Anthropic has released a new tool called Interviewer available through Claude.ai to collect data on customer usage and preferences. Among the early findings are that “the general workforce wants to delegate routine work to AI but preserve the tasks central to their professional identity.” Anthropic plans to expand the scope of inquiry “through partnerships with creatives, scientists, and teachers” and says it will share the results. The company admits it wants feedback to develop better products, but “also because understanding people’s interactions with AI is one of the great sociological questions of our time.” Continue reading Anthropic Interviewer Explores Claude Users’ Views About AI

Meta Platforms is combining Facebook and Instagram support into a single hub and using AI to improve outcomes for customers seeking help. “In the past year, new account hacks decreased by more than 30 percent globally on Facebook and Instagram and recovering an account is now faster and simpler with the help of AI,” Meta said announcing the change. Users can now report account issues, find answers by querying Meta AI-powered search, and more. The update is coming to iOS and Android for both platforms. Meta is also testing an AI support assistant for Facebook that offers “instant, personalized help.” Continue reading Meta Combines Facebook, Instagram Support into Single Hub

The Entertainment Technology Center at USC launched ETCentric in March of 2011 as a news and commentary forum designed to provide our community members with the most vital information impacting media and entertainment. Over the years we experimented with a variety of delivery methods, eventually settling upon an online portal and associated daily email alert, teamed with a social media presence, highlights of ETC projects, and live reporting from key industry events. While it has been our great pleasure to provide this service to our valued members, we now find ourselves in a different era, one that features a much wider collection of targeted news services and social media tools that serve similar objectives. With that in mind — and as a key part of our larger initiative to refocus information-sharing on ETC projects — we have decided to shutter ETCentric and The Daily News Brief in their current forms and launch a new, more dynamic ETC website in January. The final day for ETCentric will be Friday, December 12. Continue reading ETC Updating Info Exchange, Will Shutter ETCentric Next Week

YouTube has issued its first annual YouTube Recap. The feature is available to users worldwide and takes the form of a shareable YouTube Short that highlights favorites based on your watch history from the year. “You’ll get a set of up to 12 different cards that spotlight your top channels, interests, and even the evolution of your viewing habits, or which personality type you fall into based on the videos you loved to watch,” YouTube explains of the highlight reel. Along with YouTube Recap, the streamer also released its 2025 U.S. trending lists covering creators, songs, podcasts and cultural moments. Continue reading YouTube Issues Year-End Viewer Recap Alongside Trend Lists

Spotify’s Wrapped 2025 is here, and as usual, the streaming service is mixing up its annual lists including Top Global Artist (Bad Bunny), Top Global Podcast (“The Joe Rogan Experience”) and Top U.S. Artist (Taylor Swift) with some surprises. The company has included top audiobook genres for the first time, also adding “author clips” — messages from authors populated for those who’ve listened to their books. The platform is also extending the traditional Wrapped playlist — a list of each Spotify account holder’s most-played tunes — with the Wrapped Party, which lets friends go head-to-head to see who is the bigger fan. Continue reading Spotify Adds Audiobooks, Party Competition to Wrapped 2025

Apple Music Replay 2025 is here, and this year the platform takes a more granular approach to its users’ listening habits, an attempt to keep pace with Spotify Wrapped. The usual song stats are amplified with a deeper look at each subscriber’s personal music journey. This year, Apple highlights artists discovered this year, loyalty to favorites and comebacks. The company has also morphed its Apple Music for Artists analytics to Artist Replay, which includes the usual business intelligence but adds visual shareable insights encouraging performers to participate in the viral year-end celebration. Continue reading Apple Music Replay 2025 Is More Personalized, Also for Artists

Amazon’s Trainium3 accelerator chip — the company’s first AI silicon built on 3nm technology — is now in general release. It comes to market with the Trainium3 UltraServer, a high-density integrated system purpose-built for large-scale GenAI model training. Trn3 UltraServers can scale to 144 Trainium3 chips, delivering up to 362 FP8 PFLOPs. The Trn3 chips are viewed as challengers to Nvidia’s AI GPUs and Google’s Tensor TPUs. But Amazon also announced it will provide enterprises with turnkey AWS AI Factories that utilize key Nvidia components and support its AI chips, allowing customers to choose or combine brands. Continue reading Amazon Rolls Out New AI Chips, UltraServers and AI Factories

AI agents that can work for days on end without human direction and new Nova 2 models were the big announcements on day two of AWS re:Invent, where Amazon also introduced Nova Forge, a service that lets companies build their own models. The autonomous agents include Kiro for software development, the AWS Security Agent to protect against cyber threats and the AWS DevOps Agent, which monitors and improves the performance of applications across AWS, multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Amazon explains they are part of a new class of “frontier agents” that are autonomous, can operate for hours or days without requiring intervention, and are scalable. Continue reading AWS Frontier Agents Can Work for Days Without Human Help

Microsoft has updated the Xbox platform across PC, mobile, cloud and handheld gaming. Gaming Copilot, in beta, is now available on the Xbox mobile app, adding a “personal gaming sidekick” in your pocket. On Windows 11 handhelds, the “full screen experience” (FSE), which debuted on the ROG Xbox Ally, “is now available to all players on even more Windows 11 handhelds,” says Microsoft. Players who stream via cloud gaming can now choose the resolution on select titles, with support for up to 1440p. Plus, the Xbox app is coming soon for the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K. Continue reading Game Pass Grows as Microsoft Updates Xbox Across Devices

Runway Gen-4.5 is rolling out, and the text-to-video model grabbed the No. 1 spot on the Video Arena leaderboard for generative models that don’t simultaneously output sound, beating the non-audio versions of Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 Pro. Offering what Runway AI calls “unprecedented visual fidelity” across cinematic and “highly realistic” outputs, it is also built for creative freedom, providing “precise control over every aspect of generation.” The new model is good at understanding physics, cause and effect through casual reasoning, camera movements and human emotion, claims the New York-based startup. Continue reading Runway Gen-4.5 Video Debuts at No. 1 on Video Arena Chart

DeepSeek-V3.2 is now in release, integrating thinking directly into tool-use for the first time, improving its predecessor DeepSeek-V3.2 Experimental. The model supports tool-use in both thinking and non-thinking modes. China-based DeepSeek began disrupting the U.S. AI market in January with the debut of foundation models that rival those from Google and OpenAI that are available for free. The company released internal benchmark scores indicating its new model can compete with OpenAI’s GPT-5 in reasoning benchmarks and agentic tasks. A variation, DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, has been released for specialized math and is said to perform comparably to Google’s Gemini 3 Pro. Continue reading DeepSeek Debuts Its V3.2 Reasoning Model in Two Versions

Samsung has unveiled the Galaxy Z TriFold, which unfolds twice to present a seamless 10-inch screen suitable for mobile productivity and cinematic viewing. Measuring just 3.9 mm at its thinnest point, it’s a fairly heavy lift for a smartphone at 0.68 pounds (about the same as a can of soup) and measures 6.26 inches high by 2.9 inches wide and a mere half-inch thick when folded. That’s much lighter than a laptop, and provides an extra inch of height and two inches of width to a tablet of that weight, making it a viable option for business travelers. The device is expected to be available in Korea next week, starting at $2,450 for 16GB RAM/512GB storage, followed by launches in additional markets in 2026. Continue reading Samsung’s 2026 Galaxy Z TriFold Screen Opens to 10 Inches

Google has added four new features in Flow, its AI tool for storytelling, that offer more precise control over images and videos. The upgrades include generative imaging with Nano Banana Pro, doodle prompts, an object insertion/removal tool and camera motion. Flow was introduced in May and offers the ability to edit and build scenes using natural language. The improvements aim to make Flow output more polished. “In Flow, you can use images to serve as the characters, subjects and starting points for your clips” with pictures you upload or create in Flow with the new “Images” tab, according to the company. Continue reading Google Adds New Features to Its Flow GenAI Storytelling Tool

Google has signed on to provide collaborative multi-cloud networking with Amazon using its new “AWS Interconnect – multicloud,” now in preview. Amazon says the new collaboration will simplify multi-cloud networking via managed, private, on-demand access to cross-cloud connectivity. The jointly engineered solution leverages Google’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect technology. The idea is “to enable customers to easily build enterprise-grade applications that span both Google Cloud and AWS environments,” Amazon explains, pointing out that the adoption of multi-cloud applications is rapidly accelerating, driven at least in part by the rise in use of AI. Continue reading Amazon and Google Team on High-Speed Multi-Cloud Service

Amazon has added agentic AI capabilities to Amazon Connect, the neural text-to-speech tool that provides AI-powered customer service support and analytics in real time. Connect is capable of neural text-to-speech in more than 30 languages and also delivers automated speech recognition. Leveraging advanced speech models from Nova Sonic, the Connect agents “deliver natural, human-like conversations, responding with the right pace, tone, and understanding across multiple languages and accents,” Amazon says. The company has also integrated third-party automated speech recognition and text-to-speech solutions from Deepgram and ElevenLabs with Connect. Continue reading Amazon Adds Agentic AI to ‘Connect’ Customer Service Tool