Anthropic CEO Dario Amedei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were, however, for some reason, placed right next to each other on stage — and the acrimonious rivals promptly refused the gesture.
Continue reading “Faux pas at Indian AI summit as Amodei and Altman refuse hands”
Most notably, they collected $200 million in funding from Autodesk — which makes 3D CAD software in a somewhat overlapping fashion.
They will now officially become advisors to World Labs, and are starting up a collaboration, writes TechCrunch.
— You might want to take an object that you’ve designed in our [platform], and put it in a context that you create through one of [World Labs’] prompts, says Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, to the website.
World Labs themselves have not provided a valuation from the funding round.
Read more: Autodesk’s announcement, World Lab’s announcement. More detail from TechCrunch, Reuters.
Gemini can now make you thirty seconds of music based on prompts or photos, and will even use Nano Banana for custom art for it.
They say the feature is for fun and games, and very specific music requests that can be personal, like making a tune about your mum’s home cooked plantains.
Continue reading “Google launches custom music generation in Gemini with Lyria 3 model”
Meta, already a top customer for Nvidia, will use their chips in a «large-scale deployment» to build out data centers «optimized for AI training and inference,» they say.
The cost of the deal will likely run into the tens of billions of dollars or more, CNBC reckons, and includes access to future chips as well as the current Blackwell and Vera Rubin generations.
— We do expect a good portion of Meta’s capex to go toward this Nvidia build-out, chip analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies tells CNBC.
Reuters notes that Meta is likely one of the top three customers accounting for more than half of Nvidia’s sales.
Read more: Meta announcement, Nvidia announcement. Writeups on CNBC, Reuters and The Verge.
It features upgrades across coding, computer use, long context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work and design, Anthropic says.
It is now the default model for the Free and Pro plans, and has a context window of 1 million tokens.
The model performs best in class for Agentic financial analysis and Office tasks on benchmarks, but it otherwise lags slightly behind Opus 4.6.
— Sonnet 4.6 offers strong performance at any thinking effort, even with extended thinking off, Anthropic writes.
Also, Claude in Excel now supports MCP connectors, so you can now import data and use everyday tools without ever leaving Excel.
Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, more on Axios, TechCrunch, Mashable.
2,000 eligible artists will be randomly selected to get €325 per week, after the pilot found that for every €1 invested, society received €1.39 in return.
It’s not enough to live on, but it is enough to see artists through their arts without taking on side gigs and onerous secondary jobs.
During the pilot, artists reported they had more time for their art, produced more work, experienced a boost in well-being, had greater life satisfaction and that it reduced their anxiety.
— The BIA [Basic Income for Artists] pilot research has consistently demonstrated both the positive impact it has had on those in receipt of it and how difficult it is to work as an artist in Ireland, says Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan.
This is the first such officially enacted Government-based basic income program in the world, O’Donovan says.
Read more: Irish Government announcement, writeups on IrishCentral and The Guardian.
— I am concerned about these AI chatbots… as is the prime minister, about the impact that’s having on children and young people, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall says, according to Reuters.
The first order of business is to make sure the chatbots follow the Online Safety Act, which doesn’t cover one-to-one interactions with chatbots as of today, Reuters says. This is mainly because it was enacted before they were on the radar, and this step will make it possible to regulate them like social media.
The wider consultation will «include examining restrictions on children’s use of AI chatbots,» the government says, and will be conducted over the coming months, ending in a set of proposals by June, 2026.
Read more: UK government presentation, and Reuters, CNBC.
That’s why OpenAI is now launching «an advanced, optional setting for higher risk users.»
The idea is to disable tools an adversary might use to «to exploit to exfiltrate sensitive data,» such as prompt injection attacks in files or on the web.
When using Lockdown Mode, web use is limited to cached content only, and no live network access is available outside of OpenAI’s «controlled network»
Most people will never need this feature, OpenAI says, but it might be useful for corporate execs, security teams, journalists and officials.
OpenAI is also launching an «Elevated Risk»-setting, that lets users fine-tune network access for Atlas and Codex.
Both features are coming to users «in the coming months.»
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement.
Anthropic won that battle, and saw a jump in daily active users of 11%, CNBC writes, quoting BNP Paribas. In comparison, ChatGPT jumped 2.7% and Gemini added 1.4%.
Anthropic also won the battle over social media engagement, with more positive posts (25.5%) after their ad was shown than OpenAI (16.3%) — even though OpenAI led with 25K posts to Anthropic’s 10K.
Measuring through Instagram, OpenAI’s ad scored a 44% positive sentiment from 3,829 engagements on its post, while Anthropic scored 41% on 3,738 mentions, far behind the likes of Pepsi’s 33K mentions.
Read more: CNBC, Business Insider and Digiday.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
OpenClaw, the open agentic platform you can steer from your favorite app to do lots of useful things, went viral over the last the couple of weeks — with millions of views, downloads, and 100k stars on GitHub.
It also spawned Moltbook, and showed the future of intelligent AI agents for all to see — as the founder, Steinberger, was inundated with investment and job offers.
Continue reading “Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw joins OpenAI, agents to become «core»”
The model helped scientists by simplifying expressions and made a simple formula for this general case.
Then it spent nearly 12 hours reasoning the new problem, verifying the formula and «producing a formal proof.»
Continue reading “Internal OpenAI model aids in physics discovery, answers expert maths quiz”
Their current run-rate revenue sits at $14 billion, they say, well within that range.
Continue reading “Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation”
The drawback is that it’s text-only and only has a 128K context window, and it’s supposed to be used «where latency matters as much as intelligence.»
Continue reading “OpenAI introduces Codex-Spark, greatly improving coding speed”
ByteDance has yet to publish any real numbers, but videos of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West singing in Mandarin have gone viral on Weibo and x.com with millions of views.
Continue reading “ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 video generator goes viral, prompts warnings”
But now, Claude can create and manipulate Office files and PDFs for free.
Connectors are also available, which make it possible to link to Slack, Canva and others.
Anthropic is also making Skills free. These are saved prompts and workflows as a kind of template, that can be invoked at any time for repetitive tasks.
Finally, «Compaction» is becoming available on the free tier, which «summarizes earlier context automatically, so long conversations can continue without starting over.»
Together, these comprise «Claude’s most-used features,» Anthropic says.
Read more: Launch thread, writeup on Engadget.