Perplexity is expanding the publisher program associated with its AI-powered search engine. Added to the list of participants who will share ad revenue and access performance data are Adweek, LA Times, Mexico News Daily, The Independent, Germany’s Stern, the World Encyclopedia and about 10 other media brands. They join existing partners including Time, Fortune and Der Spiegel. Emphasizing its ongoing investment in publishers, Perplexity named Jessica Chan, formerly with LinkedIn and its content partner program, as head of publisher partnerships. News of Perplexity’s content deals appears to be generating mixed feelings in newsrooms. Continue reading Perplexity Expands Publisher Program Despite AI Controversy

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Pro, a $200 per month subscription plan that provides unlimited access to the full version of o1, its new large reasoning model, and all other OpenAI models. The toolkit includes o1-mini, GPT-4o and Advanced Voice. It also includes the new o1 pro mode, “a version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems,” OpenAI explains, describing the high-end subscription plan as a path to “research-grade intelligence” for a way for scientists, engineers, enterprise, academics and others who use AI to accelerate productivity. Continue reading OpenAI Announces $200 Monthly Subscription for ChatGPT Pro

Microsoft has launched a new AI-powered feature for its Edge Browser. Copilot Vision is now in preview for a limited number of U.S. Copilot Pro subscribers by opt-in through Copilot Labs. With user permission, Copilot Vision “sees” what is onscreen and can respond to questions about text and images, explains the company. Calling Copilot Vision “the first AI experience of its kind,” Microsoft suggests the experience is “almost like having a second set of eyes as you browse,” adding that when users turn on Copilot Vision it will “instantly scan, analyze, and offer insights based on what it sees.” Continue reading Microsoft Previews AI-Powered Copilot Vision for Edge Browser

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

After years of focusing on AI infrastructure, Amazon is plunging into the frontier model business with the Nova series. The new family of generative AI models includes the text-to-text model Amazon Nova Micro and Amazon Nova Lite for fast, mobile-friendly apps, and at the upper echelon the multimodal Amazon Nova Pro and Amazon Nova Premier for processing text, images and video. Amazon, which is heavy into production via Amazon Studios and MGM, is also launched two specialty models focused on “studio quality” output — Amazon Nova Canvas for images and Amazon Nova Reel for video. Continue reading Amazon Dives into Generative AI with Nova Foundation Models

Amazon Web Services is building a supercomputer in collaboration with Anthropic, the AI startup in which the e-commerce giant has an $8 billion minority stake. Hundreds of thousands of AWS’s flagship Trainium chips will be amassed in an “Ultracluster” that when it is completed in 2025 will be one of the largest supercomputers in the world for model training, Amazon says. The company announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual servers as well as Trn2 UltraServers designed to train and deploy AI models and teased next-generation Trainium3 chips. Continue reading AWS Building Trainium-Powered Supercomputer with Anthropic

“AI won’t exist as an app, or a button… it’ll be an entirely new environment built on top of a web browser.” That is the pitch from The Browser Company, the New York-based firm behind the Arc browser that is now developing an AI-first web interface called Dia, expected to debut early next year. Dia aims to leverage AI tools to simplify common Internet tasks. The repertoire is now a familiar one, with things like writing assists and inspirational prompts becoming AI givens in a competitive field where Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are already established. The Browser Company is trying to distinguish Dia with a simple, user-friendly interface. Continue reading The Browser Company is Building Dia, an AI-First Web Browser

Alibaba Cloud has released the latest entry in its growing Qwen family of large language models. The new Qwen with Questions (QwQ) is an open-source competitor to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. As with competing large reasoning models (LRMs), QwQ can correct its own mistakes, relying on extra compute cycles during inference to assess its responses, making it well suited for reasoning tasks like math and coding. Described as an “experimental research model,” this preview version of QwQ has 32-billion-parameters and a 32,000-token context, leading to speculation that a more powerful iteration is in the offing. Continue reading Qwen with Questions: Alibaba Previews New Reasoning Model

German media company Bertelsmann has partnered with AI startup ElevenLabs on an effort to drive tech innovation and workflow across Bertelsmann production, marketing and distribution. Bertelsmann operations span roughly 50 countries with businesses including the publisher Penguin Random House, record label BMG and the RTL Group television unit. The objective is for ElevenLabs tools in voice and audio generation to help Bertelsmann expand productivity and reach. In August, New York-based ElevenLabs opened a European headquarters in London, expanding its international footprint for text-to-speech and other audio apps. Continue reading Bertelsmann and ElevenLabs Team Up to Foster AI Production

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

Lightricks has released an AI model called LTX Video (LTXV) it says generates five seconds of 768 x 512 resolution video (121 frames) in just four seconds, outputting in less time than it takes to watch. The model can run on consumer-grade hardware and is open source, positioning Lightricks as a mass market challenger to firms like Adobe, OpenAI, Google and their proprietary systems. “It’s time for an open-sourced video model that the global academic and developer community can build on and help shape the future of AI video,” Lightricks co-founder and CEO Zeev Farbman said. Continue reading Lightricks LTX Video Model Impresses with Speed and Motion

Google has added a Gemini extension that lets users link their Spotify accounts and leverage the AI for music search and discovery. Currently only for Android in English, the app accepts spoken and text prompts to select music by song, album, artist or playlist using “Play & Search.” Only Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to request and play specific tunes on demand. And while users will be able to use Gemini to activate existing playlists or pipe music themed to an activity or mood (like workouts or romantic meals), it cannot create a Spotify playlist or radio. Continue reading Google Offers Spotify Extension for Gemini Mobile Ecosystem

Anthropic is releasing what it hopes will be a new standard in data integration for AI. Called the Model Context Protocol (MCP), its goal is to eliminate the need to customize each integration by having code written each time a company’s data is connected to a model. The open-source MCP tool could become a universal way to link data sources to AI. The aim is to have models querying databases directly. MCP is “a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments,” according to Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Protocol Intends to Standardize AI Data Integration

Nvidia has unveiled an AI sound model research project called Fugatto that “can create any combination of music, voices and sounds” based on text and audio inputs. Described by Nvidia as “the world’s most flexible sound machine,” many appear to agree that the new model represents an audio breakthrough, with the potential to generate a wide array of sounds that have not previously existed. While popular sound models from companies including Suno and ElevenLabs “can compose a song or modify a voice, none have the dexterity of the new offering,” Nvidia claims. Continue reading Nvidia AI Model Fugatto a Breakthrough in Generative Sound

Google DeepMind has come up with an error correction technique it says will make quantum computers more reliable, particularly at scale. While quantum computing holds tremendous promise — potentially able to solve in just a few hours problems it would take a conventional computer “billions of years” to figure out, Google claims — the systems are notoriously unstable, due to the delicacy of the “quantum state.” AlphaQubit is an AI-based decoder that identifies quantum computing errors with accuracy. Combining DeepMind’s machine learning expertise with Google Quantum AI error correction, the technique advances efforts to create a reliable quantum computer. Continue reading Google DeepMind Touts AI-Powered Quantum Error Detection