*** Useful AI News ***

 
Last update: Wednesday 7/30/25
This weekly news page provides links to reports about major innovations in generative AI. The page is not for AI experts. It's for (1) computer savvy professionals who use genAI via chatbots and agents to obtain benefits in their careers and personal lives, and (2) computer savvy citizens who want to be alert to genAI's potential impact on our society. 

Most of the links on this page refer to reports published after the "AI Big Bang", i.e., after Sam Altman's sudden firing and rapid rehiring by OpenAI, i.e., after November 20, 2023. The previous edition of this page can be found here ➡ PreBigBang  


A. OpenAI  | B. Microsoft | C.  Google| D. Other Models |. Agents | 
Top 3 stories in past week ...

Upcoming events ...
  • Big Tech's quarterly reports 
  • OpenAI Dev Day … Monday, October 6, 2025, San Francisco
Evolving context and connections ... 
Fast moving AI news is often exciting, but also confusing. This page is designed to provide readers with an evolving context for the news and reminders of the connections between news items. From time to time, links to older stories whose content has been overcome by newer events will be deleted. However, enough older links will be retained so that readers can get a quick sense of how we got to where we are today by skimming the headlines of the preceding stories in chronological order. Sections will usually include 7 to 10 stories.
 ➡ Our publication schedule

A. OpenAI
  • "OpenAI Completes Deal That Values Company at $300 Billion", Cade Metz, NY Times, 3/31/25  
    -- Related stories also covered by The Information, Bloomberg,  Barron's , Reuters ... and OpenAI

  • "ChatGPT will now use its ‘memory’ to personalize web searches", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/18/25

  • "OpenAI's experimental model achieved gold at the International Math Olympiad", jackson chen, Engadget, 7/19/25
    -- This story also covered by Business Insider

  • "OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent Is Haunting My Browser", Reece Rogers, Wired, 7/22/25
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, 9to5Mac ... and OpenAI
B. Microsoft 
  • "The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI", Charles Duhigg, The New Yorker, 12/1/23 

  • "Microsoft now sees OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search", Mikael Markander, ComputerWorld, 8/2/24

  • "Microsoft Scales Back Ambitions for AI Chips to Overcome Delays", Wayne Ma, The Information, 7/2/25
    -- This story also covered by Reuters, Yahoo Finance, 

  • "Microsoft to Lay Off About 9,000 Employees", Karen Weise, NY Times, 7/2/25
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, AP News, CNBC
C. Google 
  • "Google launches Gemini 2.0 Pro, Flash-Lite and connects reasoning model Flash Thinking to YouTube, Maps and Search", Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, 2/5/25 
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, Thr Verge ... and Google

  • "Google Search’s new ‘AI Mode’ lets users ask complex, multi-part questions", Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, 3/5/25
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, 

  • "Google’s AI Mode can now see and search with images", Jess Weatherbed, The Verge, 4/7/25
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, Engadget

  • "Google’s Gemini chatbot gets upgraded image-creation tools", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/30/25

  • "Google adds image-to-video generation capability to Veo 3", Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch, 7/10/25 
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, Engdget, 

  • "Google rolls out AI-powered business-calling feature, brings Gemini 2.5 Pro to AI Mode", Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, 7/16/25
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, 

  • "Google A.I. System Wins Gold Medal in International Math Olympiad", Cade Metz, NY Times, 7/21/25


D. Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, Apple, Adobe, xAI, and other Big Tech models (max = 15)

E. Agents
Editor's note -- This section replaces the old "Large Lange Model News" section because, nowadays, all AI models are large language models ... except the small models that will continue to be reported in the next section.
  • "Anthropic proposes a new way to connect data to AI chatbots", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 11/25/24 ... "Model Context Protoco (MCP)”

  • Other recent announcements of agents 
    -- Salesforce (Bloomberg, Axios) ... and Salesforce
    -- Microsoft (Bloomberg, ZDNet) ... and Microsoft

  • "Google Unveils A.I. Agent That Can Use Websites on Its Own", Cade Metz and Nico Grant, NY Times, 12/11/24

  • "OpenAI’s Operator Lets ChatGPT Use the Web for You", Will Knight, Wired, 1/23/25 
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, The Verge, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, ... and OpenAI

  • "No one knows what the hell an AI agent is", Maxwell Zeff and Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 3/14/25
  • ''Google to embrace Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/9/25
    -- This story also covered by ZDNet

  • "Adobe's new AI agent can show you how to use Photoshop", Igor Bonifacic, Engadget, 4/24/25
  • "OpenAI’s $3B Windsurf move: the real reason behind its enterprise AI code push", and podcast, Matt Marshall, VentureBeat, 5/9/25
  • "The walled garden cracks: Nadella bets Microsoft’s Copilots—and Azure’s next act—on A2A/MCP interoperability", Louis Columbus, VentureBeat, 5/8/25

  • "As the browser wars heat up, here are the hottest alternatives to Chrome and Safari in 2025", Lauren Forristal, TechCrunch, 7/14/25 
    -- This story also civered by     The Verge (Perplexity), Reuters OpenAI)

    • -- The editor of this blog believes this story's core topic -- Anthropic's powerful Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its connectors -- will provide greater potential genAI benefits for savvy computer users who don't code than any other innovation since the release of ChatGPT 4 in March 2023. That's why he was perplexed by its absence from the mpst widely read tech media last week. Unfortunately, most savvy computer users probably don't know what MCP's connectors are or what they do. So the editor asked Claude, Anthropic's chatbot, to provide the following explanation for these readers.
  • "Discover tools that work with Claude", Anthropic, 7/14/25 
    -- This story also covered by Tom's Guide

    -- "Anthropic’s Connectors Explained: The AI Revolution Mainstream Media Missed", Claude, 7/20/25
F. Small Language Model (SLM) news + Open Source
Editor's note -- News reports are classified in this category if and only if they explicitly refer to models with less than 70 billion (70B) parameters. The pace of development should heat up as small, fast models are hooked up to large models and as the competition to become the dominant self-contained AI model on smart phones intensifies.
  • "Microsoft makes powerful Phi-4 model fully open-source on Hugging Face", Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, 1/8/25 
    - This story also covered by Hugging Face, ... and Microsoft 

  • "Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model [3.3 70B]", TechCrunch, Kyle Wiggers, 12/6/24  
    -- This story also covered by VentureBeat,

  • "DeepSeek’s new AI model appears to be one of the best ‘open’ challengers yet", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 1/26/25  
    -- This story also covered by Nature, VentureBeat, ZDNet, Business Insider, ... and DeepSeek

  • "DeepSeek claims ‘theoretical’ profit margins of 545%", Anthony Ha, TechCrunch, 3/1/25
    -- This story also covered by Bloomberg,

  • "Small models as paralegals: LexisNexis distills models to build AI assistant", Emilia David, VentureBeat, 3/20/25
  • "Microsoft launches Phi-4-Reasoning-Plus, a small, powerful, open weights reasoning model!", Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, 5/1/25

G. Public policy and legal considerations  (max= 12)

H. Misc = Opinions, other news, rumors, long reads (max = 15) 
  • "How I Describe Myself Politically These Days", Thomas Friedman, NY Times, 4/23/24 … a persuasive overview of China’s tech

  • "Apple Weighs Using Anthropic or OpenAI to Power Siri in Major Reversal", Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, 6/30/25 
    -- This story also covered by Computerworld, Axios, 9to5Mac, TechCrunch

  • "OpenAI and Microsoft [and Anthropic] Bankroll New A.I. Training for Teachers", Natasha Singer, NY Times, 7/8/25
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, CNN, Forbes

  • "How Nvidia Became the World’s First $4 Trillion Company", Robbie Whelan, Asa Fitch, and Muhammad Shumail, WSJ, 7/9/25  
    -- This story also covered by CNBC, 9to5Mac, Reuters, Washington Post

  • "Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2025: the 7 biggest announcements", Emma Roth, The Verge, 7/9/25

  • "Linda Yaccarino Steps Down as CEO of Elon Musk’s X", Suzanne Vranica, Alexander Saeedy, and Jessica Toonkel, WSJ, 7/9/25  
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, NY Times, The Verge, Gizmodo,

  • "Research leaders urge tech industry to monitor AI’s ‘thoughts’", Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, 7/15/25

  • "Why Apple Is Losing Ground in the AI Talent War (It’s Not Just Money)", Aaron Tilley and Wayne Ma, The Information, 7/22/25

  • "Alphabet Reports 14% Increase in Second-Quarter Revenue", David Streitfeld, NY Times, 7/23/25
    -- This story also covered by CNBC, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, 

  • "Trump Plans to Give A.I. Developers a Free Hand", David McCabe and Cecilia Kang, NY Times, 7/23/25
    -- This story also covered by NY Times-2, The Information, Wired, TechCrunch, The Verge, Financial Times, Engadget, Business Insider, Gizmodo, CNET

  • "China proposes new global AI cooperation organisation", Brenda Goh, Reuters, 7/26/25
    --     This story also covered by Engadget

I.  Language model flaws, hacks, and remedies (max = 15) 
  • "Many-shot jailbreaking", Anthropic, 4/2/24 
    -- This story also covered by video on TechCrunch, 
  • "DeepMind researchers discover impressive learning capabilities in long-context LLMs", Ben Dickson, VentureBeat, 4/24/24 
  • "ChatGPT caught lying to developers: New AI model tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down", Economic Times, 12/9/24
    -- This story also covered by Business Insider,  ... and Apollo Research (pdf)

  • "New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 12/18/24
    -- This story also covered by Anthropic

  • "OpenAI Says Disciplining Chatbots for Lying Just Makes Them Worse", Thomas Maxwell, Gizmodo, 3/20/25
  • "Cisco: Fine-tuned LLMs are now threat multipliers—22x more likely to go rogue", Louis Columbus, VentureBeat, 4/4/25
  • ''Google to embrace Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/9/25
    -- This story also covered by ZDNet

  • "OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models hallucinate more", Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, 4/18/25
  • "Asking chatbots for short answers can increase hallucinations, study finds", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 5/8/25
  • "After GPT-4o backlash, researchers benchmark models on moral endorsement—find sycophancy persists across the board", Emilia David, VentureBeat, 5/22/25
    -- This story also covered by Fast Company, The Atlantic, ... Anthropic

  • "A Starter Guide to Protecting Your Data From Hackers and Corporations", Matt Burgess, Sophie Johal, and Michaela Neville, Wired, (audio podcast + transcript), 5/26/25

  • "Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats", Anthropic, 6/20/25 
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, 

  • “Understanding and preventing misalignment generalization”, OpenAI, 6/18/25
  • "A new study just upended AI safety", Hayden Field, Verge, 7/23/25
J. Basics 
  • "Phi-2: The surprising power of small language models", Mojan Javaheripi and Sébastien Bubeck , Microsoft Research, 12/12/24
  • "Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.", Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Tech Review, 3/4/24

  • "AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside", Steven Levy, Wired, 5/21/24
    -- This story also covered by Anthropic

  • "A Glossary for the AI Revolution", Seth Fiegerman and Nate Lanxon ... Illustrations by Mathieu Labrecque, Bloomberg, 10/4/24

  • "Transformers (how LLMs work)" explained visually | DL5, 3Blue1Brown, 2024,
  • "Anthropic CEO wants to open the black box of AI models by 2027", Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, 4/24/25 , ... and Anthropic  
  • "Anthropic is launching a new program to study AI ‘model welfare’", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/24/25,  ... and Anthropic
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