Altman 1, Zuck 0

xAI is bleeding cash

June 20, 2025

Welcome back! Midjourney has finally announced the launch of its hotly anticipated AI image-to-video model, V1. How it works: Users upload an image (they can also use an image generated by one of Midjourney’s other models) and V1 produces a set of four five-second videos. It’s only available through Discord and on the web for now.

Are you using V1?

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Meta tried to lure OpenAI’s top talent

CNN

Sam Altman says Meta launched a full-scale talent raid at OpenAI, trying to lure away its top researchers with compensation packages up to $100 million. But? Not a single person left. 

A bidding war for top talent. Meta reportedly tried to recruit one of OpenAI’s lead researchers, Noam Brown, as well as Google’s AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Both efforts were unsuccessful. 

  • Altman credits strong mission alignment and team culture for the retention, saying OpenAI’s staff felt too motivated by the work to walk away, even for a sum that large.

  • But: Meta did manage to recruit Daniel Gross, the CEO of startup Safe Superintelligence, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Why it matters: In today’s AI race, the best models start with the best minds. Whether it’s Meta, OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, winning hinges on who can recruit (and keep) the most elite researchers.

Musk’s xAI is spending big and asking for billions more

xAI is burning through roughly $1 billion every month and is now seeking a $4.3 billion equity raise to keep pace.

Where’s the money going? The Elon Musk-led startup is reportedly spending heavily on Nvidia H100 GPUs, server farms, data centers, and compute capacity as it races to develop its LLM, Grok, and the rumored “Aurora” model. While still pre-revenue, xAI raised $6 billion in December and aims to be a serious contender in the AGI race alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.

The pace is only accelerating. According to reports, xAI expects its burn rate to increase as it trains larger models and integrates AI across Musk’s empire—from Tesla and X to SpaceX and xAI’s own chatbot ambitions. While some see this as an audacious moonshot, others are beginning to question whether even the world’s wealthiest players can afford to keep up.

Why it matters: AI breakthroughs don’t come cheap. But burning $12 billion a year raises a bigger question: Who can actually afford to build AGI?

Turn blogs into videos in seconds

WaveGen

WaveGen automatically transforms blog posts into short-form videos for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts complete with text overlays and transitions.

How you can use it:

  • Repurpose long-form content into engaging videos

  • Drive traffic from social media back to your site

  • Save hours on manual editing

  • Maintain brand consistency across formats

Pricing: Free trial; paid plans start at $10/month

Private AI that organizes your digital brain

Remio

Remio helps you save, summarize, and search across articles, documents, and videos—all while keeping your data local.

How you can use it:

  • Capture clean copies of anything online

  • Annotate and connect related content

  • Ask AI to surface insights or summarize research

  • Enjoy full offline privacy with no cloud syncing

Pricing: Free plan available; paid starts at $8.25/month

Credential management for deploying AI agents

AgentPass

AgentPass is a secure platform for spinning up hosted MCP servers and managing API access across complex agent-based systems.

How you can use it:

  • Launch AI agents with zero coding

  • Manage API credentials and permissions

  • Monitor agent behavior and access logs

  • Scale across enterprise environments with multi-tenant support

Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $99/month

Jobs, announcements, and big ideas

  • A new report called The OpenAI files bills itself as “the most comprehensive collection to date of documented concerns with governance practices, leadership integrity, and organizational culture at OpenAI.”

  • Google is bringing Veo 3 to YouTube Shorts later this summer—which means the potential for AI slop is about to spike.

  • Also: Google quietly used YouTube videos to train Gemini and Veo 3, creators say.

  • KREA drops Hailuo 02 with sharper image-to-video accuracy.

  • HeyGen unveils AI avatars that nail lip-sync for UGC ads.

  • MiniMax debuts general-purpose AI agent for multitasking.

  • Amazon’s Zoox opens robotaxi factory, revs up race with Tesla and Waymo.

  • OpenAI severs ties with Scale AI after Meta partnership.

Your next coworker may not be human. I sat down with Microsoft’s CTO to find out how AI agents are already changing the workplace.

That’s a wrap! See you next week.

—Matt (FutureTools.io)

P.S. This newsletter is 100% written by a human. Okay, maybe 96%.