AI & TECH NEWS: Everything else you need to know today

🔍 Chrome Killer: Perplexity is challenging Chrome with a new agentic web browser called Comet. There’s no release date yet, but you can join the waitlist here.

💭 Deep Thinker: Alibaba released QwQ-Max-Preview, which adds deep reasoning and problem-solving capabilities to the base version of Qwen2.5.

⚡ In a Flash: To kick off its Open-Source Week, DeepSeek unveiled a new tool called FlashMLA that helps LLMs run more efficiently on Nvidia’s hardware.

☁️ Cloud Conquest: Google beat out Microsoft and Oracle to become Salesforce’s new cloud partner in a deal worth $2.5B. 

🎯 Pitch Perfect: Elon Musk’s X is rolling out a new set of features that will let advertisers use Grok to generate ad copy and target specific audiences.

💰 Funding: NYC-based software company MongoDB has acquired Voyage AI, a startup that builds data-retrieval tools for LLMs, in a $220M deal. And Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is planning to spend $52B on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years — matching the amount it spent on those investments over the past decade.