News in brief: OpenAI’s new $40B deal while Gemini 2.5 debuts

It’s been a big few weeks in AI. OpenAI grabbed headlines with a $40B funding round, and the launch of a powerful new image generation tool, and Google unveiled Gemini 2.5, its most advanced reasoning model yet. Meanwhile, Perplexity is eyeing a massive raise.

OpenAI has been in the limelight over the past few weeks, with the organisation announcing new funding—$40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation. In a statement, the company said: “We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group—few companies understand how to scale transformative technology as they do. Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity.”

This comes in the same week that OpenAI announced a brand new image generator. The new feature enables users to analyse and create brand-new images from user-uploaded images and prompts. While this was formerly only available to paid users, Sam Altman today, on X, (formerly Twiter) announced that this new feature is available to all users. 

“GPT‑4o image generation excels at accurately rendering text, precisely following prompts, and leveraging 4o’s inherent knowledge base and chat context—including transforming uploaded images or using them as visual inspiration,” OpenAI said in a statement.

Google is launching a family of AI reasoning models Gemini 2.5. The company says it is more capable in terms of factual accuracy, logical reasoning, and complex problem-solving, that it can follow conversations with deeper memory retention over long inputs,and is designed to work with lower computational power without compromising quality, making it more scalable.

Perplexity, the AI startup backed by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Softbank and others, is reportedly in discussions to raise between $500 million and $1 billion in a new funding round, aiming for a valuation of $18 billion. This would double its previous $9 billion valuation, reported in November 2024. The startup has also said it is interested in buying TikTok’s US operations and that it would open-source TikTok’s algorithm, a move which some analysts view as a publicity stunt. The US government has given TikTok US until April 5 to find a buyer.