Tools

I’ll keep you up-to-date with the latest tools and updates. There’s a lot to cover …

Pleias launches small reasoning models optimized for RAG with built-in citations

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 …

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Adobe expands Firefly with new AI models and redesigned web app

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 …

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Perplexity brings voice assistant to iOS with cross-app functionality

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, …

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Character.AI unveils AvatarFX for lifelike video generation

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 …

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OpenAI’s reasoning models show increased hallucination rates

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 …

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Dia debuts as open-source text-to-speech model with natural dialogue capabilities

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 …

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Google’s Gemma 3 models now run on consumer GPUs through quantization

Google has released new versions of its Gemma 3 AI models that can run on consumer-grade graphics cards through a technique called Quantization-Aware Training (QAT). This development makes powerful AI models accessible to users without high-end hardware. The company announced that QAT dramatically reduces memory requirements while maintaining high quality performance. Gemma 3’s largest 27B …

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Kagi Assistant now available to all users with no price increase

Paid search engine Kagi has announced that its AI assistant feature is now available to all users across all subscription plans at no additional cost. According to Kagi’s announcement, the Assistant combines access to leading large language models (LLMs) with optional integration of Kagi Search results. The tool was previously exclusive to Ultimate subscribers but …

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Google introduces Gemini 2.5 Flash with adjustable “thinking” capabilities

Google has released Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview, offering developers unprecedented control over the AI model’s reasoning capabilities. This new version allows users to toggle “thinking” on or off and set specific “thinking budgets” to balance quality, cost, and response time. The pricing structure reveals the cost impact of reasoning: input costs $0.15 per million …

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Guide: GPT-4.1 prompts require more precise instructions

OpenAI has released a comprehensive prompting guide for its new GPT-4.1 family of models, highlighting significant improvements in coding capabilities, instruction following, and long context handling compared to GPT-4o. According to the guide published by OpenAI, developers may need to migrate their prompts because GPT-4.1 follows instructions more literally than previous versions, which tended to …

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