“Deep research” is emerging as a model trend, with Perplexity’s Deep Research launching less than three weeks after OpenAI unveiled its own ChatGPT deep research agent, which followed Google’s similar Gemini feature. As its name implies, deep research is a productivity tool, designed to save time by having an AI agent scour materials, compiling data and analysis. Perplexity’s Deep Research “performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report,” across topics ranging “from finance and marketing to product research,” the company says. Continue reading Perplexity Deep Research Productivity Tool Offers a Free Tier

OpenAI has decided to simplify its product offerings. A month after announcing the in-development GPT-o3 as its next frontier model, the company has canceled it as a standalone release, explaining that it would be integrated into the upcoming GPT-5 instead. “A top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman wrote in a social media post this week. Expected to ship later this year, the GPT-5 models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research and more, OpenAI says. Continue reading Sam Altman Reveals Plans to Simplify OpenAI’s Product Line

ChatGPT has a new “deep research” agent that OpenAI says uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks. “It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours,” OpenAI suggests, claiming it will “synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.” Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model optimized for web browsing and data analysis, the company says the deep research agent will typically take 5 to 30 minutes to complete its work. The agent is described as an ideal research tool for areas such as finance, science and engineering. Continue reading ChatGPT ‘Deep Research’ Agent Can Create Detailed Reports

Jack Dorsey’s financial tech and media firm Block (formerly Square) has released a platform for building AI agents: Codename Goose. Previously available in beta, Goose is primarily designed to build agents for coding and software development, but Block built in many basic features that could be applied to general purpose pursuits. Because it is open source and offered under Apache License 2.0, the hope is that developers will apply it to varied use cases. A leading feature of Codename Goose is its flexibility. It can integrate a wide range of large language models, letting developers use it with their preferred model. Continue reading Codename Goose: Block Unveils Open-Source AI Agent Builder

Hangzhou-based AI firm DeepSeek is roiling the U.S. tech sector and upending financial markets. The startup has managed to become competitive with Silicon Valley’s deep learning firms despite U.S. sanctions that prevent Chinese technology companies from buying premium chips. DeepSeek has made it into the global top 10 in terms of model performance, and as of this week had the top-ranked free AI assistant at the Apple App Store. DeepSeek’s new R1 model has drawn attention for using less computing power than competing systems, while performing comparably, despite having been developed using older Nvidia chips. Continue reading Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Disrupting the U.S. Tech Sector

Perplexity joins the list of AI companies launching agents, debuting the Perplexity Assistant for Android. The tool uses reasoning, search, browsers and apps to help mobile users with daily tasks. Concurrently, Perplexity — independently founded in 2022 as a conversational AI search engine — has launched an API called Sonar intended for enterprise and developers who want real-time intelligent search, taking on heavyweights like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. While to date AI search has largely been limited to answers informed by training data, which freezes their knowledge in time, next-gen tools can pull from the Internet in real time. Continue reading Perplexity Bows Real-Time AI Search Tool, Android Assistant

OpenAI has launched Operator, a semi-autonomous AI agent that uses a proprietary web browser to execute tasks like planning a vacation using Tripadvisor or booking restaurant reservations through OpenTable. “It can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking and scrolling,” explains OpenAI. Operator is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA), and is available in research preview to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S. Combining GPT-4o’s computer vision capabilities with advanced reasoning, CUA is trained to interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) — parsing menus, clicking buttons and reading screen text. Continue reading OpenAI Operator Agent Available to ChatGPT Pro Subscribers

Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 line — the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Galaxy S25+ and Galaxy S25 — will more tightly integrate AI, including AI agents, becoming “true AI companions” at a level previously unknown to mobile devices. That leap is credited largely to a “first-of-its-kind” Snapdragon 8 Elite customization for the Galaxy chipset that “delivers greater on-device processing power for Galaxy AI and superior camera range and control with Galaxy’s next-gen ProVisual Engine,” according to Samsung. In addition, the top-of-the-line Galaxy S25 Ultra has been redesigned with a slightly larger 6.9-inch screen and rounded bevel. Continue reading Galaxy Unpacked: More AI for S25 and a Peek at AR Glasses

Just weeks after Nvidia announced the availability of its $249 “compact AI supercomputer,” the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit for startups and hobbyists, CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company is planning to launch a personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits with a starting price of $3,000. The desktop-sized system features the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which enables it to handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. Nvidia claims there is enough processing power to run high-end AI models (performing up to one quadrillion AI calculations per second) while the compact system can run from a standard power outlet. Continue reading CES: Nvidia Will Launch a $3,000 Personal AI Supercomputer

Nvidia Cosmos, a platform of generative world foundation models (WFMs) and related tools to advance the development of physical AI systems like autonomous vehicles and robots, was introduced at CES 2025. Cosmos WFMs are designed to provide developers a way to generate massive amounts of photo-real, physics-based synthetic data to train and evaluate their existing models. The goal is to reduce costs by streamlining real-world testing with a ready data pipeline. Developers can also build custom models by fine-tuning Cosmos WFMs. Cosmos integrates Nvidia Omniverse, a physics simulation tool used for entertainment world-building. Continue reading CES: Nvidia’s Cosmos Models Teach AI About Physical World

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

During CES 2025 in Las Vegas this week, Meta Vice President and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun had a compelling conversation with Wing Venture Capital Head of Research Rajeev Chand on the latest hot button topics in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Some of the conclusions were that AI agents will become ubiquitous — but not for 10 to 15 years, human intelligence means different things to different AI experts, and nuclear power remains the best and safest source for powering AI. And, for those looking for more of LeCun’s tweets, he said he no longer posts on X. Continue reading CES: AI Pioneer Yann LeCun on AI Agents, Human Intelligence

Google DeepMind’s new Genie 2 is a large foundation world model that generates interactive 3D worlds that are being likened to video games. “Games play a key role in the world of artificial intelligence research,” says Google DeepMind, noting “their engaging nature, challenges and measurable progress make them ideal environments to safely test and advance AI capabilities.” Based on a simple prompt image, Genie 2 is capable of producing “an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments” — suitable for training and evaluating embodied agents — that can be played by a human or AI agent using keyboard and mouse inputs. Continue reading DeepMind Genie 2 Creates Worlds That Emulate Video Games

Couchbase, the publicly traded data platform for developers, has launched Capella AI Services with the aim of simplifying the process of developing and deploying agentic AI apps for enterprise clients. Capella AI joins the company’s flagship Couchbase Capella cloud data platform. AI offerings include model hosting, automated vectorization, unstructured data preprocessing and AI agent catalog services. Couchbase’s goal is to “allow organizations to prototype, build, test and deploy AI agents” while giving developers control over data across the development lifecycle, including secure data mitigation for large language models running outside the organization. Continue reading Couchbase Capella AI Helps Deploy Agents, Models, Services

Microsoft’s expansion of AI agents within the Copilot Studio ecosystem was a central focus of the company’s Ignite conference. Since the launch of Copilot Studio, more than 100,000 enterprise organizations have created or edited AI agents using the platform. Copilot Studio is getting new features to increase productivity, including multimodal capabilities that take agents beyond text and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhancements to enable agents with real-time knowledge from multiple third-party sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Integration with Azure is expanded as 1,800 large language models in the Azure catalog are made available. Continue reading Microsoft Pushes Copilot Studio Agents, Adds Azure Models