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

OpenAI is live with a retail companion it calls “shopping research” that helps consumers find viable purchase options based on detailed requirement parameters. Trained on a version of GPT‑5 mini, it can query on a virtually unlimited list of discovery constraints, sourcing only from “reliable retailers.” “Results are organic and based on publicly available retail sites,” OpenAI says, indicating there are no advertiser-boosted entries — not yet, anyway. Available on iOS, Android and the Web for logged-in ChatGPT users on the Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, OpenAI is making nearly unlimited usage available to all plans through the holidays. Continue reading OpenAI Continues Push into Retail with ‘Shopping Research’

Google is adding Deep Research to its AI-powered writing and research assistant NotebookLM, adding agentic capabilities that transform it to an autonomous research agent that can find and evaluate information on its own. Previously NotebookLM was limited to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Now, led by your questions, Deep Research browses hundreds of websites, refining its search as it learns, generating within minutes an organized, source-grounded report that can be added to your notebook. Google is also adding support for more file types, including photos — allowing you to upload snapshots of notes — Google Sheets and Microsoft Word documents. Continue reading Google Adds Deep Research, New File Types to NotebookLM

Microsoft has laid out an ambitious plan to develop its own AI superintelligence as it moves to separate its artificial intelligence plans from those of OpenAI, the startup it has financed to the tune of $13 billion, an investment valued at $135 billion following OpenAI’s restructuring as a for-profit public benefit company structure. Microsoft has reorganized to concentrate internal AI efforts under a unit called the MAI Superintelligence Team led by group CEO Mustafa Suleyman. MAI will work towards “Humanist Superintelligence (HSI): incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally,” Suleyman says. Continue reading Microsoft Pursues AI Superintelligence Separate from OpenAI

More than 20 researchers have exited jobs at Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other leading AI enterprises in recent weeks to join a Silicon Valley startup called Periodic Labs whose main goal is “to accelerate science,” focusing on areas including physics and chemistry. The venture has secured more than $300 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and started work at a makeshift facility in San Francisco as it lays groundwork for a dedicated Menlo Park facility where “physical robots” will run scientific experiments on a very large scale. Continue reading AI Startup Periodic Labs Raises $300M for Scientific Research

OpenAI is taking ChatGPT beyond the question-and-answer phase with the introduction of ChatGPT Pulse, which has agentic abilities, proactively doing research to deliver personalized updates based on chats, feedback, and connected apps like calendar. Users can curate the results by indicating what’s useful. ChatGPT will be working while you’re not, delivering up to 10 “briefs” designed to help start your day. Available in preview to ChatGPT Pro users on mobile, OpenAI plans to “learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone.” Continue reading OpenAI’s Agentic ChatGPT Pulse Aims to Help Start Each Day

Meta Platforms has restructured its artificial intelligence group for a third time in as many months. Meta Superintelligence Labs is now organized into four groups: general research, superintelligence, AI products, and infrastructure (data centers and hardware). The move comes after newly hired Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang has had a chance to settle in. The aim is to better leverage the billions of dollars spent recruiting talent and more quickly get AI products to market as well as achieving the company’s longer-term goal of developing artificial general intelligence. Continue reading Meta Superintelligence Labs Continues to Restructure Groups

Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 now have the discrete ability to end “abusive” or “harmful” conversations in consumer chat interfaces. Anthropic says the feature was developed as part of its exploratory work on the protection and well-being of its AI models. The company also envisions broader safety uses, although it does point out that having a model defensively terminate a chat is an extreme measure, intended for use in rare cases. “We’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare,” Anthropic explains, qualifying it is unsure “such welfare is possible.” Continue reading New Anthropic Safety Updates Focus on Claude’s Well-Being

Google has upgraded Gemini 2.5 with a feature called Deep Think that “could be a powerful tool in creative problem solving,” according to the company. Deep Think uses parallel thinking techniques, letting Gemini “generate many ideas at once and consider them simultaneously, even revising or combining different ideas over time, before arriving at the best answer.” Its ability to reason through highly complex problems makes Deep Think mode a powerful tool for researchers, Google says, adding that it also excels at coding. Deep Think is available in the Gemini app to subscribers of Google AI Ultra, priced at $250 per month. Continue reading Google Intros Deep Think Reasoning Model for AI Ultra Subs

Semiconductor giant Qualcomm is seeking to expand its AI tech portfolio with an agreement to purchase custom silicon firm Alphawave IP Group (“Alphawave Semi”) in a deal valued at roughly $2.4 billion. UK-based Alphawave makes chips used in artificial intelligence and data centers. The deal follows months of talks between the San Diego-based Qualcomm and Alphawave, which was identified as an acquisition target in April. “AI inferencing growth is driving demand for Qualcomm’s high-performance energy-efficient compute solutions and this acquisition provides key assets for our expansion into data centers,” Qualcomm explained in disclosing the deal. Continue reading Qualcomm Strikes Deal to Acquire Alphawave for $2.4 Billion

OpenAI is releasing its Codex agentic coding tool in research preview. Codex lets developers delegate simple, routine programming tasks to software engineering agents that can generate production-ready code, documenting the work as they go. Codex can work on many tasks in parallel doing things like writing software features, answering questions about a codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review. According to OpenAI, “each task runs in its own cloud sandbox environment,” preloaded within the user’s repository. OpenAI began releasing Codex last week to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team users, with support for Plus and Edu coming soon. Continue reading OpenAI Adds Codex Software Agent to Some ChatGPT Plans

Google DeepMind has introduced AlphaEvolve, a coding agent that takes an evolutionary approach to general-purpose algorithm discovery and model optimization. AlphaEvolve combines the creative problem-solving abilities of Google’s Gemini models with automated evaluators that verify answers, then applies an evolutionary framework that improves on the most promising results. Evolutionary AI refers to techniques inspired by biological evolution, including natural selection, to optimize and design machine learning models. Continue reading Google DeepMind AlphaEvolve: Model of Algorithm Efficiency

Cisco Systems announced the development of a networking chip that uses quantum mechanics. The prototype entanglement source chip, which the company claims can generate up to one million entangled photon pairs per second (at room temperature), was created through the Outshift by Cisco incubator in partnership with UC Santa Barbara. While other companies are building quantum computers, Cisco is focusing on infrastructure, network and security frameworks. The company has also opened a new research facility in Santa Monica, California — Cisco Quantum Labs — dedicated to quantum networking tech. Continue reading Cisco Unveils a New Prototype Chip for Quantum Networking

Anthropic has upgraded its AI assistant Claude, adding Research, an autonomous capability that integrates with Google Workspace. Claude can now search and reference content in Google Docs as well as communications in Gmail and events in Calendar. “With Research, Claude can search across both your internal work context and the web to help you make decisions and take action faster than before,” Anthropic explains, turning the model into a “true virtual collaborator” for enterprise clients. The expansion puts Anthropic into more direct competition with OpenAI and Microsoft as well as Google with Gemini in the AI productivity space. Continue reading Anthropic Adds Deep Research, Google Integration to Claude

Anthropic’s Claude can now search the Internet in real time, allowing it to provide timely and relevant responses that are also more accurate than what the chatbot previously offered, according to the company. Claude incorporates direct citations for its Web-retrieved material, so users can fact-check its sources. “Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format.” While this is not exactly groundbreaking — ChatGPT, Grok 3, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini all have real-time Web retrieval and most include citations — Claude takes a slightly different approach. Continue reading Real-Time Web Access Informs Claude 3.7 Sonnet Responses