OpenAI launches Rosalind biodefense + Meta One paid AI subscriptions

OpenAI announced its Rosalind Biodefense Program on Friday, opening GPT-Rosalind — a frontier model fine-tuned for life-sciences work — to select US government agencies, allied nations, and a vetted set of private developers. Named applications span epidemiological modeling, early detection, screening, preparedness, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and medical countermeasure development. OpenAI says it briefed the White House and federal public-health agencies on its approach, though it has not yet published red-team or misuse-prevention details for the dual-use model.

Meta on Tuesday launched its first paid AI subscription tiers under a new Meta One umbrella, marking its first AI revenue model beyond advertising. Meta One Plus runs $7.99 per month. Above it sits a $19.99 Meta One Premium tier that unlocks deeper thinking-mode reasoning and expanded image and video generation. Two creator and business tiers — Meta One Essential at $14.99 and Meta One Advanced at $49.99 — round out the lineup. Meta AI stays free for casual users, with the paid AI tiers beginning testing in June across Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia.

Google flipped Gemini Spark — the always-on personal agent it teased at I/O — live for US AI Ultra subscribers on Friday. Spark surfaces as a new tab in the Gemini app on web, Android, and iOS, and can check calendars, RSVP to events, declutter inboxes, draft Gmail replies, navigate Drive, and create Workspace docs without follow-up prompts. The launch puts Google ahead of Anthropic and OpenAI in shipping a mass-market 24/7 background agent for consumer subscribers, though the rollout is US-only for now.

Shanghai-based StepFun released Step 3.7 Flash on Friday — a 198-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts vision-language model that activates roughly 11 billion parameters per token, ships under Apache 2.0, and exposes a 256,000-token context window at up to 400 tokens per second. The model reports 56.26 percent on SWE-Bench Pro and 79.16 percent on SimpleVQA with search, putting its Advisor coding mode within a single-digit margin of Claude Opus 4.6 at roughly one-ninth the per-task cost. Hosted inference is opening on OpenRouter and NVIDIA NIM, with DeepInfra, Fireworks AI, and Modal next.

Nearly all of California's roughly 30 AI-related bills cleared the May 29 crossover deadline on Friday, surviving their chamber of origin and crossing to the second house when the legislature reconvenes June 1. Survivors include AB 1609 (customer-service chatbots must disclose their AI nature), AB 1988 (the PAUSE Act on chatbot safety), SB 947 (worker protections against AI-driven automated decisions), and SB 951 (90-day notice before any technological displacement of 25 percent or more of a workforce). With Sacramento aiming for a July 2 summer adjournment, the next four weeks shape what reaches the governor's desk.

Korean chip startup Xcena closed a $135 million Series B at a $570 million valuation on Friday, co-led by Atinum and IMM Investment with Corstone Asia, SBI Investment, and Mirae Asset Capital joining. Its MX1 chip embeds compute directly inside DRAM modules over the CXL interconnect, aiming to cut the round-trips between GPU and memory that increasingly bottleneck inference. The founders are former Samsung and SK Hynix veterans, and Xcena says the design could let workloads that currently need 10 servers fit on one — though it has not named a launch customer.

Embodied-AI startup Shift launched a New York pilot on Thursday offering free home cleaning in exchange for footage captured by an operator-worn camera the company calls a "magic hat." The first-person video is meant to train future household robots on real-world chores from tidying clutter to washing dishes; Shift says faces and sensitive information will be blurred before footage enters the training set. The pilot is set to expand to San Francisco, London, Zurich, and Munich, with cooking and plumbing data slated for later phases — drawing pointed pushback from privacy advocates over the consent structure of paid-in-service data collection.