"Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity — not a threat."

— Steve Jobs

Welcome to another edition of the Be10x AI Pulse.

Google's new image editing AI just dominated the leaderboards as "nano-banana" in testing, while Apple quietly explored using Gemini to rebuild Siri after pushing their own AI upgrade to 2026. Meanwhile, Meta partnered with Midjourney for "aesthetic technology," OpenAI helped make old cells young again, and Elon Musk sued both Apple and OpenAI over App Store dominance. From viral AI breakthroughs to corporate partnerships to courtroom battles, this week proved that AI competition is getting personal — and profitable.

Let's dive into these exciting developments!

Google has launched Gemini Flash 2.5 Image, the mysterious "nano-banana" model that became a viral sensation during testing by claiming the top spot on LM Arena's Image Edit leaderboard with a commanding lead over competitors. The model specializes in precise, multi-step image editing while preserving character consistency across complex modifications, supporting layered editing workflows that allow users to make sequential changes without losing visual coherence. The system combines multimodal reasoning with world knowledge to make intelligent creative decisions, such as adding contextually appropriate plants for specific environments or maintaining lighting consistency across edits.

Priced at $0.039 per image through Google's API and AI Studio, Flash 2.5 Image undercuts competitors like OpenAI's GPT-Image and BFL's Flux-Kontext while enabling users to blend images, apply artistic styles, and perform sophisticated manipulations using simple natural language prompts. While not yet ready to replace professional photo editing workflows entirely, the model represents a significant step toward democratizing advanced image manipulation and could spark a wave of consumer applications built around its viral editing capabilities.

Apple is reportedly in early discussions with Google about using Gemini to power a completely rebuilt Siri assistant, following internal setbacks that have pushed the voice assistant's major AI upgrade to 2026. According to reports, Google has already begun training a custom Gemini model designed to run on Apple's private servers, ensuring user data remains within Apple's infrastructure. Internally, Apple is simultaneously developing two Siri versions: "Linwood" using Apple's own AI models and "Glenwood" powered by external technology, while also exploring similar partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI.

Apple remains "several weeks away" from finalizing decisions about both the internal versus external approach and potential partner selection. The consideration of external AI partnerships marks a significant departure from Apple's typical strategy and acknowledges the technical challenges the company faces in developing competitive AI capabilities independently.

Meta has announced a partnership with Midjourney to integrate the startup's distinctive "aesthetic technology" into future AI models and products, marking a shift from the company's previous focus on in-house creative tool development. The collaboration aims to enhance visual capabilities across Meta's product ecosystem.

Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang described the arrangement as a "technical collaboration" that will combine engineering teams to upgrade Meta's current visual generation tools, including Imagine, Movie Gen, and research models like Dino V3. Midjourney founder David Holz emphasized that his company remains "an independent, community-backed research lab with no investors" despite the partnership.

The integration could significantly improve the quality of AI-generated visuals for Meta's billions of users, addressing previous criticisms of the company's in-house models. Midjourney's distinctive aesthetic style, developed through its popular Discord-based platform, has proven difficult for competitors to replicate, making this partnership strategically valuable for Meta's creative AI ambitions.

OpenAI has published research with Retro Biosciences demonstrating how a specialized AI model successfully redesigned proteins that reprogram aging cells into stem cells, achieving 50 times better efficiency than the original Nobel Prize-winning versions discovered in 2012. Researchers developed GPT-4b Micro, an AI system trained specifically on biological data rather than general internet content, to redesign "Yamanaka" proteins responsible for cellular reprogramming. The AI-optimized proteins demonstrated dramatically improved DNA repair capabilities and essentially reversed key aging signatures at the cellular level, with results validated across multiple laboratories.

The success represents a significant advancement in applying custom AI models to domain-specific challenges. While public AI models help users with general tasks, specialized systems trained by experts could unlock discoveries in biology, chemistry, and materials science that would take decades using traditional laboratory methods, potentially compressing years of research into weeks of computational work.

Pro editing just became super easy for everyone with Google's new image editing model that dominated testing leaderboards as "nano-banana" 🍌. Perform precise multi-step edits while maintaining character consistency, blend images naturally, and apply artistic styles using simple text prompts. Perfect for creators who want professional-level editing without complex software. Try it out here.

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See you next week,
The Be10x Editorial Team