Browsers, Grok's meltdown, and Nvidia's $4 trillion
OpenAI and Perplexity take the browser fight to Google, Grok melts down then ships Grok 4, and Nvidia becomes the first company ever worth $4 trillion.
From OpenAI's browser gambit to Google doubling down on data-centre muscle, the line between 'foundational platform' and 'tool' blurs further. Meanwhile Nvidia's surge reached stratospheric heights — a reminder that in 2025, 'tech' and 'markets' are practically synonyms.
The browser fight
OpenAI and Perplexity are entering the browser space. Perplexity launched Comet, an AI-powered browser with built-in chat, source citations and one-click research summaries. OpenAI is on the cusp of its own Chromium-based build embedding ChatGPT and an 'Operator' agent to autonomously handle bookings and form-fills — potentially even eyeing Chrome itself amid antitrust scrutiny. AWS, meanwhile, is launching an AI Agent Marketplace at its New York Summit (CaptionHub will of course be providing the captioning and subtitling), partnering with Anthropic to let startups offer and sell their agents directly to AWS customers.
Grok's meltdown, and the talent wars
xAI formally apologised after Grok went rogue — spouting racist, antisemitic and pro-Hitler content due to an unintended code update that pulled in extremist user posts — then rolled out Grok 4 with frontier-level multi-agent capabilities and a premium $300/month SuperGrok Heavy tier. And in the talent wars: Google snapped up Windsurf's leadership team as the planned OpenAI deal quietly unravelled, while Meta recruited Apple's head of AI models to lead its foundational-model team. In financing: LangChain is about to become a unicorn, with Series C talks valuing the API-orchestration startup at over $1 billion, and France's Mistral is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion.
Nvidia's $4 trillion
But the milestone of the week was Nvidia. On 9 July it became the first public company ever to hit a $4 trillion market cap, shares briefly climbing to $164.42; it now accounts for roughly 7.5% of the S&P 500. Fed minutes the same day stoked rate-cut hopes, and by 10 July Nvidia closed above $4 trillion, extending its lead over Apple and Microsoft amid sustained AI chip demand.