• Perplexity is cashing in. 

• Google’s sweating. 

• Dell's giving thousands of human jobs the ol' Ctrl+Alt+Delete and copy-pasting those roles over to AI. 

Yikes. 

Meanwhile, political AI shenanigans are heating up faster than a overclocked GPU, and OpenAI's teasing us with a juicy new model that's got the whole tech world buzzing. 

Oh, and their latest voice tech?

Double yikes.

It's giving us more chills than a horror movie marathon.

Don’t waste hours every single week trying to keep up with the AI news. We do that hard work for you, and bring you the ‘What you need to know’ every Monday with the AI news that matters. 

Here’s what happened, what’s happening, and how it might impact us all. 

Buckle up shorties. 

Let’s get educated shorties. 👇

Perplexity, the AI answers engine startup, just raised a cool $250 million, valuing the company between $2.5-$3 billion. 

That's a 2.5x value jump since March, y'all. 

They're processing 75 million user queries this year and pulling in $20 million ARR according to reports.

In other words? At Perplexity, things are moving fast and so is the cash.

What it means: 

This cash injection puts Perplexity in prime position to take on the big dogs like Google and OpenAI (and their upcoming SearchGPT) in the AI-powered search game. 

This funding round is like giving your business superpowers and a cape – get ready for AI search to revolutionize how we find and use information.

If you're not using Perplexity yet, you're missing out on some serious AI-powered knowledge retrieval. 

(Side note, we gave you the complete Perplexity guide here.)

Apple's playing hard to get with their AI features. Despite rumors of a $20/month charge for advanced AI, analysts are saying we won't see that for at least 3 years. 

Apple's still in the "improve first, monetize later" phase with their AI…. Er....Apple Intelligence (eye roll at that name, right? lolz)

We’ve already seen Apple delay their ‘Apple Intelligence’ rollout once, and we may see more delays. At least when it does roll out, though, there won’t be an immediate monthly upcharge to use it.

What it means: 

Apple's fashionably late to the AI party, but they're not charging cover – not yet anyways. 

We called a free and paid tier wayyyyyyyyy before anyone else, picking up on a lil nugget in their keynote that went underreported. 

So not only is Apple’s AI being delayed by at least a month, but it also looks like they’ll be probably charging for more “premium” AI features once their tech is there. (Which may be 3 years.)

This gives businesses time to prep for the eventual Apple AI ecosystem without breaking the bank.

 But don't sleep on this – start thinking about how Apple's AI could integrate with your products or services down the line.

Or, maybe you’re tired of waiting and are Team Copilot? 

(We’re honestly on Team Apple but reallllllllly tempted to jump ship as Microsoft is crushing it while Apple’s seemingly snoozin.) 

According to reports, Dell's cutting approximately 12,500 jobs, mainly in sales and marketing, as they pivot hard towards AI. 

They're creating a new unit dedicated to AI-optimized servers and data center solutions. It's part of a broader tech industry trend – 2,000 tech companies laid off over 250,000 workers in 2023 according to layoffs.fyi.

Surprising?

Not really.

Over the past 3 months, Dell has been one of tech’s biggest losers, as it’s lost nearly 30% of its market value over the past 90ish days.

So, they’ve followed the Big Tech AI playbook by announcing massive layoffs and a “focus on AI,” which Wall Street loves.

What it means:

 The AI revolution is here, and it's not all rainbows and unicorns. 

We’ve been cutting that you to you straight since literally day one. (Go listen, it’s kinda cringe.)

But if you're in tech, now's the time to level up your AI skills if you haven’t already, or you’ll risk being left behind. 

When the job cut hammers drops, companies are looking to retain employees who have shown strides in Generative AI.

And for even non-tech companies, the 12,500 jobs cut by Dell and the 15,000 cut earlier this month by Intel (both in part due to AI) should be a wake-up call to start thinking about how AI can streamline your operations.

Former President Trump falsely claimed VP Kamala Harris's campaign used AI to fake crowd sizes at her rallies. 

Every news source has refuted Trump’s claims, as they shared real-time photo and video accounts showing that the crowds were real.

(Side note — is this gonna become a thing now?)

The latest ‘AI ‘ scapegoat is raising some serious questions about AI's role in political disinformation.

What it means: 

Let’s throw a big ol warning out there — we try as hard as possible to be non-political here at Everyday AI. Political division has already crept its way into our lives just about everywhere else, especially in the U.S.

(Hands off our AI safe space, politics!)

And when it comes to this story, we’re holding to that. 

These are facts not opinions — Trump claimed Harris’s crowd were AI generated. They were not. 

And a former U.S. President trying to change reality and blame it on AI is both a big deal and a troubling sign of what’s to come.

Welcome to the wild west of AI-powered politics, y’all. Like we talked about on today’s show, we expect AI to be used and misused by both sides of the political aisle, from local races all the way to the biggest ticket. 

As we barrel towards the 2024 elections in the U.S., expect to see more AI-related misinformation.

And AI-powered disinformation will run rampant. (It’s gonna get ugly y’all.)

Businesses and individuals need to be extra vigilant about the content they share and sources they trust. 

Don’t believe anything and everything you see on the internet, as things are getting AI-generated content is getting SHOCKINGLY realistic at the wrong time. 

It's gonna get messy out there.

Like, this below is 100% AI generated.

OpenAI (and AI enthusiasts everywhere) have been teasing a new AI model codenamed "strawberry," potentially dropping as soon as August 13th. 

(In less than a day, according to this mysterious Twitter user who the entire internet believes has some kind of inside info. We’re not sure.) 

We’ve been covering ‘Strawberry’ since it was first talked about last month. I

n short, this is a reported codename for OpenAI’s next model, which reportedly will have much higher reasoning and autonomous capabilities. 

This ‘new model dropping’ buzz comes amid some executive shuffles and growing competition from Anthropic and Google, as one OpenAI cofounder departed for Anthropic last week and the President of the company has gone on a hiatus. 

What it means: If Strawberry's as sweet as the rumors suggest, we could be looking at a major leap in AI capabilities. (Formerly, Project Strawberry was referred to as Q*, or Q Star.)

Generally, we try not to cover ‘model rumors’ too often, as GPT-5 has literally been trending on Twitter/X nearly every day for a few months. 

(We personally think the next model could be named GPT-4.5, GPT Next or GPT-4o Large. Don’t think we’ll be seeing a GPT-5 this year.) 

So, keep your eyes peeled for potential new features that could give your business an edge. (Or, maybe this could just be a hyped-up nothing burger that even Sam Altman is promoting.) 

But also be ready for potential disruptions as the AI landscape shifts faster than a quantum particle.

Speaking of that……

OpenAI just dropped a bombshell report on their GPT-4o voice tech, and it's giving us more chills than a midnight screening of "The Exorcist." 

Quick catch-up: 

• OpenAI demoed their new advanced voice mode in May, which was pretty mind-boggling. 

• In May, they kinda said it was too powerful and risky for general release. 

• They started rolling it out to paid users in very small groups earlier this month. 

• On Thursday, they released their GPT-4o System Card, focused on how they measure safety and model preparedness. 

• Around the same time, we started seeing reports that OpenAI’s new voice tech may cause users to get emotionally attached, and their new advanced voice mode can apparently go off the rails faster than a rollercoaster with butter on the tracks. 

• In other words, the new voice mode screamed ‘No!’, then cloned a user’s voice without the user’s consent. 

Rut-roh.

What it means:

This ain't just another "oops" moment in AI land, shorties. 

Nope.

This is half wake-up call. Half nightmare fuel. 

We played this not-so-little voice cloning SNAFU live on today’s show. 

And, you can also read about (and listen to) what happened on OpenAI’s GPT-4o System Card blog post. 

In short: 

• The voice recording showed a women talking to a GPT-4o. 

• GPT-4o responds in a natural and neural voice. 

• The model suddenly screams “No!”

• Then the model instantly clones the women’s voice and starts talking like her. 

Triple yikes. 

For businesses diving into AI voice tech, it's time to triple-check those guardrails. 

We're walking a tightrope between mind-blowing innovation and "Black Mirror" episodes coming to life.

OpenAI's transparency on their System Card blog post commendable, but it also shows we're in legit uncharted (and kinda scary) territory.

The potential for voice fraud, misinformation, and just plain creepy stuff is through the roof.

And it’s coming at us all faster than we can keep up with. 

This incident proves that even the big players are still figuring out how to keep AI's superpowers in check. 

For now, maybe keep that tinfoil hat handy when chatting with AI assistants – you never know when they might decide to do their best impression of you.

Refer Friends to Win a Year of ChatGPT!

(Or your fave LLM like Claude, Gemini, Copilot, etc)