OpenAI is rolling a new foundation model, GPT-5, via API for developers and enterprise users in three branded sizes — gpt-5, gpt-5-mini and gpt-5-nano — “to give developers more flexibility to trade off performance, cost, and latency.” The company said Thursday that it is also making GPT‑5 available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team and Free tier users. Enterprise and Education tier users are promised access this week. While GPT‑5 in the API platform is the reasoning model that powers maximum performance in ChatGPT, “GPT‑5 in ChatGPT is a system of reasoning, non-reasoning, and router models,” OpenAI explains. Continue reading OpenAI Announces Launch of GPT-5 Model Across All Tiers

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Opus 4 that reportedly improves on agentic tasks, computer coding and reasoning. Pricing has not increased from what customers were paying for Opus 4, and the company promises “substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.” The move comes as Anthropic nears a new funding round targeting $3 to $5 billion, which could place a valuation of up to $170 billion on the startup. Recurring revenue hit $5 billion as of late July, which could increase to $9 billion by the end of the year. Claude Opus 4.1 was released two days before OpenAI unleashed GPT-5, and performs comparably in coding benchmarks. Continue reading Anthropic Seeks to Raise $5 Billion, Debuts Claude Opus 4.1

The “open agentic web” was a major focus at the Microsoft Build conference, with dozens of new AI tools and features aimed at helping developers create autonomous systems that can shoulder routine and repetitive duties for human taskmasters and even undertake things like independent research with minimal supervision. The company unveiled a new GitHub Copilot coding agent that “supercharges” the AI assistant, allowing it to undertake more complex tasks and collaborate with other agents. Copilot Tuning was introduced as a “low-code” customization tool for adding corporate data to AI models. In all, Microsoft made more than 50 news announcements. Continue reading Microsoft Promotes AI Agent Capabilities with New Features

The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund will award financing to select applicants in a program designed to fuel security and sustainability for open-source projects. Applications are open now and close on January 7. During that time, 125 projects will be selected for a piece of the $1.25 million investment fund, made possible through the participation of American Express, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Chainguard, HeroDevs, Kraken, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and others. In addition to monetary support, recipients will be invited to take part in a three-week educational program. Continue reading GitHub Promotes Open-Source Security with Funding Initiative

An AI-powered coding app called Cursor is building a fanbase, with everyone from hobbyists to engineers subscribing to the service. The platform reportedly has 30,000 paying customers, among them employees at OpenAI, Midjourney and Perplexity. Referred to as “the ChatGPT of coding,” Cursor uses popular models including GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to automate building apps and other coding tasks. Cursor was launched by two-year-old startup Anysphere, which has raised more than $60 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Continue reading New AI Coding App Cursor Gains Following and $60M in Funds

French startup Mistral AI has released its first large language model for coding. Codestral gives developers looking for a code-native AI tool an option to Meta’s Code Llama, Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. Fluent in 80 programming languages — including Python, C++ and JavaScript — Codestral can complete code, write tests, and augment partial code “using a fill-in-the-middle mechanism,” while reducing “the risk of errors and bugs,” according to the company. The new LLM is described as open, but its license prohibits commercial use of both Codestral and its outputs. Continue reading Mistral Development Tool Knows 80 Programming Languages

Amazon has pulled the plug on CodeWhisperer, which has been incorporated into its Q Developer product, announced at November’s re:Invent as part of an AI-powered AWS enterprise suite called Amazon Q, which also includes Q Business. Both Q Developer, which enables natural language coding, and Q Business, a data-driven productivity tool are now in general release, and Q Apps has just been added in preview, letting employees “build generative AI-powered apps from their company’s data, without any prior coding experience.” The move comes as Amazon seeks to gain ground on the Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding products. Continue reading AWS CodeWhisperer Is Rebranded as Part of Amazon Q Suite

GitHub has introduced Copilot Workspace, a Copilot-native developer environment for artificial intelligence, in technical preview. Developers are invited to sign up for a waitlist for the service, which allows the use of natural language to plan, build, test and run code. The Microsoft-owned company has introduced various aspects of Copilot over the past few years, adding an autocomplete pair programmer in 2022, and in 2023 Copilot Chat for natural language coding, debugging and testing, “allowing developers to converse with their code in real time.” The “task-centric” Copilot Workspace leverages different agents for a “start-to-finish experience.” Continue reading GitHub Puts Copilot Workspace Developer Platform in Preview

Months-old startup Cognition AI has emerged from stealth mode with Devin, a generative platform it is calling “the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer.” Although Cognition has yet to make Devin widely available, much less allow independent testing, if its claims are true it would mark a turning point in the AI coding space, moving it from a field of AI assistants to a full-fledged AI engineer. Based on natural language instruction, Devin could potentially take a project from concept to execution rather than simply suggesting code snippets or offering barebones frameworks. Continue reading Startup Cognition Launches AI Software Coding Engine Devin

Amazon is offering a new service called Bedrock that offers foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI and Amazon, which is introducing two of its own models under its new brand, Titan. The models, which are accessible via API, will allow customers to build and scale generative AI-based applications using pre-trained, off-the-shelf systems that can be customized. Amazon’s Titan line includes a generative LLM that outputs text, the other is an embeddings LLM that translates text to numeric representations that carry the semantic meaning of the text. Embeddings are typically helpful when bridging concepts, like words and images. Continue reading Amazon Intros GenAI Service Bedrock and Its Own Titan LLM

Google has teamed with San Francisco startup Replit in a bid to challenge Microsoft’s GitHub and the Github Copilot code generator launched in conjunction with OpenAI. Under the new partnership, Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Replit’s software development AI, called Ghostwriter, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform. Replit, which says 20 million developers use its platform, launched Ghostwriter in the fall and in January added a conversational AI interface for generating code and debugging. Continue reading Google Cloud Partners with Replit to Develop AI Coding Tools

On the heels of debuting conversational AI to search, Microsoft is leveraging artificial intelligence in corporate applications that have traditionally been dominated by competitors like Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Dynamics 365 Copilot is an AI assistant debuting in preview as part of the software giant’s business suite. Based on technology from OpenAI, it is designed to handle tasks including sales, marketing, customer service and supply chain. It can also draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. Targeting customers and categories for sales pitches and writing product listings for e-commerce are also among its skills. Continue reading Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Copilot Brings AI to Business Apps

Google seems to view ChatGPT as a threat to its $149 billion annual search business. OpenAI’s chatbot is said to have amazed those who’ve seen its ability to grasp concepts and generate ideas, which Google execs are concerned might translate to “a compelling new search experience,” according to reporting by The New York Times. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, is said to have wrangled Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for “several meetings” focused on ratcheting up Google’s AI development in an effort to overtake ChatGPT’s first-mover advantage. Continue reading Google Taps Page and Brin to Take on ChatGPT for AI Search

Microsoft plans to add OpenAI’s artificial intelligence app ChatGPT to its Azure OpenAI Service, which is now being made generally available after being offered to select enterprise customers in limited availability since November 2021. ChatGPT’s Azure debut expands on the existing relationship with OpenAI, in which Microsoft in 2019 invested $1 billion, a stake it is considering to expanding by another $10 billion. Microsoft couched the moves as a ”continued commitment to democratizing AI, and ongoing partnership with OpenAI.” Microsoft chief exec Satya Nadella also announced the company plans to eventually include AI tools like ChatGPT into all of its products. Continue reading Microsoft Adding ChatGPT to Wide Release of Azure OpenAI