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⚙️ Meta tried (and failed) to buy SSI for $32B

Welcome back. The OpenAI Files just dropped and they're damning—documenting OpenAI's "culture of recklessness" and how the company ditched its 100x profit cap to appease investors. Ex-Chief scientist Ilya Sutskever reportedly said "I don't think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI." Turns out when you're racing toward artificial general intelligence, transparency becomes the first casualty.

In today’s newsletter:

  • ⚕️ AI for Good: Catching prescription errors in the Amazon

  • 🎥 Midjourney launches video model amid Hollywood lawsuit

  • 🤝 Meta in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to join AI efforts

⚕️ AI for Good: Catching prescription errors in the Amazon

Source: Rest of World

In Brazil's remote Amazon region, where patients travel for days by boat to get their prescriptions, a 34-year-old pharmacist named Samuel Andrade was drowning in paperwork.

Andrade works in Caracaraí, an Amazonian municipality with 22,000 inhabitants spread across an area larger than the Netherlands. Until April, he spent hours each day cross-checking drug databases to ensure rural doctors hadn't prescribed anything dangerous — often getting stuck on just a few prescriptions while dozens of patients waited in line.

What happened: Andrade now has an AI assistant developed by Brazilian nonprofit NoHarm that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and helps him verify their safety. The software has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions and caught more than 50 errors since he started using it.

  • The AI was built by siblings Ana Helena, a pharmacist, and her brother Henrique Dias, a computer scientist and NoHarm's CEO. They trained their open-source machine learning model on thousands of real-world drug combinations, dosage errors and adverse interactions.

  • The software can process hundreds of prescriptions at once, identifying potential red flags like medication interactions and overdoses. It provides links to medical sources backing each warning, allowing pharmacists to make informed decisions.

Why it matters: NoHarm, supported by grants from Google, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia and the Gates Foundation, offers its software free to public health facilities in Brazil's overburdened universal healthcare system. Around 20 cities in the country's poorest regions now use the technology.

"Many things slip past our eyes, or we simply don't know," Andrade said. "The system lets us cross-check information much faster."

The tool recently helped rural physician Nailon de Moraes avoid prescribing dangerous dosages to patients who had traveled by boat to reach his clinic near the Branco River.

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🎥 Midjourney launches video model amid Hollywood lawsuit

Source: Midjourney

Midjourney launched its first AI video generation model, entering a competitive field where multiple companies are racing to build the best text-to-video technology — just days after Disney and Universal sued the company for copyright infringement.

The V1 model transforms still images into 480p video clips through an "image-to-video" workflow. Users upload images or use Midjourney-generated content, then press "Animate" to create movement.

Here's how it works: The system offers automatic motion generation or manual prompts where users describe how elements should move. Each job produces four 5-second clips that can extend to 20 seconds total.

  • CEO David Holz called it "a stepping stone" toward "real-time open-world simulations."

  • Available on all subscription tiers starting at $10 monthly, costing eight times more than image generation but claimed to be "about 25 times cheaper" than competitors.

The competitive landscape: Google's Veo 3 is widely considered the current leader, while established players include Runway (the professional standard), Luma Labs and Pika Labs. Chinese competitors like Kling AI have emerged as serious challengers, generating longer, higher-quality videos. OpenAI's Sora has disappointed, with filmmakers calling the public version "neutered" compared to early demos. Here’s a deeper look comparing Midjourney V1 to competitors.

V1 has notable limitations — no audio generation and no text-to-video capability, features available in competing platforms.

The launch comes amid legal pressure from Hollywood. Last week, Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit calling Midjourney a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" for generating unauthorized copies of characters like Darth Vader and Homer Simpson. The studios claim the company earned $300 million in revenue last year.

"Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing," Disney's chief legal officer Horacio Gutierrez said.

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🤝 Meta in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to join AI efforts

Source: Midjourney v7

Meta is panic-hiring its way out of an AI crisis. The company that got blindsided by ChatGPT is now throwing $100 million signing bonuses at competitors' employees and taking a $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI to get access to the startup's data infrastructure and CEO, Alexandr Wang. Now Mark Zuckerberg is personally conducting recruitment meetings to land two more big fish.

This isn't normal Silicon Valley poaching. This is desperation with a corporate credit card.

The latest targets: The Information reports that Meta is in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and investor Daniel Gross in a deal potentially worth over $1 billion. The arrangement would involve Meta partially buying out their venture capital fund NFDG, giving the company minority stakes in portfolio companies including Perplexity and Safe Superintelligence.

  • Friedman led GitHub through Microsoft's 2018 acquisition and has been quietly advising Meta on AI strategy since 2014

  • Gross co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever after the latter's dramatic exit from OpenAI

  • Both would join Meta's new "superintelligence" unit under Scale AI's Wang

The Friedman-Gross pursuit comes after Meta struck out on an even bigger prize. CNBC reports that Meta attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence outright earlier this year, targeting the $32 billion startup Sutskever founded after leaving OpenAI. When Sutskever refused and declined to join Meta personally, Zuckerberg pivoted to recruiting SSI's CEO Daniel Gross instead.

Here's what's driving the frenzy: Meta's internal AI efforts are struggling badly. Llama 4 scored just 43.83 on LiveBench, performing nearly 50% worse than Google's top models. The company has lost 4.3% of its AI talent to competitors in 2024, including 11 of the 14 original Llama researchers since 2023.

  • Internal executives are reportedly frustrated with the AI team's performance

  • The company is offering salaries exceeding $10 million annually for top AI researchers

  • Talent keeps flowing to OpenAI and Anthropic despite the massive pay packages

The numbers tell the story of both success and pressure. Meta's stock has soared 683% since November 2022, largely on AI promises that are proving harder to deliver than investors expected.

Meta isn't just buying individuals — it's acquiring networks, knowledge, and competitive intelligence. Wang brings intimate knowledge of how OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft train their models through Scale AI's work with all three companies. The NFDG acquisition would give Meta insight into promising AI startups before they become threats.

But there's a fundamental problem with this approach. Meta is trying to solve a talent problem with money, but the real issue might be strategic. The company's open-source approach with Llama puts it at a structural disadvantage against competitors who can monetize their models directly. No amount of hiring can fix that mismatch.

Meta built its success on promoting from within and maintaining a tight-knit engineering culture. Now Zuckerberg is essentially admitting that approach failed in AI by hiring outsiders at unprecedented compensation levels. That sends a demoralizing message to existing employees who've been passed over for leadership roles.

The talent war also reveals something uncomfortable about the current AI landscape. A few dozen researchers have become so valuable that companies will spend billions to acquire them. This concentration of expertise in a handful of individuals suggests the field is less mature than the hype suggests. If Meta's $14.3 billion Scale AI investment hinges on one 28-year-old's knowledge, that's not a sustainable competitive advantage.

Meta's stock surge has created a window for these expensive experiments, but windows close. If the hiring spree doesn't produce breakthrough models within 18 months, investors will start questioning whether the company is throwing good money after bad at a problem that can't be solved with cash alone.

Which image is real?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 1 (Left):

  • “The road in the other image kinda went to nowhere. Nailed the symmetry on the gate/fence, but didn’t add a purpose.”

  • “One of the bushes in the background was cut off. Unnaturally straight line in nature.”

Selected Image 2 (Right):

  • “I thought the randomness of the tree and shrub growth was too good to be fake... On closer inspection, the gates don't look long enough to span the opening when closed, and there's a weird quad set of tire tracks.”

  • “This one looked fake, but the twists in the path in the other photo looked even more fake.”

🙏 Thank you!

The Deep View is written by Faris Kojok, Chris Bibey and The Deep View crew. Please reply with any feedback.

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