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OpenAI has launched a new shopping feature within ChatGPT that allows users to search for products and make purchases. According to Reece Rogers from WIRED, the feature will be available to all users, whether logged in or not. When users select a product, they will be redirected to the merchant’s website to complete their purchase. …
French AI startup Pleias has released two open-source small reasoning models specifically designed for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with native citation support. As reported by Carl Franzen for VentureBeat, the new models—Pleias-RAG-350M and Pleias-RAG-1B—are available under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing commercial use. Despite their small size, the models outperform many larger alternatives on multi-hop reasoning …
Adobe has launched a major update to its Firefly AI platform, including new image generation models and a redesigned web app that now features AI models from competitors. The company introduced Firefly Image Model 4, which Adobe claims offers improved quality, speed, and greater control over image outputs with resolutions up to 2K. A more …
Perplexity has released an update to its iOS app that adds voice assistant capabilities. According to Umar Shakir of The Verge, the new feature allows iPhone users to perform tasks such as setting reminders, sending messages, and making restaurant reservations through verbal commands. The assistant can continue operating when users navigate away from the app, …
Character.AI has announced AvatarFX, a new video generation model that can animate both AI characters and uploaded images. According to the company, the technology can generate photorealistic videos with audio that maintain consistency in face, hand, and body movements, even for long-form content. The system builds on diffusion model architecture with a parameter-efficient training pipeline …
Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, has developed a new technique to observe and analyze how its AI expresses values during real-world conversations with users. The research, conducted by Anthropic’s Societal Impacts team, examines whether Claude adheres to the company’s goal of making it “helpful, honest, and harmless” when interacting with users. The …
In a comprehensive essay titled “AI as Normal Technology,” researchers Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor from Princeton University argue that artificial intelligence should be understood as a normal technology rather than a potential superintelligence. Published by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the paper presents an alternative vision for understanding AI’s trajectory and …
OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate more frequently than their predecessors, according to internal testing. Maxwell Zeff from TechCrunch reports that o3 hallucinated in 33% of questions on OpenAI’s PersonQA benchmark, approximately double the rate of previous models. The o4-mini performed even worse, with a 48% hallucination rate. OpenAI acknowledged in its …
The Washington Post has entered a strategic partnership with OpenAI to make its journalism accessible through ChatGPT. According to Todd Spangler’s article for Variety, the agreement will allow ChatGPT to display summaries, quotes, and links to Washington Post reporting in response to relevant search queries. The deal covers content across politics, global affairs, business, and …
A startup called Nari Labs has released Dia, a new open-source text-to-speech model designed to produce naturalistic dialogue. According to VentureBeat reporter Carl Franzen, the 1.6 billion parameter model rivals offerings from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Google’s NotebookLM. Co-creator Toby Kim developed Dia “with zero funding” and Google’s support through access to TPU chips. The model …