OpenAI is releasing two lower-cost, open-weight reasoning models in an effort to be more competitive with Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek and they will be the first OpenAI models available from Amazon. The new offerings — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — will be among the model choices on AWS’s Bedrock and SageMaker AI services. Both models are said to be well-suited for agentic use. The gpt-oss-120b model performs comparably to OpenAI o4-mini on core reasoning and can run on a single 80GB GPU. The gpt-oss-20b model is compared to OpenAI o3‑mini and can run on edge devices with just 16GB of memory. Continue reading Open-Weight Models Are a First from OpenAI in AWS Catalog

Google’s YouTube is adding new age-verification methods designed to protect teens. The streaming video platform is using AI to interpret “a variety of signals” to identify users under 18, regardless of the birthdate used to create the account. If the system identifies a user as a teen, age-appropriate protections will automatically take effect. These include disabling personalized advertising, restricted recommendations, limits on repetitive viewing of certain content and screen-time reminders. If the system incorrectly categorizes a user as under 18, they will have the option to correct the situation with a credit card or a government ID. Continue reading YouTube Deploying AI to Identify and Safeguard U.S. Minors

Software development platform Hugging Face is taking orders on Reachy Mini, a table-top robot that lets people use the latest AI models to develop, test, deploy, and share real-world AI applications from their desk. The tiny test subject is 11 inches at work and nine inches in sleep mode. Due to begin shipping later this summer, Reachy Mini comes in two configurations: a $299 Lite version that must be tethered to a computer running Mac or Linux OS (Windows coming soon) and a wireless $449 model that has a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer built-in. Continue reading Hugging Face Opens Preorders on New ‘Reachy Mini’ Robots

OpenAI has upgraded its autonomous web browsing agent Operator to the new reasoning model OpenAI o3 from the prior GPT-4o multimodal LLM engine. The update is being released globally in research preview this month for those who subscribe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro for $200 per month. Operator serves OpenAI’s “computer-using agent” (CUA), a model trained to interact with graphical interfaces that uses the Web to perform tasks for people. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage, and interact with it much like a human would by typing, clicking, scrolling and more,” OpenAI explains. Continue reading New Reasoning Model Improves Smarts of OpenAI Operator

Netflix is testing a new recommendation engine that uses OpenAI technology to suggest viewing options based on input that goes beyond the usual parameters of cast and genre. The system is being introduced gradually and is already available in Australia and New Zealand where subscribers must opt-in to try it out, reports say, noting it allows input of more nuanced parameters, including mood, to populate search results. The partnership underscores OpenAI’s efforts to have its technology applied practically and commercially as it seeks to transition from a non-profit to a for-profit public benefit business structure. Continue reading Netflix Tests Content Recommendations Powered by OpenAI

Google has debuted a new accelerator chip, Ironwood, a tensor processing unit designed specifically for inference — the ability of AI to predict things. Ironwood will power Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, which runs the company’s Gemini models and is gearing up for the next generation of artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s TPUs are similar to the accelerator GPUs sold by Nvidia, but unlike the GPUs they’re designed for AI and geared toward speeding neural network tasks and mathematical operations. Google says when deployed at scale Ironwood is more than 24 times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Continue reading Google Ironwood TPU is Made for Inference and ‘Thinking’ AI

Microsoft is debuting a suite of security agents for Copilot that will take over repetitive and rote tasks burdening cybersecurity teams. This next evolution of Security Copilot with AI agents is designed to autonomously assist in critical areas such as phishing, data security, and identity management. “The relentless pace and complexity of cyberattacks have surpassed human capacity and establishing AI agents is a necessity for modern security,” notes the company. Microsoft Threat Intelligence is processing 84 trillion signals per day, indicating exponential growth in cyberattacks, including 7,000 password attacks per second, the company says. Continue reading Microsoft Is Combating Security Threats with Copilot Agents

OpenAI is getting close to finalizing its first custom chip design, according to an exclusive report from Reuters that emphasizes the Microsoft-backed AI giant’s goal of reducing its dependency on Nvidia chips. The blueprint for the first-generation OpenAI chip could be finalized as soon as the next few months and sent to Taiwan’s TSMC for fabrication, which will take about six months — “unless OpenAI pays substantially more for expedited manufacturing” — according to the report. Even by usual standards, the training-focused chip is already on a fast track to deployment. Continue reading OpenAI In-House Chip Could Be Ready for Testing This Year

Model training continues to hit new lows in terms of cost, a phenomenon known as the commoditization of AI that has rocked Wall Street. An AI reasoning model created for under $50 in cloud compute credits is reportedly performing comparably to established reasoning models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 on tests of math and coding aptitude. Called s1-32B, it was created by researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington by customizing Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, feeding it 1,000 prompts with responses sourced from Google’s new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental reasoning model. Continue reading Reasoning Model Competes with Advanced AI at a Lower Cost

Snap has created a lightweight AI text-to-image model that will run on-device, expected to power some Snapchat mobile features in the months ahead. Using an iPhone 16 Pro Max, the model can produce high-resolution images in approximately 1.4 seconds, running on the phone, which reduces computational costs. Snap says the research model “is the continuation of our long-term investment in cutting edge AI and ML technologies that enable some of today’s most advanced interactive developer and consumer experiences.” Among the Snapchat AI features the new model will enhance are AI Snaps and AI Bitmoji Backgrounds. Continue reading Snap Develops a Lightweight Text-to-Video AI Model In-House

Most people know Hugging Face as a resource-sharing community, but it also builds open-source applications and tools for machine learning. Its recent release of vision-language models small enough to run on smartphones while outperforming competitors that rely on massive data centers is being hailed as “a remarkable breakthrough in AI.”  The new models — SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M — are optimized for “constrained devices” with less than around 1GB of RAM, making them ideal for mobile devices including laptops and also convenient for those interested in processing large amounts of data cheaply and with a low-energy footprint. Continue reading Hugging Face Has Developed Tiny Yet Powerful Vision Models

CES’s Eureka Park is a section of exhibits where startups and early-stage products from all over the world solicit feedback and explore opportunities. From this year’s Italian delegates at Eureka Park, our team found EYE2DRIVE, a semiconductor company that develops CMOS chips for digital imaging inspired by the human eye. Their image sensors use AI to mimic the human eye’s ability to adapt its response to changing environmental light conditions. As a result, quality and color of the captured image remains unaffected. While currently focusing on autonomous navigation applications, the tech has potential for media production as well. Continue reading CES: Image Sensors Adapt to Light Changes Like Human Eye

Billed as a conversation among CMOs, this CES panel — moderated by Consumer Technology Association VP of Marketing & Communications Melissa Harrison — drilled down into how major brands and advertising technology companies are integrating artificial intelligence into their pipelines and organizations. They agreed that, although this is still at the beginning stage and requires experimentation, those who are frozen and have not yet started engaging with AI will quickly be at a learning curve disadvantage. Still, panelists emphasized that AI will not replace human creativity. Continue reading CES: How Brands and Marketers Are Integrating AI, Creativity

In the never-ending smorgasbord of AI hype, “agents” represent practical and worthwhile potential. AI agents are autonomous AI programs that can understand some context and take action in that context. Agents can autonomously perform a task that involves mapping a goal to its context and parameters (even if they’re not explicitly laid out), process data across multiple formats and ontologies to understand the goal and work through the task, call multiple functions across multiple apps, and take some action to achieve the goal. Unfortunately, however, while many are talking about AI agents, few are promoting actual products at CES. Continue reading CES: Show Features a Surprisingly Small Number of AI Agents

Amazon is testing a new way to provide viewers with content recommendations with AI Topics, now in limited beta release for Prime Video. AI Topics eschews traditional recommendation algorithms in favor of AI that “discovers” Prime Video content based on a combination of viewing history and personal interests. Users can request “mind-bending sci-fi” or “fantasy quests,” then navigate seamlessly through topics curated for them that appear on the Prime Video home page. Once a topic is selected, movies, series and linear channels will populate alongside additional related topics. Continue reading Amazon Testing ‘AI Topics’ Recommendations for Prime Video