Meta's Watermelon AI, Venice AI unicorn, and Iran funeral tensions dominate July 5 pulse
The weekend's biggest tech story is Meta's claim that its next frontier model, codenamed Watermelon, has already matched OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on unnamed AI benchmarks while still in training [1]. Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang told employees on July 2 that the model is consuming
The weekend's biggest tech story is Meta's claim that its next frontier model, codenamed Watermelon, has already matched OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on unnamed AI benchmarks while still in training [1]. Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang told employees on July 2 that the model is consuming roughly ten times the compute of its predecessor, Muse Spark, and is being trained on the company's Prometheus cluster in Ohio [1]. However, the benchmarks were not named, the evaluation was internally run, and independent auditors have not yet verified the claim [1]. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Muse Spark scored 52, below GPT-5.5's 59, Claude Opus 4.6's 53, and Gemini 3.1 Pro's 57 [1].
In AI funding, privacy-focused startup Venice AI raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, its first external fundraise, led by Dragonfly with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures [2]. The company, founded by crypto veteran Erik Voorhees, says it serves more than 3 million active users and 1.7 million API calls per day, with annualized run-rate revenue exceeding $70 million [2]. Venice hosts more than 200 AI models, including "uncensored" open-source options, and encrypts user input client-side without storing data on its own systems [2].
On the world stage, Iran held the second day of funeral ceremonies for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a February 28 airstrike [3]. A performer at the Tehran funeral directly called for the death of U.S. President Donald Trump, drawing cheers from hundreds of thousands of mourners [3]. The new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, did not attend; he is believed to be in hiding after reportedly being wounded in the same strike that killed his father [3]. The funeral has paused ongoing U.S.-Iran talks over a permanent end to the war [3].
Meanwhile, the Kremlin said Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a "businesslike and highly constructive" phone call on Saturday lasting one hour and 25 minutes [4]. Trump "reaffirmed his readiness" to help end the Ukraine war, while Putin accused Ukraine and European countries of prolonging the conflict [4]. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke with Trump on Saturday and said they agreed to continue discussions at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8 [4].