Western Open Models get Funding: Cohere $500m @ 6.8B, AI2 gets $152m NSF+NVIDIA grants
OpenAI's GPT-5 achieved a speedrun of Pokemon Red 3x faster than o3. Perplexity raised $200M at a $20B valuation. AI2 secured $75M NSF grants and $77M from NVIDIA for AI infrastructure projects like Olmo and Molmo. Cohere raised $500M and hired Joelle Pineau from meta-ai-fair, boosting models like Command A. Google released the Gemma 3 270M on-device tiny LLM with INT4 QAT checkpoints and large embedding tables, and made Imagen 4 generally available with a fast version at $0.02/image. Meta-ai-fair introduced DINOv3, a family of self-supervised vision foundation models with high-resolution dense features and strong performance on benchmarks like COCO detection and ADE20K segmentation, under a permissive license. A $150,000 MiniMax AI Agent Challenge is ongoing with 200+ prizes, encouraging AI project builds by August 25.