The Sequence Radar #880: Last Week in AI: A $60B Cursor Deal, Google's Brain Drain, and Midjourney's Body Scanner

TheSequence · 3 weeks ago

SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor, an AI coding editor, for $60 billion in stock to strengthen its xAI division, while top AI researchers including Noam Shazeer and John Jumper departed Google for OpenAI and Anthropic respectively. Google's $2.7 billion acqui-hire of Shazeer two years prior failed to ensure retention, demonstrating that researcher talent rather than compute capacity has become the limiting factor in AI development. AI capabilities are expanding beyond software into hardware and biology, with Midjourney building a full-body ultrasonic medical scanner and various startups raising hundreds of millions for embodied AI and world models, signaling that AI infrastructure has become strategically essential across physical industries.