AI NEWS: xAI just launched Grok 4 — crushing AI benchmarks across the board! Plus, more news from Perplexity, OpenAI, Google, Ai2, Hugging Face, and Tencent. Here's everything you need to know:

Elon Musk's xAI released Grok 4 and 4 Heavy models. Key highlights: — SOTA on Humanity's Last Exam, Arc-AGI-2, AIME, and more —128-token context window —News voices with improved latency, vision support —Multiple agents in 4 Heavy for complex tasks

Perplexity released Comet, its agentic web browser It embeds the company's core answer engine and an assistant that watches users browse and answers questions, all while handling tasks like email management Available to Perplexity Max users

OpenAI announced that its acquisition of Jony Ive’s, io, has closed, with Ive and his LoveFrom team staying independent but embedded in OpenAI’s design direction The company is also said to be working on an agentic browser to take on Chrome and Perplexity

Google started rolling out Gemini to Wear OS 4+ watches, including those from Pixel, Samsung, OPPO, OnePlus, and more The company is also expanding its AI Mode and adding it to Circle to Search to help users explore complex topics on Android

Ai2 dropped FlexOlmo, a new paradigm for the co-development of language models It allows each data owner to locally branch from a shared public model, add an expert trained on their data locally, and contribute this expert back to the shared model

Hugging Face opened orders for Reachy Mini, an expressive, open-source desktop robot Starting at just $299 and fully programmable in Python, it makes an ideal candidate for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation