OpenAI is sending the message that artificial intelligence is coming to make jobs, not take jobs. The company is developing the OpenAI Jobs Platform and a complementary OpenAI Certification program, and says it will certify 10 million Americans by 2030 working with launch partners including Walmart. The move comes as OpenAI is amping up its commercial endeavors. Although observers are positioning the career-focused effort as a potential rival to LinkedIn, owned by OpenAI investor Microsoft, the new contender will have a much narrower focus. It is expected to go live in mid-2026. Continue reading OpenAI Developing a Job Platform and Certification Program

Google wants to heighten the profile of its Veo 3 video generator, and to help do so has named Henry Daubrez, the longtime creative chief at the multidisciplinary Dogstudio/DEPT, filmmaker in residence at Google Labs. In addition to working with the Google team to continue developing the Veo 3-powered Flow AI filmmaking tool, Daubrez will mentor artists in a new pilot program called Flow Sessions. Select filmmakers will get unlimited access to Flow, a subscription product starting at $20 per month, plus mentorship and AI education as part of Flow Sessions. Continue reading Google Pushes Generative Video with Filmmaker in Residence

Apple is reportedly working on an AI-powered search tool that would initially be integrated with Siri and eventually added to the Safari browser and Spotlight, a search app launched from the iPhone home screen. Known internally as World Knowledge Answers, it is expected to debut next spring, possibly with help from Google, which is said to have built a model to power Apple’s AI search. Google is a longtime Apple partner, providing the default search engine for Apple devices. The move is intended to make Apple’s search offerings more competitive with products from OpenAI and Perplexity. Continue reading Apple Said to be Working with Google on AI-Powered Search

Following a California teen’s suicide after months of conversation about it with ChatGPT and a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his parents against OpenAI, the company says it will introduce parental controls “within the next month.” New safeguards include parents being able to “control how ChatGPT responds to their teen” and “receive notifications when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress.” OpenAI says it has recently introduced a real-time router that can redirect “sensitive conversations” to its GPT-5 thinking and o3 reasoning models, engineered to respond with greater contextual awareness than efficiency-focused chat models. Continue reading OpenAI Announces Plans for New ChatGPT Parental Controls

OpenAI is purchasing software-testing startup Statsig in a deal reportedly worth $1.1 billion and has named its founder and CEO Vijaye Raji the ChatGPT-maker’s CTO of Applications as part of the move to build out that division, announced in May under CEO Fidji Simo, who previously ran Instacart. Reporting to Simo, Raji will head product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex “with responsibilities that span core systems and product lines including infrastructure and integrity,” said OpenAI, a client of Statsig, whose services include powering A/B testing, feature flagging, and “real-time decisioning.” Continue reading OpenAI Acquires Product-Testing Firm Statsig for $1.1 Billion

Two new Google infrastructure projects will benefit from a nearly $20 billion Alphabet cash infusion. Reported in recent weeks: a $9 billion cloud and AI server facility expansion in Virginia and $9 billion to be spent on new construction and an existing plant upgrade in Oklahoma. Google has also committed $1 billion to AI training and support from the community college to university levels in both states. Such ambitions do not stop at U.S. shores. AWS has earmarked $4.4 billion to construct and operate cloud centers in New Zealand while OpenAI seeks investors for an India build-out. Continue reading Google, AWS Rack Up $23 Billion in New Data Center Growth

Microsoft is rolling out its first internally developed AI models. Branded Microsoft AI (MAI), the two initial releases are MAI-Voice-1, a “highly expressive and natural speech generation model,” and MAI-1-preview, a mixture-of-experts LLM designed for consumer facing applications. The move demonstrates Microsoft’s intent to move beyond exclusive reliance on OpenAI models to power its Copilot assistant and other applications. By striking out on its own, Microsoft is paving a smoother road for OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit entity, which the company is scheduled to initiate by the end of the year. Continue reading Microsoft AI Introduces Proprietary Foundation, Voice Models

OpenAI and Anthropic — rivals in the AI space who guard their proprietary systems — joined forces for a misalignment evaluation, safety testing each other’s models to identify when and how they fall short of human values. Among the findings: reasoning models including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini resist jailbreaks, while conversational models like GPT-4.1 were susceptible to prompts or techniques intended to bypass safety protocols. Although the test results were unveiled as users complain chatbots have become overly sycophantic, the tests were “primarily interested in understanding model propensities for harmful action,” per OpenAI. Continue reading Anthropic and OpenAI Report Findings of Joint AI Safety Tests

Perplexity AI has created a new revenue sharing opportunity for publishing partners affiliated with its Comet browser. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says the company has allocated $42.5 million in revenue to be shared among “a group of trusted publishers and journalists” supporting the company’s products with premium content. Publishers will be apportioned funds based on how much traffic their content generates across the debuting subscription model Comet Plus, as well as the Comet browser and Comet’s AI assistant. Publishers will get 80 percent of the revenue generated from the Comet Plus subscription with Perplexity keeping the rest. Continue reading Perplexity Launches Publisher Revenue Sharing for AI Search

Meta Platforms has agreed to a six-year deal with Google Cloud valued at $10 billion as part of its push into artificial intelligence. Use of Google Cloud data centers are expected to help the social media giant bring leading-edge AI tools to market more quickly. This is the first agreement between Google Cloud and Meta, which continues to work with the number one and two global cloud providers by market share, Amazon Web Services (30 percent) and Microsoft Azure (20 percent). Third-place Google has been aggressively pursuing big cloud contracts as it seeks to grow its 13 percent share. Continue reading Meta Secures $10 Billion Deal with Google Cloud for AI Efforts

This week, DeepSeek-V3.1 dropped on Hugging Face. Media outlets immediately began citing benchmark scores that rival proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic for a system that is available via a permissive license, facilitating wide access. The 685-billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model has 37 billion active parameters and is designed for efficiency. It builds on DeepSeek-pioneered processes like multi-head latent attention (MLA) and multi-token prediction (MTP) to optimize inference, enabling high-performance computing on both enterprise servers loaded with H100 GPUs and consumer hardware like a Mac Studio or comparably powered PC. Continue reading DeepSeek-V3.1 Offered with Improvements in Speed, Context

Japan’s SoftBank has committed to investing $2 billion in U.S. chipmaker Intel as the company struggles to gain traction in the exploding artificial intelligence space and catch up in the mobile market. SoftBank has agreed to purchase roughly 87 million Intel shares at $23 per share to become the company’s fifth or sixth-largest shareholder. The move comes as the Trump administration deliberates converting the U.S. government’s CHIPS Act grants into a 10 percent equity stake in the company as part of its effort to revive American semiconductor manufacturing. Such a deal would make the government Intel’s largest stakeholder. Continue reading SoftBank Invests $2 Billion in Intel as Government Mulls Stake

HTC has entered the smart glasses space with its new Vive Eagle AI-powered eyewear. Since launching in 2016, HTC’s Vive VR headset has accrued an estimated 10 percent global market share — not nearly as much as Meta Quest MR and VR headsets (at 50 percent), Sony PlayStation or even the Apple Vision Pro, but a respectable berth from which to expand to everyday wearables. The Vive Eagle is fully voice controllable and lets users listen to music as well as capture photos and videos with a 12MP ultra-wide camera. The product is available for preorder in Taiwan for the equivalent of about $520. Continue reading HTC Enters Wearables Market with Vive Eagle Smart Glasses

Elon Musk’s xAI has made Grok 4 available on its free tiers as it seeks to take advantage of initial user dissatisfaction with OpenAI’s new GPT-5. The company has positioned Grok as freewheeling and uncensored, a contrast to GPT-5, which has been criticized on Reddit and other social platforms as a “corporate beige zombie” with too many guardrails. After its February debut, Grok 3 was reined-in with checks including removal of its native image generator in March. Grok 4 was released in July with integrated image and video features as well as a “Spicy” mode for creating risqué content. Continue reading Grok 4 Offered Free in xAI Move on ChatGPT-5 Market Share

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