WHAT’S INSIDE

• Tech News: Tariffs, Rates, Birthright, AI Accountability Act, McFlaw

• Company Watch: Mistral, LangChain, Revolut, Nvidia, EssilorLuxottica, Replit

• Feature: Beyond Chrome The AI Interface Wars, OpenAI Browser + Grok 4

• Buzzy Tools: Latest Buzzy tech, AI and financial tools

• Deep Tech: The latest in deep tech, biotech, futurism and more

• Space Tech: Latest news in the space race and aerospace tech

• Crypto: Blockchain and crypto policy and startups or protocols to watch

TECH IN THE NEWS

Tariff Twist — The EU is rushing to finalize a tariff deal with the US by August 1 to avoid import taxes. Trump has also imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian exports, escalating trade uncertainty.

Rates Rant — Donald Trump urges the Federal Reserve to slash the U.S. interest rate by 3 percentage points, claiming the current rate burdens the nation despite no inflation and robust business growth.

Birthright Blocked — A federal judge halted Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship, citing irreparable harm. The White House plans to appeal.

AI Accountability Act — California State Senator Scott Wiener has reintroduced efforts to mandate AI safety reporting through SB 53 including whistleblower protections, and exempting smaller entities.

McFlaw — McDonald's AI chatbot security breach exposed thousands of applicants' personal data. 64 million records were accessed due to generic passwords and lack of multifactor authentication.

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Beyond Chrome: The AI Interface Wars Heat Up 

OpenAI, Google, xAI and Perplexity are racing to reinvent the internet’s front door

A quiet but decisive pivot is taking place in the tech industry. Browsers — once standardized, predictable, and dominated by Google Chrome — have become sites of rapid reinvention and represent a $165B battlefield. The catalyst is AI agents that no longer just search the internet, but interpret and act within it. This new category of software is nothing short of a new front end to the digital world, and control over it may decide which companies shape the next decade.

OpenAI’s Browser Is Coming 

Sources just leaked that OpenAI is set to release its own AI-enabled browser that replaces static tabs with a conversational interface in the coming weeks. Users will be able to conduct research, fill out forms, and delegate tasks entirely through natural language. The browser is built on Chromium, but it’s a new layer atop the web, not a facelift of Chrome. You might notice ChatGPT is already prompting users to add a chrome extension to make it your default search engine. 

With 500 million weekly ChatGPT users, OpenAI has a strong user funnel and has poached key Chrome engineers to help accelerate launch. Financially, it’s the most mature challenger with $10B in annualized revenue and a projected $125B revenue by 2029.

Its aggressive timeline, deep integration across its agent ecosystem, and upcoming Jony Ive-designed hardware suggest OpenAI views the browser as the first step in reshaping user habits across devices. The io acquisition deal just officially closed today, unlocking the full creative power of Ive’s team for OpenAI. 

Grok 4’s Infrastructure for Agentic Thinking

xAI’s Grok 4 also just released yesterday and is now officially “the smartest model in the world”. It introduced far more than just the expected performance gains, revealing a new architectural approach: multi-agent reasoning. The system deploys parallel agents on a task, lets them debate internally, and refines outputs through consensus—more akin to a panel of researchers than a single system.

The Grok 4 Heavy variant scored 88.9% on GPQA, and a perfect 100% on the AIME mathematics exam, outperforming OpenAI o3 and Claude 4 Opus by wide margins. This kind of intelligence opens the door to AI-native browsers that don’t just “understand” queries, but reason through pages, cross-check claims, and surface structured answers automatically.

Grok 4 is not currently embedded in a browser product — but it’s clearly designed to be. Its 256,000-token context window, $300/month enterprise tier, and Musk’s characterization of it hint at larger ambitions. Also, Musk has been clear about his “everything app” ambitions with X, and it would seem a logical step for the merged entity to expand its media services to include things like a browser and cloud-based productivity tools to rival Google and Microsoft. 

Perplexity Ships Comet 

Perplexity’s Comet is also now live, available to its Max subscribers at $200/month. It’s a fully AI-native browser: the assistant reads pages in real time, offers summarizations, highlights product comparisons, and can be instructed to do deep research on command.

Comet is built for cognition, not just navigation. It offers full Chrome extension compatibility, but shifts control to the AI layer. While early reviews note latency and occasional hallucinations and state it struggles with more complex tasks, the company’s rapid iteration pace and sustainable economics give it a unique edge.

Valued at $14B, up from $520M just 18 months ago, it posts $100M in ARR with far lower burn than its rivals. With limited infrastructure costs compared to xAI or OpenAI, its growth may be slower, but its steadier and has more room to expand to the upside.

Google’s Double Bind

Google still owns 66.6% of browser market share, but that dominance now feels brittle. Its entire $66.9B quarterly ad business relies on controlling how users reach the web — primarily through Chrome and Search. If AI agents start delivering answers directly, click-through models collapse.

To make matters worse, the DOJ’s antitrust case threatens to force a divestiture of Chrome, a move that would unravel the tight integration between browser, search, and ads. Google also now faces an EU antitrust complaint over its AI Overviews, which allegedly misuse publisher content, impacting traffic and revenue for independent journalism. Even if it adapts its products, its business incentives pull in the opposite direction: maintaining visibility, not replacing it with agent delegation.

Initiatives like Gemini Live and Circle to Search’s new AI Mode aim to inject AI into mobile browsing and multitasking, but without a full AI-native browser, Google risks becoming a layer behind. They must be working on one behind the scenes.

Google’s Infrastructure Advantage

Yet it still holds a quiet, structural advantage: unlike its AI competitors, Google cannot be blocked from scraping most websites. While Cloudflare and other hosts have begun blocking unauthorized AI bots from crawling content for training, Google is exempt because its scraping is embedded in its core indexing infrastructure. Even as websites move to lock out OpenAI or Perplexity, they often continue serving Google’s crawler, either out of habit or necessity.

This gives Google a frictionless firehose of high-quality, up-to-date web data, fueling both Gemini and Search. In an era where data supply chains are becoming bottlenecks, this loophole offers a massive input advantage that may prove decisive if agent-based browsing relies on constant, real-time knowledge. xAI also has a pipeline of live data from x, but it’s not even close to the value of Google’s web data.

The Economics of AI Browsing

The AI browser market is expected to grow from $15B in 2025 to $165.5B by 2033, reflecting a 35% CAGR. By contrast, traditional browser markets grow just 7% annually. This divergence reflects a deeper trend: users want results, not routes.

AI-native browsers represent a leap in how humans interact with machines. Instead of inputs and interfaces, they offer dialogues and delegation. That changes not just the software—it reshapes the entire economic logic of the web.

What Comes Next

The interface battle is now over who builds the next default. In a world where people don’t browse but instruct, and where the browser becomes an AI agent, infrastructure, reasoning architecture, and talent become more decisive than market share. Chrome may still be the gateway for now. But the competition is already designing the agent that answers before you even click.

COMPANIES TO WATCH

[Open Deal] Mistral — The French AI startup is in talks to raise $1B shortly after a $1.19B raise. It partners with MGX and Nvidia on an AI data center in Europe, drawing interest from the MGX fund and French banks.

[Open Deal] LangChain — The AI infrastructure startup is raising at a $1B valuation. Founded in 2022, it boasts an ARR between $12M and $16M, marking rapid growth and making it an industry leader.

[Open Deal] Revolut — The leading UK neobank seeks $1B at a $65B valuation, up from last year. Revenue is up 72% to $4B on 52M customers, despite regulatory challenges and intense competition.

Nvidia — The chip tech giant has reached a market capitalization of $4 trillion, matching the GDPs of countries like India and Japan.

EssilorLuxottica — Meta strategically invested $3.5B for a minority stake in the eyewear maker, signaling a robust commitment to its continued place in the smart glasses market, and enhancing Meta’s presence in the eyewear industry.

Replit — The leading vibe coding platform, has partnered with Microsoft to offer its services through Azure Marketplace, challenging Google Cloud, its previous host.

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BUZZY TOOLS

Buzzy Tech Tools To Watch & Use

xAI — Grok 4 live with $300/m plan, Tops benchmarks. AI in Teslas next week.

OpenAI — Launching AI web browser + open-weight LM for organisations.

Google — Gemini AI now on Wear OS for hands-free task management, info.

Perplexity — Comet AI browser rivals Google Search.

IBM Power11 — Servers with AI integration for hybrid clouds, zero downtime.

Context — AI suite with 300+ integrations for presentations, data, research.

Blok — AI personas simulate users for app testing, replaces live experiments.

BUZZY TECH

The Latest Deep Technology & Trends To Watch

Narada AI — Agentic AI streamlines workflows, more efficient than SaaS.

AI Manhattan Project — Major compute investment could accelerate AI.

World Internet Speed Record - Japan hits 1.02 petabits p/s = all of Netflix in 1 sec.

Anthropic AI Law School — AI chatbot Claude aids law students at USF.

De-extinction — Sir Peter Jackson, Colossal Bio to de-extinct NZ’s giant moa bird.

Tiny Nose Robots — Magnetic micro-robots target sinus infections vs antibiotics.

CRYPTO WATCH

Truth Social Token — Trump Media plans utility token for Truth Social, enabling Truth+ streaming subscriptions and digital wallet services with Crypto.com and Yorkville America Digital partnerships.

Coinbase & Perplexity — Partner to launch a crypto data service, offering live prices, market trends, and AI-driven insights to enhance user experience.

Pump.fun ICO — Launching the PUMP token via ICO on July 12, offering 33% of supply at $0.004 each with KYC required; excludes U.S. users and rewards attention.

Phantom Wallet — Launches in-wallet perpetual futures trading across 100+ crypto markets with up to 40× leverage, featuring risk management tools to enhance the DeFi ecosystem.

BIT Mining's Solana Shift — Plans to raise $200-300M to invest in Solana ecosystem by acquiring SOL and operating validator nodes.

Ant International's USDC Move — Ant Group Plans to integrate USDC into its blockchain platform pending U.S. regulatory approval, aiming to enhance cross-border payments potentially reaching millions of users.

SPACE_RACE

NASA Chief_Trump appoints Duffy Chief amid budget cuts, layoffs.

SpaceX Funding_Seeks $400B valuation, up from $350B in Dec 2024.

Varda Space_Space lab startup raises $187M to enhance drug purity.

Helicity Barrier_Solar wind research improves space weather predictions.

China Satellite Docking_Advances orbital refueling capabilities.

Moon-Rice Project_Super-dwarf rice for astronauts' long missions.

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