June 24, 2026
AI News
The AI news worth knowing this week.
Google's AI brain drain: Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer joins OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper joins Anthropic
Two of Google's biggest AI names left within a single week. Noam Shazeer — a Google VP of engineering, co-lead of Gemini, and co-inventor of the Transformer architecture — is leaving for OpenAI to lead architecture research, less than two years after Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring him back from his startup Character.AI. Days later, John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, said he is leaving DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic, the maker of Claude. The back-to-back exits rattled investors and helped push Alphabet to its worst stock day in more than a year, fueling talk of an intensifying AI talent war.
Read the original →China's Z.ai releases GLM-5.2, an open-weight model that rivals GPT-5.5 on coding at a fraction of the cost
Chinese startup Z.ai (formerly Zhipu) released GLM-5.2, an open-weight model under the MIT license that matches or beats GPT-5.5 on several coding benchmarks at roughly one-sixth the API cost, with a 1-million-token context window.
Read the original →Meta halts worker tracking for AI training due to privacy fears
Meta has halted its program of tracking employee computer usage for AI training after raising privacy concerns.
Read the original →US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia
Global markets dropped Tuesday as investors became cautious about high valuations and spending in the AI sector.
Read the original →You’re only supposed to blow the bloody hooves off: AI Michael Caine narrates Odyssey audiobook
ElevenLabs has created an AI replica of Michael Caine's voice, which narrates a new audiobook version of Homer's Odyssey. The project comes as Christopher Nolan releases his own adaptation of the epic poem in theaters next month.
Read the original →Oracle’s 21,000 layoffs help drive its debt-fueled AI investments
To fund its AI investments, Oracle is utilizing proceeds from recent layoffs and increasing its debt.
Read the original →Anthropic reimagines Claude in Slack as nosy, always-on agentic AI coworker
Anthropic has replaced its standalone Claude app for Slack with a new "agentic" version that integrates more deeply into the platform. The updated Claude acts as an always-on AI assistant within Slack conversations.
Read the original →Dubbing & Open source
Open-source voice and dubbing tools worth a look.
FunAudioLLM/CosyVoice
CosyVoice is Alibaba's open-source multilingual voice-generation model, covering inference, training, and deployment for cross-lingual text-to-speech and voice cloning.
Read the original →QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS
Alibaba's Qwen team open-sourced Qwen3-TTS, a text-to-speech model family with expressive, streaming speech, free-form voice design, and voice cloning.
Read the original →k2-fsa/OmniVoice
OmniVoice is an open-source text-to-speech system offering high-quality voice cloning across more than 600 languages.
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