Some educational institutions, like the University of South Australia, are reconsidering the usefulness of oral assessments after facing the challenges of evaluating students using traditional written methods at a time when generative AI can quickly output plausible-sounding prose.
Anthropic has open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an innovative standard designed to help AI systems break through data silos by providing a universal, secure framework for connecting AI assistants to diverse data sources and enterprise tools.
The US sees China as a contender in the AI race; DeepSeek launches R1-Lite-Preview, an open-source "reasoning" model; Amazon has invested an additional $4B in Anthropic; AI announcements in Microsoft's Ignite 2024; OpenAI launches Advanced Voice Mode for the web; and more.
Anthropic and Amazon have recently expanded their partnership, with Amazon making another $4B investment in the startup. Correspondingly, Anthropic has named AWS its main cloud and training partner, and committed to contribute to optimizing AWS's hardware and software stack.
OpenAI has expanded the availability of Advanced Voice Mode to the web experience for paid subscribers, who can talk to ChatGPT right from their browser. OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil confirmed the company is looking to enable free users to use AVM from their browser soon.
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.