New features and launches in ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity and other AI tools, plus changes to pricing and availability.
Brett Adcock’s startup Hark just unveiled Handoff, an autonomous agent that browses the web to book flights or order food. It claims a record 97.7 score on the Online-Mind2Web benchmark at one-tenth the token cost of rivals. Why it matters: True end-to-end web agents could replace repetitive browser work, though Hark conveniently compared it against last-gen models rather than GPT-5.6.
Autodesk Flow Studio just rolled out a new 3D Editor and Canvas to solve AI video's lack of precise control. Instead of struggling with flat 2D generations, creators can stage scenes, animate characters, and position cameras in full 3D before rendering the look through node-based AI models. It bridges the gap between traditional film direction and rapid AI generation.
OpenAI just rolled out three education-focused plugins for ChatGPT Work and Codex, tailored for K–12 teachers, college educators, and university students. The plugins bundle role-specific skills, prebuilt workflows, and integrations with calendars and course materials, letting users tap into agentic AI without writing complex prompts. It is part of OpenAI's push to close the capability overhang across campuses through ChatGPT Edu deployments.
VEED just launched OpenEdit, an open-source pipeline that lets coding agents like Claude Code and Gemini edit video, add captions, and turn slides into motion graphics without a GUI timeline. It uses HTML/CSS for composition and renders locally up to 2.2x faster than headless Chrome. A newer Fabric update also generates assets on demand, though it currently requires an Apple Silicon Mac.
Alibaba just kicked off the public beta of QwenWork in China, an all-in-one workplace AI agent platform tying together desktop, cloud, and DingTalk. It packs autonomous agents, native multimodal generation, and instant web app creation, with access to the flagship Qwen3.8 Max model starting August 3. A standalone mobile app and international rollout are also on the roadmap.
Google just plugged its Gemini Spark agent directly into Chrome to automate tedious web tasks like scheduling apartment tours or booking flights. With permission, it accesses saved passwords and active logins to navigate sites, handing control back for sensitive actions like payments. Auto-browse is rolling out first in the U.S., while Spark expands to Google AI Pro users in 160+ countries.
Avi Schiffmann just launched Friend 2.0, giving the loneliness-fighting AI necklace a built-in speaker for real-time voice conversations. But the talkative pendant now costs $249, up steeply from its original $99 price tag. Why it matters: In a graveyard of failed AI wearables, Friend is doubling down on emotional companionship over productivity, betting users will pay premium prices for a digital confidant.
Perplexity just upgraded Spaces into Projects, giving users a persistent hierarchical file system and a self-improving memory engine called Brain. Humans and agents can now edit shared files simultaneously without starting from scratch, while pulling context from over 400 integrations like Google Drive and GitHub. Existing Spaces migrate automatically, turning Perplexity into a true shared workspace.
Ideogram just launched Object Remover, a dedicated AI tool that scrubs unwanted items, text, and logos from photos. Instead of leaving smudged artifacts, it erases the surrounding shadows, reflections, and subtle lighting shifts while cleanly rebuilding the background underneath. Ideogram says it ranks first on the RemovalBench benchmark while beating rivals on per-request pricing.
Tavus just launched PAL Maker, a no-code platform that lets anyone build interactive AI video companions simply by describing them to a creator agent named Charlie. Powered by models like Raven-1 and Phoenix-4, the avatars come equipped with faces, voices, vision, and long-term memory. Why it matters: It lowers the barrier of digital human creation to a casual chat, already serving roles from post-surgery check-ins to candidate screening.
Replit just launched Replit Design, a new AI-powered creative suite built to make design accessible to anyone. The tool aims to turn rough concepts into finished visuals with ease, marking a clear push by the company beyond code into full creative workflows.
Martha Stewart just co-founded and launched Hint, an iOS app designed to turn AI into a personal home manager. Homeowners enter an address and snap photos of appliances to get customized maintenance schedules, insurance advice, and property risk insights powered by OpenAI and Gemini models. The startup is backed by $10 million in funding and is completely free to use.
Google just updated its Gemini app for macOS with instant voice controls triggered by long-pressing the Fn key. It handles clean dictation by default—stripping filler words on the fly—and can read your screen to summarize highlighted files, rewrite text, or tweak images. It's rolling out globally in English.
Fish Audio just secured $52M in seed funding and launched S2.1 Pro, a new voice cloning model that requires just five seconds of sample audio. The startup claims it runs twice as fast as Cartesia at one-sixth the cost of ElevenLabs, featuring word-level control over pacing and emotion. Frontier AI firms like HeyGen and LiveKit are already running it in production.
Ai2 just launched the OlmoEarth Platform, an infrastructure stack built to run Earth observation foundation models at planetary scale. It can process continent-sized satellite datasets in roughly a day for fractions of a penny per square kilometer. In a test mapping North America wildfire risk, it coordinated 19,600 CPUs and 994 GPUs to deliver a 155x speedup.
Google just rolled out major updates to Gemini API Managed Agents, making Gemini 3.6 Flash the new default model. Developers can now run custom pre- and post-tool scripts inside remote sandboxes to lint or block actions, set hard token limits to stop runaway costs, and test autonomous workflows on a free tier.
xAI just brought Grok 4.5, its smartest coding model, to millions of GitHub Copilot developers across VS Code, Copilot CLI, and cloud agents. You can simply pick it from the model selector (though some enterprise accounts require an admin toggle first), or access it directly via xAI's console starting at $2 per million input tokens.
Perplexity just launched Personal Computer for Windows, bringing its autonomous agent out of the browser and straight into your local desktop environment. It can directly edit local Word and Excel docs, organize messy downloads, and pull real-time web and enterprise data into local workflows. It is available now for Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers.
xAI just rolled out Build Mode in early beta for Grok, letting users turn chat prompts into interactive websites, apps, and even 3D games. The model writes the code and runs a live preview right inside the chat window with zero setup required, and projects can be published instantly to a grok.me link or custom domain. It is currently limited to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers.
Meta just rolled out a software update for its Ray-Ban Display glasses in the US, adding hands-free Threads browsing and a Meta AI upgrade powered by its Muse Spark model. The update boosts visual understanding and brings neural handwriting via the Meta Neural Band for Early Access users in the US and Canada, letting people silently interact with AI by scribbling on any surface.
