A new Discord Social SDK allows developers to integrate the platform in-app for games. Discord is massively popular with gamers; the company estimates PC players alone spend more than 1.5 billion hours each month on the platform. This free SDK can extend the user experience beyond the third-party content in which it becomes embedded to reach the platform’s community of over 200 million monthly active users. “Developers can power friends lists, cross-platform messaging, voice and more for all players — with or without a Discord account,” the company announced. Continue reading New Discord Social SDK Integrates Platform In-App for Games

Baidu has launched two new AI systems, the native multimodal foundation model Ernie 4.5 and deep-thinking reasoning model Ernie X1. The latter supports features like generative imaging, advanced search and webpage content comprehension. Baidu is touting Ernie X1 as of comparable performance to another Chinese model, DeepSeek-R1, but says it is half the price. Both Baidu models are available to the public, including individual users, through the Ernie website. Baidu, the dominant search engine in China, says its new models mark a milestone in both reasoning and multimodal AI, “offering advanced capabilities at a more accessible price point.” Continue reading Baidu Releases New LLMs that Undercut Competition’s Price

Feeling the pressure from the “open agent” movement and specifically Chinese startup Butterfly Effect and its new product Manus, OpenAI has expanded the capabilities of its own AI technology, launching new tools to help businesses and developers build their own agents. The company’s new Responses API has the functionality of two earlier tools, the Chat Completions API (facilitating ChatGPT queries and responses) and the Assistants API (for multi-step reasoning and file access). The company is also issuing an Agents SDK, a suite of tools for creating and deploying agents that bundles the Responses API. Continue reading OpenAI Ramps Up Its Agent Functions as Competition Surges

Butterfly Effect is the latest Chinese AI firm to get global attention, having drummed up interest in Manus, positioned as a “general agent” that can scour online resources to produce reports. Companies like OpenAI and Google are competing in this space, called deep research. Butterfly Effect says Manus has surpassed OpenAI Deep Research on the GAIA benchmark and the world is listening. The Manus Discord server swelled to more than 138,000 members in the past weeks, and “invite codes” to gain access at this “invitation-only” phase are allegedly going for thousands of dollars on Chinese sales app Xianyu. Continue reading Startup Claims AI Agent Manus Is an Autonomy Breakthrough

Google has added Gemini Embedding to its Gemini developer API. This new experimental model for text translates words, phrases and other text inputs into numerical representations, otherwise known as embeddings, which capture their semantic meaning. Embeddings are used in a wide range of applications including document retrieval and classification, potentially reducing costs and improving latency. Google is also testing an expansion of its AI Overviews search feature as part of a Gemini 2.0 update. Called AI Mode, it helps explain complex topics by generating search results that use advanced reasoning and thinking capabilities. Continue reading Google Updates AI Search and Intros Gemini Text Embedding

OpenAI is releasing a research preview of what it calls its “largest and best” chat model to date, GPT‑4.5, which scales unsupervised learning in pre-training and post-training. As a result, the new chat model has the ability to recognize patterns, draw connections, and generate creative insights without having to draw on time and energy consuming “reasoning.” GPT‑4.5 is currently available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers ($200 per month) and developers subscribing to OpenAI’s API tier. ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Team customers are expected to gain access this week. Continue reading OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 Model Sees Patterns and Thinks Creatively

Over a year after teasing a next-gen Alexa virtual assistant, Amazon is releasing an AI-powered version called Alexa+. The new personal assistant can do things like order groceries for the household, facilitate event planning, manage smart home utilities and security, and, of course, shop online. “She’s smarter, more conversational, more capable,” according to Amazon SVP of Devices & Services Panos Panay. Strategically priced to entice the AI-curious into Amazon membership, Alexa+ costs $20 per month as a standalone service or comes free with Amazon Prime ($15 per month or $139 per year). Continue reading Amazon’s AI-Powered Alexa+ is Agentic with Computer Vision

Anthropic has released a new frontier model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, described as the industry’s first “hybrid AI reasoning model.” The new Claude is different in that it can both respond to questions in real time or, alternatively, “think” about a problem for a prolonged period of time — basically as long as a user would like. Users can choose between “near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user” by selecting the appropriate “reasoning” capability for Claude, Anthropic says. Along with the new model, Anthropic is also debuting a command line tool for agentic coding, Claude Code. Continue reading Anthropic Introduces a New Claude Hybrid Reasoning Model

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

Samsung is showing off what it calls the “next generation of commercial displays” at the Integrated Systems Europe 2025 show in Barcelona. Included are a 115-inch, 4K Smart Signage screen designed to deliver “a new level of immersive visuals” and the Samsung Color E-Paper EMDX that goes up to 75 inches at 5K, uses digital ink and operates at 0.00W power when displaying static images. Both devices consume significantly less energy at their height of workload compared to traditional digital displays, a high priority for business customers. Continue reading Samsung Demos 75-Inch E-Paper Display and AI Smart Signs

Google has initiated a flurry of AI activity following the recent collection of Chinese AI releases. The Alphabet company has launched an experimental version of a new flagship AI model, Gemini 2.0 Pro. Its premiere coding and complex questions model is now available in Google AI Studio, Vertex AI and the Gemini Advanced app. The company has also made its general-purpose “workhorse” model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, available in general release via the Gemini API in AI Studio and Vertex. This follows last week’s announcement that Gemini 2.0 Flash is powering the Gemini app for desktop and mobile. Continue reading Google Adds Gemini Flash Thinking to Search, Maps and More

An internecine AI battle has erupted between Alibaba and DeepSeek. Days after DeepSeek dominated several news cycles with its affordable DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model and the multimodal Janus-Pro-7B, Alibaba released its latest LLM, Qwen 2.5-Max, available via API from Alibaba Cloud. As with DeepSeek, Alibaba is looking beyond its domestic borders, but the fact that a public-facing AI battle is heating up between Chinese companies indicates the People’s Republic isn’t going to quietly cede the AI race to the U.S. Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms models from DeepSeek, Meta and OpenAI. Continue reading Alibaba Plans to Take On AI Competitors with Qwen2.5-Max

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

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