Western Open Models get Funding: Cohere $500m @ 6.8B, AI2 gets $152m NSF+NVIDIA grants

**OpenAI's GPT-5** achieved a speedrun of Pokemon Red 3x faster than **o3**. **Perplexity** raised **$200M** at a **$20B valuation**. **AI2** secured **$75M NSF grants** and **$77M from NVIDIA** for AI infrastructure projects like Olmo and Molmo. **Cohere** raised **$500M** and hired **Joelle Pineau** from **meta-ai-fair**, boosting models like Command A. **Google** released the **Gemma 3 270M** on-device tiny LLM with INT4 QAT checkpoints and large embedding tables, and made **Imagen 4** generally available with a fast version at $0.02/image. **Meta-ai-fair** introduced **DINOv3**, a family of self-supervised vision foundation models with high-resolution dense features and strong performance on benchmarks like COCO detection and ADE20K segmentation, under a permissive license. A **$150,000 MiniMax AI Agent Challenge** is ongoing with 200+ prizes, encouraging AI project builds by August 25.