The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has closed its investigation into the arrangement between Alphabet/Google and Anthropic. The CMA determined that a merger situation is unlikely given Anthropic's market share size, and the lack of demonstrable material influence on Google's part.
Microsoft announced Copilot Actions and agents at Ignite 2024. The announced features build on the company's commitment to make Copilot a powerful AI-powered personal assistant, and to enhance productivity and transform business processes by applying the much-touted potential of AI agents.
Microsoft introduced Azure AI Foundry at Ignite 2024, a comprehensive platform that unifies AI services, tools, and models to help enterprises streamline AI application development with enhanced scalability, privacy, and management capabilities.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, has released R1-Lite-Preview though its chat interface. R1-Lite-Preview is marketed as an open-source OpenAI o1 contender, as it reportedly performs comparably in math benchmarks such as AIME and MATH.
H launched its automation platform Studio and Runner H, an AI agent that automates web tasks through natural language commands. Notably, Runner H outperforms recent tools like Anthropic's computer use API, while being built on models a fraction of Sonnet 3.5's size.
Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of using ANI's content to train its models without permission, and of attributing fabricated news stories to the agency, to the detriment of its reputation.
Perplexity AI has launched an AI-powered shopping assistant featuring one-click checkout, visual search capabilities, and unbiased product recommendations, alongside a new merchant program to expand its retail partnerships.
OpenAI and Common Sense Media have launched a free online course for K-12 educators about AI and ChatGPT, though teachers remain skeptical about AI's benefits. According to a Pew Research Center study, only 6% of public school K-12 teachers believe generative AI is more beneficial than harmful.
Roboflow, a computer vision development platform used by over 25,000 organizations, including several Fortune 100 companies, has secured $40 million in a Series B led by GV. Roboflow has also seen continued growth of its open source community, hitting 1M downloads of its tools in the last 30 days.
Microsoft has partnered with Deep Sky, the world's first carbon removal innovation and commercialization center. Deep Sky brings together eight DAC technologies to test and validate their scalability and potential for long-term carbon removal.
Virgin Media O2 has launched dAIsy, an AI-powered chatbot that poses as a grandmother to engage and waste scammers' time by keeping them on the line with meandering conversations about knitting, family, and pets.
The first draft of the EU's General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, developed by independent experts, will undergo discussion with 1,000 stakeholders. Following three more drafting rounds ending in April 2025, the final document will establish comprehensive guidelines for AI providers.