Prompt engineering, once considered a promising career in artificial intelligence with potential salaries of up to $250,000, has become largely obsolete, reports Isabelle Bousquette in The Wall Street Journal. The role, which involved crafting precise inputs for AI models, has diminished in importance as newer AI systems have become better at understanding user intent and …
Pete Koomen, a prominent tech figure and YC Partner, has published a critique of Gmail’s AI assistant, arguing that it represents an outdated approach to implementing artificial intelligence in applications. In his blog post titled “AI Horseless Carriages,” Koomen explains that AI applications often fall short because developers don’t allow users to customize the system …
Writer has released Palmyra X5, a new large language model featuring a 1-million-token context window that aims to accelerate AI agent adoption in enterprises. As reported by Michael Nuñez for VentureBeat, the model offers performance comparable to GPT-4.1 at 75% lower cost. Palmyra X5 is priced at $0.60 per million input tokens and $6 per …
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 …