Beyond the Mainframe Nº4 | Laika Ventures
AI is joining companies, schools, and governments 🤠
Welcome to Laika Ventures’ monthly newsletter! We promise to bring you the most relevant news on AI, fire 🔥 discussions, and more.
We all know trying to stay updated on what’s happening in AI can be difficult with so much going on and how fast it is evolving — for those who are still amazed by having chatGPT conversational features, voice, image, and video generation will blow your mind. We’re still watching the AI race and companies, like NVIDIA that sell to China 🇨🇳, could be seen as questionable and wrongdoing for USA 🇺🇸 policymakers. We’re also still seeing controversy on adopting AI in companies since it might replace employees, and could be seen as unreliable technology, but some companies and even governments have been public about being AI-first.
Let’s go!
UAE will be the first country using AI to write laws 🇦🇪
The UAE is set to become the first country to actively use AI to help write and review new and existing legislation. The UAE is looking to lead by using the newest technologies across different Government functions, and following the AI Strategy 2031. The country has also appointed the world’s first Minister of AI.
“The new system will allow us to track the daily impact of laws on our people and economy using large-scale data, and it will regularly suggest updates to our legislation,” His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, said in a statement.
Open AI news 🗞️
OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini which are capable of using all tools within chatGPT — we’re talking web search, image generation, etc. These models are the first ones to be able to “think with images”. You can now use the image generation model in the API.
OpenAI faced critics after users of GPT-4o faced AI excessive flattery and tendency to agree (too much). This reminds us that models face challenges when trying to balance politeness and responsibility. OpenAI was not the only one having more hallucinations than usual, with Cursor also having an incident.
This month, OpenAI also released Codex CLI which is an open-source local coding agent that turns natural language into working code.
OpenAI’s Startup Fund made its first cybersecurity investment, co-leading a $43 million investment round.
Ex-OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati has (is) quietly been recruiting ex-OpenAI “Founding Team” members. The company was announced in february this year, and we can see now some familiar names in their website: OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company’s chief scientist; Barret Zoph, who led model post-training at OpenAI, is the CTO; Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations are now advisors.
Google Cloud Next 2025 🎤
At the Google Cloud Next 2025 conference, the company shared with the world several new updates: from AI Models, to Infrastructure, and security.
Some of the main takeaways are:
Google has significantly upgraded their AI Hypercomputer architecture for better performance, efficiency and cost-effectiveness — introducing Gemini 2.0 Flash. Shortly after the conference, they released Gemini 2.5 Flash and the cost/performance of the model.
The new Ironwood TPU (Google’s seventh-generation AI chip) delivers a tenfold increase in performance for machine learning workloads.
Google Unified Security, powered by Gemini AI, which will be integrating Google’s threat intelligence, security operations, cloud security and secure enterprise browsing capabilities.
Google Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) is an open protocol that complements Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides helpful tools and context to agents. This announcement also confirms that Google is using Anthropic to let its models connect to diverse data sources and apps. This protocol counts with the support and contribution from big companies, such as PayPal, Salesforce, BCG, SAP.
AI among the youth 🏫
Anthropic follows OpenAI and launches Claude for Education — a specialized version of Claude tailored for higher education institutions. Students will be able to get help from Claude to think instead of getting answer right away. Northeastern University, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and Champlain College will have Claude available to all students.
Two undergrads students with no funding launched a startup that can compete with the big players (Sesame and ElevenLabs) in generating ultra-realistic dialogue in one pass - Dia. This Korean startup remind us that we’re in a time where inexperience undergrads can train an open-source model that competes with the top voice tech on the market.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order for an AI Education Task Force to establish plans to “encourage and highlight student and educator achievements in AI, promote wide geographic adoption of technological advancement, and foster collaboration between government, academia, philanthropy, and industry to address national challenges with AI solutions”.
AI in the workforce 👨🏻💼
This month, Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke shared with the world an internal memo which reflects the AI workforce dilema that many companies face. Many companies have chosen to restrict AI use, but others like Shopify integrate the technology in their day to day.
“AI will totally change Shopify, our work, and the rest of our lives. We're all in on this!” - Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify
But he even goes beyond stating that before hiring more people, employees should “demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI”.
Another company joining the AI-first movement is Duolingo. The company shared an all-hands email from the CEO, Luis von Ahn, comparing to a critical moment in 2012 when they bet on building mobile-first.
What’s happening with the big players 👀
Similar to Google last month, Microsoft Copilot can now remember what you talked about, what you searched on the web and other features that provide a more personalized experience - Your AI Companion. Following the trend, OpenAI also announced memory in chatGPT from the past conversations.
NVIDIA announced its first US factories in Arizona, and plans to produce up to “a half a trillion dollars of AI infrastructure” through partnerships with TSMC, Foxconn, Wistron, Amkor and SPIL.
“Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency.” - Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA
Grok released Grok Studio to generate documents, code, reports and browser games, and user can iterate and collaborate with ti.
Anthropic shared a study analyzing hundreds of thousands of real AI conversations to understand how models like Claude make judgements and use it to align their values.
Funny Updates 😆
You’ve probably seen AI-generated Tom&Jerry videos circulating on the internet. NVIDIA and Stanford researchers unveiled the “One-Minute Video Generation with Test-Time Training”. One of the biggest constraints of AI videos has been the length of clips and the consistency across shots. This could be a new approach to tell longer and coherent stories.
Sam Altman shared on a tweet that they’ve spend millions of dollars on eletricity costs for people saying “thank you” and “please” to their models.
Minds That Build vs. Minds That Scale
You can build something no one else can and still never ship it. You can see the future but it takes someone else to drag it into the present.
Inventors see what others don’t. Entrepreneurs make others see it.
Steve Wozniak, the engineering genius behind Apple’s early computers, once remarked:
“Steve [Jobs] didn’t do one circuit, design or piece of code… But it never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them up in the air and sell a few.’”
This highlights the synergy between Wozniak’s technical brilliance and Jobs’ visionary drive to bring products to market.
The inventor delves deep—obsessed with the “how.” The entrepreneur maintains a broader view—focused on the “why now.” One crafts technology; the other builds momentum.
Woz needed Jobs. And Jobs needed Woz.
Without Wozniak, there’s no Apple I. Without Jobs, there’s no Apple. That’s the contrast.
I’ve said this before: we might have the best engineers, researchers, and product minds, but building companies isn’t about knowledge. It’s about relevance. It’s about friction. It’s about growth. It’s about network.
- Nuno Job, co-founder of Decipad
Read the full article in our blog.
We’re a portuguese company based in Braga, and we’re all about celebrating 🇵🇹 portuguese innovations!
Feedzai, the portuguese unicorn that uses advanced AI and machine learning to protect global financial institutions from fraud, money laundering, and financial crime in real time, acquired Demyst and Zonic.
Portugal is competing to host an AI Gigafactory for training and developing artificial intelligence models. The European Commission aims to create five Gigafactories mobilizing 20 billion euros in total.
The portuguese LLM, Amália, is in beta launch. It should be launched in september.
Portugal takes 28 startups to Web Summit Rio 2025, alongside Startup Portugal and Unicorn Factory Lisboa.
→ If you’re doing amazing things in Portugal and we didn’t highlight it, let us know! We keep our eyes wide open but sometimes we can miss something 😉
🐾 Join us!
We’ll be hosting a coworking day and a panel discussion this month, but this time in the capital, Lisbon, for our dear friends who have been traveling to Porto. We’ll be announcing the date soon.
Check what we’re doing at laikaventures.co. Thanks for reading!