Perplexity just launched Deep Research, an autonomous agent that browses hundreds of web sources and synthesizes in-depth reports in two to four minutes. It scored a chart-topping 21.1% on Humanity's Last Exam, and unlike rivals, it is free for all users with daily query caps.
OpenAI just struck a strategic partnership with Guardian Media Group to bring the publisher's reporting to ChatGPT's 300 million weekly users. Queries will now return extended summaries with direct attribution and links to the original articles, while The Guardian rolls out ChatGPT Enterprise across its newsroom and operations.
OpenAI just removed the nagging orange content warnings from ChatGPT's interface to cut down on gratuitous refusals. While hard guardrails against harm and illegal acts remain, the company also updated its Model Spec so models won't shy away from sensitive viewpoints. Why it matters: It directly addresses long-standing complaints about AI over-censorship.
Google just updated Gemini Advanced to recall past conversations and tailor its responses without you having to re-explain everything. You have full control to review, delete, or turn off history. The feature is rolling out now in English for Google One AI Premium subscribers on web and mobile.
Anthropic is reportedly gearing up to launch its next flagship AI model within weeks. Described as a hybrid system, it can alternate between deep reasoning and instant replies, featuring a sliding scale for developers to balance compute costs. The new model allegedly beats OpenAI's o3-mini-high on several coding benchmarks.
Alibaba just confirmed a major partnership with Apple to power generative AI features for iPhones sold in China. Apple previously explored talks with Baidu and DeepSeek before landing on Alibaba to navigate strict local regulations. It's a critical move for Apple after an 11% drop in Chinese sales spurred by the absence of Apple Intelligence.
OpenAI just rolled out file and image upload support for both o1 and o3-mini inside ChatGPT. Plus subscribers also get a 7x limit increase for o3-mini-high, up to 50 messages per day, making it much more practical to feed complex documents and diagrams straight into top reasoning models.
Sam Altman just outlined OpenAI’s plan to ditch the messy model picker once and for all. The company will next launch GPT-4.5 as its final non-chain-of-thought model, before rolling out a unified GPT-5 system that bakes in o3 and all flagship tools. Most notably, free ChatGPT users will get unlimited access at standard intelligence.
Perplexity just rolled out a new version of its in-house Sonar model, powered by Cerebras chips to generate answers at a blazing 1,200 tokens per second. Built on Llama 3.3 70B, it beats GPT-4o mini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in user satisfaction testing while answering almost instantly. It is now live for Pro subscribers.
Google just bundled NotebookLM Plus into its $19.99/month One AI Premium plan at no extra charge. Subscribers get five times more Audio Overviews, notebooks, and queries, plus custom chat responses and viewer analytics. It makes Google's AI bundle a lot more compelling for heavy researchers.
Anthropic just launched the Anthropic Economic Index to track AI's real-world impact on labor markets using anonymized Claude conversations. The data shows AI leans toward human augmentation over automation at 57% to 43%, with software engineering and writing seeing the heaviest use.
OpenAI just struck a content partnership with Nordic powerhouse Schibsted Media Group to pull articles from major titles like VG and Aftenposten directly into ChatGPT. The integration provides ChatGPT's 300 million users with timely Nordic news summaries featuring clear source links. Why it matters: OpenAI continues building out its verified media network to feed real-time responses while shielding itself from copyright backlash.
OpenAI just aired its first-ever Super Bowl ad, charting human progress from fire to ChatGPT to usher in what it calls the Intelligence Age. The company shared that over 300 million people now use ChatGPT—with nearly eight in 10 under 35—and that its creative team leaned on Sora to visually brainstorm the campaign.
Perplexity just rolled out file and image uploads for free account holders, complete with a massive 1 million token context window. That means anyone can now dump an entire 400-page book or 1,000 pages of PDF financial reports into the search tool at once, easily trouncing ChatGPT's paid 128k context cap.
OpenAI just updated the chain of thought for o3-mini, revealing far more reasoning steps to both free and paid ChatGPT users. While it still holds back raw internal monologues to prevent distillation, a new post-processing layer cleans up unsafe output and translates the thought process into non-English native languages.
OpenAI just increased the cross-chat memory limit in ChatGPT by 25% for Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers. The upgrade gives the chatbot more room to store ongoing preferences, details, and context across workflows without forgetting earlier notes. It is already live for paid accounts.
AI researcher Steven Hoi just joined Alibaba to lead its AI-to-Consumer business group. He plans to focus on building foundation models and AI agent applications for consumer markets over the coming decade. It shows Alibaba is getting serious about turning frontier model tech into everyday consumer software.
Mistral just rolled out dedicated iOS and Android apps for its le Chat assistant alongside a major platform upgrade. It packs web search, document processing, Flux Ultra image generation, and a new Flash Answers mode that replies over 10x faster than ChatGPT.
OpenAI is reportedly set to air its first television commercial during Sunday’s Super Bowl, according to The Wall Street Journal. Coming shortly after the December hire of its first CMO, Kate Rouch, the spot marks the ChatGPT maker’s biggest advertising push yet. Why it matters: As tech giants race for mainstream users, OpenAI is trading pure word-of-mouth for prime-time marketing.
Lyft just partnered with Anthropic to deploy Claude for customer support, cutting resolution times for driver inquiries by 87%. The bot handles frequent questions before routing trickier issues to human staff. Notably, Lyft also revealed that generative AI now writes one in four lines of its engineering code.
