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

“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

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

Ten months after its preview, OpenAI has officially released a Sora video model called Sora Turbo. Described as “hyperrealistic,” Sora Turbo generates clips of 10 to 20 seconds from text or image inputs. It outputs video in widescreen, vertical or square aspect ratios at resolutions from 480p to 1080p. The new product is being made available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers ($20 and $200 per month, respectively) but is not yet included with ChatGPT Team, Enterprise, or Edu plans, or available to minors. The company explains that Sora videos contain C2PA⁠ metadata indicating that they were generated by AI. Continue reading OpenAI Releases Sora, Adding It to ChatGPT Plus, Pro Plans

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