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Perplexity has quietly pulled off something the AI industry is watching closely. The company fine-tuned an open-source Chinese model called GLM five point two, and early benchmarks suggest it matches Anthropic's Claude Opus four point eight at roughly one-third the cost. It's already running in production, which signals that the race to frontier performance no longer requires frontier spending.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is closing a door it only opened months ago. ChatGPT Atlas, the company's agentic browser designed to handle tasks on your behalf, is being sunsetted with an August ninth deprecation date — less than a year after its October launch. It's the latest in a string of quiet shutdowns from OpenAI, and it raises real questions about how fast the company is moving versus how much it can sustain.
And in crypto, two significant departures are drawing attention. Grayscale's CFO Edward McGee stepped down after seven years, weeks after the firm's distribution chief left for a competitor. Over at Coinbase, chief legal officer Paul Grewal is also moving on, though he'll stay on as an adviser now that the company's prolonged SEC battle has concluded. Leadership turnover at this scale, at this moment, tells a story worth following.
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