Good Afternoon,
In this issue of The Singularity Advantage:
xAI vs Apple & OpenAI — an antitrust battle over AI defaults
Perplexity’s Comet pays publishers — first direct media revenue model from AI search
Apple eyes Google Gemini for a Siri reboot — internal versus external AI
Meta partners with Midjourney to boost visual quality — aesthetics matter again
xAI opens AI by releasing Grok 2.5 — what builders should test now
🔥Top stories
🔓 xAI vs Apple + OpenAI: The Antitrust Bomb
The Story: Elon Musk’s xAI filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Apple and OpenAI of colluding to suppress competition. The claim highlights Apple’s default integration of ChatGPT via Apple Intelligence and favorable App Store curation, effectively disadvantaging challengers like Grok.
Bigger Picture: App Store defaults aren’t just convenience, they’re distribution power. If the court forces Apple to unbundle or loosen defaults, the AI landscape shifts from incumbents to “discoverability winners.” This could lead to new front doors opening for rival AI tools and startup challengers.
Insight: Distribution trumps algorithms. A fair fight isn’t about model quality—it’s having a chance to be seen. Now is the time to architect multi-path discovery, not push features in isolation.
💰 Perplexity Funds Publishers: AI Answers Finally Pay Creators
Source: Perplexity
The Story: Perplexity launched “Comet Plus,” an AI browser subscription model that shares 80% of revenue with publishers whose content drives traffic—human visits, AI citations, or agent actions — via a $5/month plan.
The Bigger Picture: AI tools have orphaned publishers, surfacing content without compensation. This is the first structural change: rewarding publishers for being "sources," not victims. It turns content pipelines into co-owned assets within the AI economy.
Insight: Incentives realigned. Content teams can once again justify output not by links, but by AI discovery. It’s time to build content that guides AI, not just Google.
🤖 Apple Eyes Gemini Brain for a Smarter Siri Upgrade
The Story: Apple is in early-stage discussions with Google to license a custom version of the Gemini AI model to overhaul Siri, with plans to host the model on Apple’s own servers.
The Bigger Picture:
This marks a strategic shift for Apple, acknowledging that internal bottlenecks have left Siri trailing competitors. Outsourcing critical AI components like Gemini offers a faster path to catch up in generative AI. If executed, this hybrid model—anchored by Apple’s privacy-first ethos—could leapfrog years of internal development stagnation.Insight: Borrowed brilliance can be a powerful accelerator. While in-house R&D builds resilience, thoughtfully chosen external partnerships can unlock breakthroughs faster, especially when time, expertise, and market expectations are misaligned.
🎨 Meta Licenses Midjourney Aesthetic Tech—Visuals Get a Boost
The Story: Meta has entered a licensing deal with AI visual-generation startup Midjourney to integrate its distinctive “aesthetic technology” into Meta’s AI offerings across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its AI model lineup.
The Bigger Picture: This partnership signals a pragmatic pivot from purely in-house model development toward collaborative augmentation, especially as Meta’s own tools lag behind competitors like OpenAI’s models. Integrating Midjourney’s visuals could deliver a noticeable boost to user engagement and creative quality across billions of feeds.
Insight: Visual superiority doesn’t require full-stack creation. Licensing breakthrough tools lets you instant-win on aesthetic performance, while freeing internal teams to focus on product integration and layered experiences.
🔓 xAI Opens Grok 2.5: The Open AI Model That Changes the Game
Source: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg / Getty Images
The Story: Elon Musk’s xAI has released the weights of its Grok 2.5 model on Hugging Face, and announced plans to open-source Grok 3 within six months. While the move is ambitious, the license includes some limiting clauses, raising questions about the openness degree.
The Bigger Picture: By open-sourcing, xAI shifts the competitive advantage from proprietary pipelines to ecosystem momentum. Openness accelerates innovation, diversifies use cases, and amplifies network effects — especially when other players cling to closed stacks.
Insight: Transparency can be an ecosystem play, not a liability. Open models unlock collective experimentation, attract communities, and create shared foundations that scale faster than gated code ever could.
🏆 Tool of the week
Tool: Browse.ai
Web Data Extraction for Everyone (No Code Needed)
Image Source: Browse.ai
What it is: Browse.ai is an intuitive, AI-powered platform that lets you scrape, monitor, and automate data extraction from any website—without writing a single line of code. Users simply point and click to train “robots” that retrieve data, handle logins, scroll, and adapt to layout changes automatically.
Why It Matters: Today data is the foundation. Browse.ai transforms static web pages into live data pipelines, feeding insights directly into tools like Google Sheets, Airtable, or even APIs. It saves time, reduces friction, and makes real-time data accessible to teams, researchers, and startups alike.
Best For:
Marketers & Ops teams: Track competitor pricing or monitor product listings.
Founders & analysts: Extract leads, reviews, and market data—automation that used to be a dev project.
Everyone needing data—even from complex sources like login-protected pages, paginated listings, or dynamic content.
Key Features at a Glance:
Point-and-click robot building — No dev skills needed.
Smart monitoring — Get alerts when web content changes, with robots that auto-heal as layouts evolve.
Built-in reliability and scale — AI handles proxies, CAPTCHAs, pagination, and retries seamlessly.
7000+ integrations — Connect to Zapier, Make.com, Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, CRM systems, and more.
☕️ Quick Bites.
OpenAI Opens New Delhi Office — OpenAI is launching its first India office in New Delhi later this year, reinforcing its commitment to its second-largest user base. This comes just after introducing the India-specific ChatGPT Go plan (~₹399/mo with UPI support), signaling a strategy centered on localization and accessibility.
Macrohard: Musk’s AI-Only Software Firm — Elon Musk announced Macrohard, a tongue-in-cheek yet serious project under xAI aiming to simulate a software company like Microsoft, entirely powered by AI agents. It’s the next frontier of conceptual entrepreneurship, blending ambition and satire.
ChatGPT’s Project‑Memory Debuts — With Project‑Only memory enabled, ChatGPT now uses conversations within a project for context and blocks memories outside it—helping maintain focus and avoid cross-project data bleed. This sharpens collaboration workflows while preserving privacy.
Perplexity’s Comet Browser Security Alert — Security firms Brave and Guardio flagged major vulnerabilities in Perplexity’s AI-powered Comet browser, warning that prompt injection attacks could enable phishing or malicious command execution—an alarm for all agentic AI interfaces.
✌🏻 That's it for today.
This moment in AI is shaped not by the smartest models, but by who can build, distribute, and partner best.
If visibility is locked, open channels.
If creativity stalls, license brilliance.
If proprietary walls slow progress, build in community, and let distribution do the lifting.