Apple is gearing up to announce a deal bringing Google Gemini to its devices as soon as this fall, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The move adds another heavyweight alongside ChatGPT, with Anthropic also in the mix. Why it matters: bringing in third-party chatbots buys Apple time to build Apple Intelligence while taking a cut of partner subscription sign-ups.
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman sparked major pushback after arguing on CNBC that content published on the open web has essentially been "freeware" under a social contract since the 90s. Legal experts were quick to dispute the claim, pointing out that US copyright attaches automatically upon creation and isn't waived just because something is online.
The Center for Investigative Reporting just sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the tech giants vacuumed up its stories to train AI models without permission or pay. It joins a mounting wave of publisher lawsuits like The New York Times, highlighting growing pushback against AI companies treating journalism as free training data.
Solos just unveiled the AirGo Vision, taking direct aim at Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The new eyewear features a temple-mounted camera powered by GPT-4o for visual search, with the freedom to swap to Gemini or Claude. It uses a modular design with swappable frames, though it only takes photos and skips video. It launches later this year.
Mark Zuckerberg just called out closed-source AI competitors, claiming tech labs obsessing over 'one true AI' act as if they are trying to 'create God.' Instead of a hoarded single product, he argued the future belongs to diverse, open-source models tailored to different human interests. Why it matters: As tech giants race for total control, Meta is positioning open tools and smart glasses as the antidote to proprietary walled gardens.
Meta is testing creator-made AI chatbots on Instagram in the U.S. Built through AI Studio, these characters primarily appear in messaging to help creators interact with fans, clearly labeled as AI. The test starts with around 50 creators, with plans for a full launch by August.
TIME just teamed up with ElevenLabs to bring Audio Native to TIME.com, automatically generating voiceovers for select articles. The integration started brewing back in March 2023 and is now live with voice options like Brian. Why it matters: It gives millions of readers a hands-free listening option and shows how top newsrooms are practical about adopting AI audio tools.
LangChain just rolled out the stable release of LangGraph v0.1 alongside a closed beta of LangGraph Cloud. The framework ditches rigid abstractions to give developers low-level control over multi-agent workflows, complete with human-in-the-loop approvals, time-travel debugging, and dedicated infrastructure for scaling agent fleets reliably.
Google just officially released Gemma 2, introducing ultra-efficient 9B and 27B open models for developers. The 27B variant punches above its weight by matching models twice its size while running full precision on a single Nvidia H100, and the 9B edges out Llama 3 8B. It is available now under a commercial-friendly license.
Character.AI just rolled out a two-way voice calling feature, letting users talk out loud to its AI characters in real time. It supports multiple languages including English, Chinese, and Spanish, with low latency and tap-to-interrupt controls. Why it matters: Turning text bots into voice buddies makes role-play and language practice feel far more personal.
YouTube is reportedly offering Universal, Sony, and Warner lump sums of cash to legally train upcoming AI tools on songs from dozens of artists. Google is taking a strict permission-first approach to avoid the copyright battles currently hitting competitors like Suno and Udio.
OpenAI just introduced CriticGPT, a model based on GPT-4 designed to critique ChatGPT's code and help human trainers spot bugs. In experiments, trainers assisted by CriticGPT outperformed unassisted reviewers 60% of the time. The lab is now integrating these critic models into its RLHF pipeline to keep superhuman AI properly aligned.
OpenAI just struck a multi-year content partnership with TIME, bringing 101 years of historical archives and current reporting into ChatGPT. User responses drawing from the coverage will include direct citations and Time.com source links, while TIME taps OpenAI's models to build new reader-facing products.
Google just rolled out 110 new languages to Google Translate powered by its PaLM 2 model, marking its biggest expansion ever. The update opens up translation to more than 614 million speakers—around 8% of the global population—spanning from widely requested tongues like Cantonese to reviving Indigenous languages like Manx. PaLM 2 makes it far easier for models to learn closely related dialects without abundant standalone training data.
Google just opened up Gemini 1.5 Pro's 2-million-token context window to all developers, removing the waitlist. Both 1.5 Pro and Flash now also feature built-in Python code execution in an offline sandbox to tackle math and data reasoning, alongside Gemma 2 landing in Google AI Studio. Why it matters: developers can now feed entire codebases into Gemini while letting the model verify its own math by running code.
NBC just announced an AI clone of legendary sportscaster Al Michaels to narrate personalized Paris Olympics recaps on Peacock. Viewers can pick their favorite sports and get greeted by their first name in custom morning highlights, with NBC estimating up to 7 million variants—all vetted by human editors before hitting user feeds.
Figma just introduced a massive interface redesign alongside a suite of generative AI tools that build app prototypes and UI mocks from simple text prompts. The update also adds a native presentation tool called Figma Slides. The AI features are currently in limited beta and free through year-end, though default user data training terms have sparked privacy concerns.
Amazon is reportedly developing a new chatbot codenamed Metis, powered by its upcoming Olympus AI model rather than Titan. The tool leans on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to pull real-time data, with CEO Andy Jassy directly involved in the effort. Insiders say it could launch as early as September, though some within the company worry it may be too late to catch OpenAI and Google.
Video editing app Captions just launched AI edit, a new feature that automatically adds graphics, zooms, transitions, music, and sound effects to vertical talking-head videos. It can also be paired with the app's 12 AI avatars, letting creators generate and fully edit clips from a simple text prompt in minutes.
AI startup Etched just raised $120M to build Sohu, a specialized ASIC hardwired solely for Transformer models. By stripping away general-purpose GPU flexibility, the company claims it outperforms Nvidia's H100 by 20x. Why it matters: It could drastically lower LLM serving costs, but the chip hasn't taped out yet and is useless for any other AI architecture.
Reverse-engineering group Rabbitude just revealed that Rabbit left critical API keys hardcoded in its codebase, allegedly allowing anyone to access every response the R1 has ever given. The keys could also let attackers brick devices or alter responses. Rabbit stated it was alerted on June 25 and has found no evidence of compromised user data so far.
The RIAA just filed massive copyright lawsuits against AI music generators Suno and Udio, claiming they unlawfully scraped vast catalogs of copyrighted songs to train their models and demanding up to $150,000 per infringing work. While the labels argue AI songalikes threaten their core business, the startups lean on fair use. Why it matters: this battle could redefine how all generative AI models license training data.
Opera just launched the developer beta for Opera One R2, bringing its Aria AI assistant right to the center of web browsing. The browser now packs native image and voice generation, image understanding, and a new page-context mode to summarize or query any open site. It also adds split tabs and floating media controls. A broader rollout is scheduled for later this year.
Anthropic just made Claude 3 Haiku and Sonnet available in AWS GovCloud and the AWS Marketplace for the US Intelligence Community. The startup also modified its usage policies to permit authorized foreign intelligence analysis like detecting sabotage and early military warnings, while strictly keeping bans on weapons and cyberwarfare.
Toys ‘R’ Us owner WHP Global just premiered what it calls the first brand film created with OpenAI’s video generator, Sora. Creative agency Native Foreign revealed that Sora handled roughly 80% to 85% of the footage, but a dozen artists still had to step in with VFX cleanups. It offers a candid early look at how Hollywood and ad agencies are actually mixing generative AI into production pipelines.
OpenAI just pushed back the rollout of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode alpha by a month. The team says it needs extra time to refine content refusal guardrails and ready server capacity, targeting a full rollout to Plus subscribers in the fall.
OpenAI just opened its macOS desktop app to all users, expanding beyond early Plus subscribers. Mac users can now hit Option + Space to pull up a Spotlight-style chat interface, take instant screenshots to ask questions, upload files, and talk directly from the desktop. It is a huge leap toward making AI a native part of everyday computer workflows.
ElevenLabs just rolled out its new Reader app on iOS and Android, letting users listen to any article, PDF, or newsletter read aloud by its lifelike AI voices. It is free to use for the first three months. While it currently only supports English, offline mode and 29 additional languages are already on the roadmap.
EvolutionaryScale just unveiled ESM3, a 98B-parameter generative model that simultaneously reasons over protein sequence, structure, and function. The team used it to generate esmGFP, a novel fluorescent protein sharing only 58% similarity with known variants—effectively simulating 500 million years of natural evolution in silico. A preview API is now available in public beta via Forge.
Anthropic just rolled out Projects for Claude.ai Pro and Team subscribers, giving each workspace a massive 200K context window to ground Claude in internal docs, code, and custom instructions. Team members can also share conversation snapshots in an activity feed. Basically, your team can now stop copy-pasting the same context into every single prompt.
Synthesia just launched Synthesia 2.0, upgrading its AI video platform with personalized avatars shot via webcam or phone and multi-language voice cloning in over 30 tongues. It also previewed next-gen full-body avatars that can talk with their hands later this year. It's making studio-grade corporate video production as simple as typing a doc.
OpenAI just acquired Multi, an enterprise-focused remote video collaboration startup, in an acqui-hire deal. Most of Multi's five-person team will join OpenAI, and the standalone app will shut down on July 24. Coming right after its Rockset purchase, the deal signals OpenAI's growing ambitions to build native collaboration features into its enterprise stack.
Google just opened up Gemini to teen students using Google Workspace for Education accounts across more than 100 countries, completely free of charge. The teen experience comes with built-in guardrails, automatic fact-checking, and zero chat data used for model training, while teachers get new AI lesson-planning tools in Classroom. Schools finally get a secure, supervised way to introduce GenAI to minors.
Google just rolled out Gemini directly into the Gmail side panel on the web. The assistant can summarize messy email threads, draft replies, and answer specific questions by digging through your inbox and Google Drive files without leaving the page. It is rolling out to Workspace add-on and Google One AI Premium subscribers.
Universal Music, Warner Music, and Sony Music just sued AI music startups Suno and Udio, alleging they illegally trained their models on copyrighted recordings without permission or payment. Led by the RIAA, the labels seek up to $150,000 per infringed work, totaling billions in potential damages. The copyright battles seen in text and images have officially hit AI music, likely forcing eventual licensing deals.
Meta just rolled out Meta AI in India in English across WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. Built on Llama 3, the free assistant lets users brainstorm in group chats, pull up details directly from Facebook feeds, and generate or animate images by typing "imagine".
Endiatx just moved its PillBot, a swallowable mini-robot equipped with pumpjet thrusters and cameras, into clinical trials. Doctors can remotely navigate it inside a patient's stomach via an app for virtual endoscopies, replacing invasive hospital visits. The team is also adding AI to assist with preliminary diagnosis and autonomous navigation, aiming for a 2026 launch.
Stability AI just appointed former Weta Digital CEO Prem Akkaraju as its new chief executive and secured fresh funding led by Sean Parker, who will become board chairman. The cash injection offers a much-needed lifeline after reports revealed the startup lost over $30 million in Q1 and owes nearly $100 million to cloud providers.
Meta has reportedly discussed integrating its generative AI models into Apple Intelligence alongside OpenAI's ChatGPT. Apple has also held talks with Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity, potentially creating a hub where AI companies sell premium subscriptions directly to iPhone users. Negotiations are still ongoing and could fall through.
Apple just confirmed it won't roll out Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, or SharePlay screen sharing to EU users this year due to regulatory uncertainties from the Digital Markets Act. The company claims the DMA's strict interoperability rules could force compromises on user privacy and data security. Apple is working with the European Commission to find a workaround.
Grok's standalone web codebase was just found to contain direct references to Midjourney, backing up earlier rumors of a partnership between xAI and the leading image platform. If true, Grok 1.5 could soon leverage Midjourney via API to output visuals, alongside upcoming image upload and vision capabilities.
OpenAI just acquired real-time analytics database company Rockset to bolster its data indexing and querying infrastructure across products. The Rockset team will join OpenAI to help integrate the technology. Why it matters: The deal tackles a major enterprise pain point, making it far easier for businesses to connect their live, real-time data to AI applications.
AI companies are quietly bypassing the decades-old robots.txt protocol to scrape publisher sites without permission, according to licensing startup TollBit. The finding follows Forbes recently calling out Perplexity for lifting its investigative work. With web scrapers ignoring traditional courtesy standards, publishers' primary defense against AI crawlers is essentially breaking down.
Leonardo AI just released Phoenix, a new flagship image model boasting sharper text rendering, tighter prompt adherence, and a natural-language "Edit with AI" tool. While some legacy features like photoreal mode are temporarily sidelined, its deep creative control turns the platform into a fierce challenger to Ideogram.
PayPal just hired former Walmart executive Srini Venkatesan as its new Chief Technology Officer to oversee AI, machine learning, and data science across its ecosystem. Venkatesan officially steps in on June 24, succeeding Archie Deskus. It marks a major milestone in CEO Alex Chriss's strategy to turn 2024 into a transition year focused on AI personalization.
OpenAI just revealed updates on its Cybersecurity Grant Program, highlighting sponsored research across UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, and MIT after receiving over 600 applications. The projects focus on countering prompt injections, patching code vulnerabilities, and building autonomous defense agents. OpenAI is also expanding its support by granting free ChatGPT Team and Enterprise tiers to cybersecurity researchers.
Anthropic just released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, leapfrogging its own flagship Opus and rival models on coding and reasoning benchmarks at twice the speed. It also introduced Artifacts, a new side-by-side workspace on Claude.ai that lets you view, edit, and run code or designs in real time. It is available for free on Claude.ai and via API.
Apple Intelligence will automatically add code to image metadata to flag AI alterations—even for simple fixes like removing a background distraction. Software chief Craig Federighi confirmed the policy, noting Apple has no plans to generate photorealistic people or places. Why it matters: As slop and deepfakes multiply, tech giants are leaning hard on provenance markers.
Ai Build just released Aibuild 2.0, adding an OpenAI-powered assistant named Talk to AI directly into its industrial 3D printing software. Engineers can now type plain text like "slice the part with 2mm layer height" to automatically configure simulations and toolpaths. Bringing natural language prompts to industrial additive manufacturing could slash setup time from days to minutes.
OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever just launched Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a new lab dedicated entirely to building safe superintelligence. The startup says it will insulate itself from short-term commercial pressures and product cycles, with zero plans to release anything else until safe superintelligence is solved.
Elon Musk just revealed that Dell and Super Micro will supply the server racks for xAI's massive new supercomputer. Dell is assembling half the racks alongside Nvidia to build an "AI factory" aimed at powering Grok 3, which Musk says will need a staggering 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips.
Microsoft just released Florence-2 on Hugging Face under a permissive MIT license, cramming multi-task vision capabilities into 232M and 771M parameter models. It uses text prompts to handle object detection, captioning, and segmentation, outperforming models a hundred times its size in zero-shot tests. This gives developers a single, lightweight tool instead of juggling multiple specialized vision pipelines.
Apple is reportedly shelving plans for its next premium Vision headset to focus entirely on a cheaper, lighter model codenamed N109. Aiming for late 2025, the company wants to cut weight by at least a third and hit a price tag between $1,500 and $2,500, though cost-cutting challenges could delay that timeline.
Meta's FAIR team just released five new AI research models and tools to the public. Highlights include Chameleon for mixed text-and-image generation, JASCO for chord- and beat-controlled music synthesis, and AudioSeal, an audio watermarking system that detects synthetic speech up to 485 times faster.
Microsoft just officially launched its new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro Copilot+ PCs starting at $999. Powered by Snapdragon X series processors and dedicated NPUs, the machines enable on-device experiences like real-time Cocreator image generation and system-wide Live Captions. It marks Microsoft's first major hardware push to make on-device Windows AI a practical reality.
Nvidia just dethroned Microsoft to become the world's most valuable public company, reaching a $3.34 trillion market cap after shares rose 3.6% on Tuesday. The chipmaker commands around 80% of data center AI processors, pushing its stock up over 170% this year alone. It confirms that the AI boom's biggest winner remains the hardware engine powering it all.
Google is aggressively pushing DeepMind to shift from an academic research lab into a commercial AI product factory, but the transition is causing serious growing pains. Insiders told Bloomberg that researchers are increasingly frustrated and burned out by top-down corporate mandates, a strain worsened by Gemini's rocky public rollouts.
Apple just released 20 new Core ML models and four datasets on Hugging Face, including FastViT and DepthAnything. Built specifically to run on-device without an internet connection, they let developers build fast computer-vision features while keeping user data strictly private.
Perplexity just rolled out card-based direct answers for basic factual queries like weather, local time, currency conversion, and simple math. CEO Aravind Srinivas noted these lookups are now much faster, though they conspicuously drop source links. It’s a direct play against Google, aiming to stop users from hopping back to traditional search for routine everyday facts.
DeepSeek just open-sourced DeepSeek Coder V2, an MoE-based code model supporting 338 languages and a 128K context window. It beat GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro on major coding benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP+, marking a rare open-source victory over leading proprietary models. Available under the MIT license in 16B and 236B sizes.
Runway just announced Gen-3 Alpha, its next-generation video foundation model trained on an all-new multimodal infrastructure. It delivers major improvements in fidelity, motion, and consistency over Gen-2, enabling fine-grained temporal control and photorealistic character generation. It marks Runway's next big step toward building general world models.
TikTok just unveiled Symphony Digital Avatars and AI Dubbing to supercharge marketing content across borders. The tool offers pre-built commercial avatars speaking over 30 languages, custom avatars modeled on real creators, and automatic dubbing into 10+ languages. Why it matters: Brands and creators can now scale localized video campaigns worldwide without reshooting footage.
U.S. cyber officials just teamed up with OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and AWS to run their first joint tabletop exercise simulating a cyberattack on a critical AI system. Over 50 experts gathered in Virginia to test incident response and communication channels, with findings set to shape an official AI security playbook due later this year.
Adobe just overhauled Acrobat by integrating Firefly Image 3 directly into PDFs, letting users generate and edit visuals inside their documents. The updated Acrobat AI Assistant can also synthesize insights across multiple Word and PowerPoint files with citations, plus pull action items from meeting transcripts. Adobe is offering free, unlimited access to the assistant from June 18 through June 28.
Google DeepMind just unveiled its video-to-audio (V2A) technology, which generates synchronized soundtracks, sound effects, and dialogue directly from video pixels and optional text prompts. Using a diffusion-based model, it pairs with video generators like Veo without requiring tedious manual audio alignment. Why it matters: Silent AI video is one of generative media's biggest immersion killers, though DeepMind notes lip-syncing still needs work before any public release.
Sam Altman is reportedly considering converting OpenAI into a for-profit benefit corporation, breaking free from the non-profit board's control. The structural overhaul could smooth over governance headaches like last year's boardroom drama, make raising up to $100B far easier, and ultimately pave the way for an IPO.
McDonald's just announced it is ending its automated drive-thru ordering test with IBM, removing the voice AI from over 100 locations by July 26, 2024. The chain isn't abandoning voice AI altogether, but plans to evaluate new partners by the end of the year.
OpenAI just appointed retired General Paul Nakasone, the former director of the NSA and US Cyber Command, to its board's Safety and Security Committee. While OpenAI claims his cybersecurity expertise will protect its AI supercomputers from hackers, whistleblower Edward Snowden blasted the move as a calculated betrayal and warned the public never to trust the company.
Zeta Labs, founded by former Meta engineers, just launched Jace, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing complex multi-step tasks inside a web browser. Powered by their proprietary AWA-1 model, Jace handles everything from booking hotels to setting up ad campaigns on command, backed by a fresh $2.9M pre-seed round.
Meta just suspended plans to launch its Meta AI assistant in Europe following objections from the Irish Data Protection Commission over training on user data. Meta called the move a setback, arguing that blocking access to European content leaves it with only a "second-rate experience." Privacy advocates at Noyb countered that Meta simply refused to ask for explicit consent.
Yahoo just launched a revamped Yahoo News app powered by the tech it acquired from Instagram founders' Artifact. The app serves up personalized feeds, bullet-point summaries, and Artifact's signature feature: letting AI rewrite clickbait headlines into plain English. It's available now on iOS and Android alongside an opt-in web redesign.
