Musk v Altman - Again; Wild Bids and Quiet Winners

🥊 Musk v Apple & Altman: The Rivalry That Won’t Quit

What started as a product rivalry is now playing out like a Silicon Valley soap opera. This week, Elon Musk announced that xAI will take legal action against Apple, accusing the tech giant of giving unfair App Store preference to OpenAI’s products while suppressing competitors like his AI chatbot, Grok.

Sam Altman, Musk’s former collaborator at OpenAI, quickly jumped in, accusing Musk’s X platform of doing the same kind of gatekeeping. From there, the exchange spiraled:

• Musk claimed it was “impossible” for any AI company besides OAI to reach #1 in the App Store. Others on X quickly pointed to counter-examples like DeepSeek and Perplexity.
• Musk called out Altman for getting more views on a post despite having far fewer followers. Altman’s reply? “Skill issue” and “or bots.”
• Grok piled on, siding with Altman and accusing Musk of a “documented history” of algorithmic favoritism.
• Musk ended the round by posting a GPT-5 screenshot naming him more trustworthy than Altman, while promising that Grok would reduce its dependence on “legacy media.”

Why it matters: Musk and Altman once built OpenAI together. Now, they’re locked in a public rivalry that blends ego, ideology, and billion-dollar business stakes — and their feud is increasingly shaping the AI narrative in public.

🧠 OpenAI’s Bet on a Neuralink Rival

As if the Musk–Altman drama weren’t enough, OpenAI is reportedly leading an $850 million investment in Merge Labs - a brain-computer interface (BCI) startup co-founded by Altman himself. The aim? Compete directly with Musk’s Neuralink.

Merge Labs will be led operationally by Alex Blania (CEO of Worldcoin), while Altman takes a co-founder role without day-to-day duties. The funding would mark OpenAI’s first major foray into BCIs - a field Altman has been bullish on since his 2017 blog post The Merge, which predicted the blending of human and machine intelligence.

Meanwhile, Neuralink has its own ambitious roadmap: Musk has publicly stated he wants to implant 20,000 people annually by 2031, generating $1 billion in yearly revenue.

Why it matters: This isn’t just another investment — it’s a direct challenge to Musk on one of his most futuristic bets. And with both men already sparring in public, the move adds a new dimension to their increasingly personal tech rivalry.

💰 Perplexity’s $34.5B Play for Chrome

In a move that raised eyebrows, AI search startup Perplexity has reportedly offered $34.5 billion to buy Google Chrome - more than double Perplexity’s own $18B valuation.

The unsolicited pitch went straight to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, positioning Perplexity as an independent steward of Chrome that could address DOJ antitrust concerns. Chrome, which has over 3.5B users and controls more than 60% of the browser market, is at the center of a legal battle that could force Google to divest.

Skeptics see the move as more PR stunt than serious acquisition attempt - especially since Perplexity just launched its own AI-first browser, Comet. But whether or not the deal is real, it’s generated headlines and drawn attention to Comet’s positioning as an alternative to AI-infused Google search.

📈 AI Growth Map: Who’s Winning in July

July was a big month for AI traffic - and the data tells an interesting story about where the industry is headed:

Overall AI: ChatGPT reclaimed the growth crown, adding +325.1M visits to hit 5.7B total monthly visits - far outpacing Gemini’s +51.1M. Grok (+43.2M) surged past Claude, while Notion (+14.5M) continued its transformation from a productivity tool into an AI-powered knowledge partner.

Visual AI: remove.bg led with +6.2M new visits, proving that single-purpose, easy-to-use tools can still dominate. Higgsfield (+5.5M) and Seaart.ai (+5.3M) showed that niche creativity platforms are finding loyal audiences.

AI Coding: Newcomer Kiro (+2.9M) shot to #1 in coding tools by focusing on “copilot for X” functionality. Replicate (+2.4M) and Base 44 (+2.4M) followed closely, signaling a shift away from monolithic IDEs toward modular, task-specific tools.

GTM AI: Salesforce (+8.9M) extended its lead as the AI backbone for enterprise sales and marketing, while creator tools like VidIQ and Framer made notable gains.

Enterprise AI: Chaport (+3.7M) and TurboScribe (+3.1M) climbed the ranks by quietly solving specific workflow problems like live support and transcription — showing that the next wave of enterprise AI will be less flashy but deeply embedded.

The takeaway: Across categories, utility beats novelty. The fastest-growing tools are the ones solving a clear problem with speed, focus, and integration into existing workflows.

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🌎 Matrix-Game 2.0: Skywork’s open-source interactive world model

🤖 Claude 4 Sonnet: Now with a 1M context window for massive projects

🌐 Jan: Lightweight open-source model for research and web search

⚙️ v0: Vercel’s AI assistant for designing and deploying full-stack apps

🎥 Viddo AI: Turn a text prompt into a finished video in minutes

📰 Quickies

🛑 Reddit has blocked the Internet Archive from storing its threads, citing concerns over AI scraping.

🧠 Claude 4 Sonnet can now handle 1M tokens - enough to process an entire codebase or long-form book.

🚀 Lockheed Martin is using IBM’s watsonx.data to unify engineering workflows for 10,000 engineers.

🎮 Grok Imagine now instantly turns prompts into images - and then into short, AI-scored video clips.

🧩 AI has cracked a decades-old math puzzle, hinting at new forecasting potential for finance, disease modeling, and climate science.

Today's Sources

• The Internet
• AI Secret
• The Rundown AI
• The Neuron