Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• 🕵🏻‍♂️ OpenAI releases tools for building agents

• 🤖 Google’s Gemma 3 takes on DeepSeek

• 🍰 Google own 14% of Anthropic

• 💰 Project Osprey - How NVIDIA funded CoreWeave’s rise

Let’s get right into it!

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STARTUPS

OpenAI releases tools for building agents

OpenAI is advancing AI agent development with its new Responses API, providing building blocks for developers to create agents that search the web, navigate files, and perform tasks on a computer. The API includes a web search tool powered by GPT-4o, a computer-use feature utilizing the Operator model, and a document search function for tasks like customer support and legal research.

Alongside this, OpenAI introduced the Agents SDK, which helps developers coordinate multiple AI agents to handle complex workflows. These tools build on OpenAI's existing offerings and will eventually replace the Assistants API in 2026, incorporating key improvements based on developer feedback.

BIG TECH

Google’s Gemma 3 takes on DeepSeek

Google's latest open-source AI model, Gemma 3, challenges DeepSeek AI's R1 by achieving similar performance with significantly lower computing power. Using Elo scores, Google claims Gemma 3 reaches 98% of R1’s accuracy while requiring only one Nvidia H100 GPU, compared to R1's estimated need for 32 GPUs. Gemma 3 is designed for efficiency, leveraging AI distillation techniques and reinforcement learning to enhance capabilities while maintaining a smaller parameter count than R1.

It also surpasses Meta's Llama 3 in efficiency, supports multimodal inputs, and offers an expanded context window of 128,000 tokens. Google highlights Gemma 3 as the most capable model operable on a single GPU or TPU, optimizing it for mobile and on-device use while minimizing data memorization risks.

BIG TECH

Google own 14% of Anthropic

Google has secretly invested heavily in AI startups to maintain its competitive edge, with court documents revealing it owns 14% of Anthropic and has invested over $3 billion in the company. Although Google holds no board seats or voting rights, it plans to invest an additional $750 million through convertible debt in September. This revelation comes amid regulatory scrutiny over big tech’s influence on AI, with concerns about monopolistic control.

Despite calls for Google to divest its stake, Anthropic argues that such a move would harm both the company and market competition. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has raised over $14.8 billion, with investments from Amazon ($8 billion) and other firms. The company sources computing power from its investors, meaning some of its funding cycles back into Google and Amazon’s infrastructure.

BIG TECH

How NVIDIA funded CoreWeave’s rise

Nvidia, facing surging AI chip demand, made an unconventional move in 2023 by committing $1.3 billion to rent its own chips from CoreWeave, a rising cloud computing firm. This deal, dubbed "Project Osprey," made Nvidia CoreWeave’s second-largest customer, accounting for 15% of its revenue, while also helping Nvidia diversify from major cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft. Nvidia previously invested $100 million in CoreWeave, an amount now worth over $1 billion ahead of CoreWeave’s anticipated $30 billion IPO. CoreWeave, originally a crypto-mining firm, pivoted to AI cloud services and secured $8 billion in debt and $15 billion in leases to fuel rapid expansion.

Alongside Nvidia, Microsoft contributed over $4 billion in contracts under "Project Albatross", helping CoreWeave scale its data centers. This financial interdependence between AI firms mirrors industry trends, where companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and SoftBank fund AI startups while recapturing revenue through cloud and chip sales. CoreWeave recently announced an $11.9 billion deal with OpenAI, aiming to reduce reliance on Nvidia and Microsoft, though its long-term sustainability depends on securing new customers beyond 2029.