power users are driving productivity and innovation, most companies are failing to create the AI-forward culture needed to keep them. Even more surprising? Only 22% of employees use AI for strategic tasks—despite 93% of daily users saying its full potential remains untapped. If you're responsible for AI adoption, workforce strategy, or retention, this is a must-read. The 2025 State of Performance Enablement Report breaks down what's happening—and what HR and business leaders need to do next. 👉 Check it out 🚀 Headlines & Launches xAI acquires X in $80B all-stock deal (1 minute read) xAI has officially acquired X in an all-stock transaction that values the combined company at over $110 billion. Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model (1 minute read) Gemini 2.5 Pro, an advanced AI model, is leading LMArena benchmarks by a significant margin. It enhances performance and accuracy through improved reasoning capabilities. The model "thinks" by analyzing information and making informed decisions, building on Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking advancements. Announcing ARC-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025 (12 minute read) The ARC Prize has launched ARC-AGI-2, a challenging benchmark aimed at advancing general AI systems. Current AIs score significantly lower compared to humans. The accompanying ARC Prize 2025 competition, hosted on Kaggle with a $1 million prize pool, aims to drive open-source innovation by rewarding efficiency and capability in solving ARC-AGI-2 tasks. 🧠 Research & Innovation Test-Time Visual In-Context Tuning (14 minute read) A novel method to adapt VICL models at test time using only the test sample, improving generalization under domain shifts across various visual tasks. Harmful Fine-Tuning Attacks (14 minute read) Researchers highlight vulnerabilities in existing defenses against harmful fine-tuning attacks and propose Panacea, an adaptive perturbation method that preserves model safety while maintaining fine-tuning performance. High-Fidelity Simultaneous Speech-To-Speech Translation (30 minute read) Kyutai has released its next amazing audio system which is a real time, audio to audio, translation system. It is built on a powerful multi stream transformer and boasts expressive voice ability. 🧑‍💻 Engineering & Resources Tools and Weapons: Microsoft's Story, Told by Its CEOs (Sponsor) Hosted by Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, the Tools and Weapons podcast explores technology's global impact. In the latest episodes, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella reflect on Microsoft's 50-year journey—past, present, and what's next. Listen to the podcast here. Mobile-VideoGPT (GitHub Repo) A lightweight multimodal video model under 1B parameters that features dual visual encoders and token pruning for real-time inference on edge devices. Multimodal Adaptation Methods (GitHub Repo) A curated list of approaches for multimodal adaptation that covers traditional domain adaptation, test-time adaptation, and newer methods. Reasoning augmented generation code (GitHub Repo) Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems rely on a two-step process: first, semantic search retrieves documents based on surface-level similarities. Then, a language model generates answers from those documents. While this method works, it often misses deeper contextual insights and can pull in irrelevant information. ReAG – Reasoning Augmented Generation – offers a robust alternative by feeding raw documents directly to the language model, allowing it to assess and integrate the full context. This unified approach leads to more accurate, nuanced, and context-aware responses. 🎁 Miscellaneous Awesome Vision-to-Music Generation (GitHub Repo) A curated and regularly updated list of methods, datasets, and demos for turning visual inputs into music. It covers both academic and industrial advances in V2M. OpenAI reshuffles Sam Altman's job once again (2 minute read) OpenAI has expanded Brad Lightcap's role to oversee operations and partnerships, allowing CEO Sam Altman to concentrate on research and product development. Mark Chen and Julia Villagra have been promoted within the company amid leadership restructuring following recent executive departures. OpenAI is also transitioning to a for-profit model, leading to a lawsuit from cofounder Elon Musk. Tim Cook says China's DeepSeek AI is 'excellent' during visit (3 minute read) Despite DeepSeek AI's security and privacy issues, Tim Cook praised it as "excellent" during his China visit. The AI, developed in China, rivals top global models at lower development costs but faces investigations in the US and Europe. Cook, who is attending the China Development Forum, often has to make diplomatic remarks about China due to Apple's business interests there. ⚡ Quick Links Google's AI-focused Education Tools AI (3 minute read) Google's new AI-focused educational tools include training for educators, student resources, and expanded access to Gemini for younger users. Microsoft announces security AI agents to help overwhelmed humans (2 minute read) Microsoft has introduced six AI-powered security agents for its Security Copilot to help teams handle phishing and data loss incidents more efficiently. Perplexity CEO Addresses Financial Rumors (2 minute read) Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has denied financial trouble rumors, stating the company has healthy funding and no IPO plans before 2028. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! 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