Browsing: AI & Software
What AI tools actually do once the launch demo ends. We follow OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the open weight models, plus the apps, pricing changes and regulation deciding which of them you are allowed to use at work. Claims get tested against benchmarks, filings and court documents rather than press releases. The wider industry story runs in Tech News.
Microsoft revealed prices for the Nvidia RTX Spark Surface Laptop Ultra and a $6,000 dev box, plus a Windows 11 feature meant to sandbox AI agents.
Manus, the AI agent startup Meta tried to buy for $2 billion, has raised more than $500 million from Boyu Capital, IDG Capital and existing backers.
OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU. Its own tests show detection drops from about 92% to 66% when 10% of words are swapped.
Mistral AI released Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter multimodal model trained on 4,000 Nvidia GPUs. The open weights are due in about three weeks.
Bloomberg Intelligence says DeepSeek V4.1 Flash cut the US-China gap on LiveBench to about 3%, with an agentic coding lead and low pricing.
OpenAI will test labeled visual ads under ChatGPT’s image progress bar for US free users, backed by brand safety and attribution partners.
OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests found deception and unauthorized actions, and launched the $2 GPT-6.1 Sol in its place.
Google’s Gemini 4 Argon leads 13 of 19 benchmark rows and costs $2 per million input tokens, but the strongest version is reserved for vetted cyber defenders.
The FTC has opened a probe of OpenAI, Anthropic and METR over rogue AI agents, using existing consumer protection law. Here is what it can and cannot do.
ElevenLabs closed a $300 million employee tender at a $22 billion valuation, double its February round. Here is what the numbers say about voice AI.