Entering the halls of power, AI chatbots get approved for U.S. Senate use

The Senate officially clears the big three chatbots for staffer use. (Picture: generated)
After some staffers had been using chatbots informally at work since at least 2025, the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms office of the Chief Information Officer has now approved three of them officially.

The chatbots cleared for «drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis» are ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini on Workspace and Copilot, according to Business Insider.

Anthropic’s Claude is not on the list, although it has been approved for use in The House of Representatives since September 2024. President Trump earlier said government agencies shouldn’t use Claude after the Pentagon spat in February.

The Sergeant at Arms will now provide all Senate employees with an AI chatbot license at no cost. The office also touts Copilot Chat as integrated with Office 365 and is usable with Word and Excel — although Claude also offers this capability.

Read more: Business Insider has the memo, NY Times reported it first. Popvox has a Congressional AI tracker.

Internet legend Digg’s relaunch on hold after deluge of AI slop

Digg.com was once one of the great traffic drivers on the internet, and popularized many iconic memes. (Picture: Digg)
Digg.com is looking to make a reboot with its original founder, after a public beta for the link-sharing site was literally drowned in a sea of AI bots and SEO spam.

— Building on the internet in 2026 is different. We learned that the hard way, writes CEO Justin Mezzell, — We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

Launched in 2004, as some readers might remember, Digg was once not just viral, but a virality machine. It was one of the original link sharing and commenting platforms that could see massive engagement and send great amounts of traffic to pages getting upvoted.

Continue reading “Internet legend Digg’s relaunch on hold after deluge of AI slop”

Meta postpones launch of «Avocado» model until «at least» May

Meta’s new model can’t beat Gemini 3, and is delayed for more work. (Picture: generated)
After spending untold billions on talent, data centers and chips, homegrown and from AMD and Nvidia, Meta’s new foundational model is found lacking.

Pushing back the launch from «early 2026» is due to performance issues, The New York Times reports — as the model «currently falls between Gemini 2.5 and Gemini 3.»

This falls far behind the Meta Superintelligence Lab’s ambitions of «pushing the frontier,» after working on the new model «for months,» Reuters reports.

— We’re ​excited for people ​to see ⁠what we’ve been cooking very soon, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Apparently, Meta AI has considered «temporarily» licensing Google’s Gemini model to propel their AI products while they wait for their own models to catch up.

Read more: The New York Times (paywalled) and Reuters.

«Ask Maps» brings Gemini 3 intelligence, personalization to Google Maps

You can now get pretty comprehensive natural language answers from Google Maps. (Picture: Google)
With the latest Maps upgrade, you can ask questions in natural language and have Gemini answer with map-specific information.

The feature is supposed to work great for questions of where to find the nearest restroom, or a cozy vegan restaurant nearby — and it even lets you book a table right from the app.

To achieve this, Gemini will scan information from the Maps database consisting of some 300 million places and reviews from over 500 million contributors to find you just the right spot.

Ask Maps also remembers your previous saved spots or queries, so it will know that you are vegetarian, say, or if you have any special needs or preferences.

Of course, once you find a spot, Maps will help you navigate to get there — and in the biggest update in a decade, you now get a 3D driving experience.

Ask Maps is only available on mobile in the USA and India, with desktop support «coming soon.»

Read more: Google’s announcement, The Verge, Engadget.

Anthropic introduces charts and diagrams in Claude, days after ChatGPT

Claude can now illustrate some concepts and processes within the main chat window, just days after ChatGPT added visuals for some math queries.

Previously, Claude could draw illustrations in a sidebar window that you could copy or download, but these can be interactive and are made inside the main chat, writes The Verge.

Sometimes, the chatbot will determine itself if a concept needs illustrating, or you can simply ask it to make one yourself — and it will draw a chart from html and xml vectors.

The feature is available to all users, paid and free — but it’s officially in beta, so users can expect hiccups, and it’s not available on mobile, notes Engadget.

Read more: The Verge, Engadget.

Gemini on Chrome expands to more countries and languages

Gemini is offering AI integration in the Chrome browser for even more markets. (Picture: Google/generated)
With som features previously only available for Pro and Ultra subscribers in the USA, the AI features for Chrome are now launching on desktop and mobile in India (the second largest market for American AI), New Zealand and Canada, with promises of more to come.

Gemini in Chrome adds a new side panel, letting you chat with Gemini without opening up a new tab, and can do things like summarize or interact with web pages. It can connect to Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Shopping and flights information.

It also comes with Nano Banana features, so you can try an apartment listing picture with your own furniture, for example.

In addition to the three new countries, which are mostly English-speaking, Google is announcing support for another 50 languages.

This of course includes Hindi, but there is also support for French, Spanish, Chinese and lots of other European languages.

Read more: Google’s announcement. Writeups on TechCrunch and Engadget.

Sora 2 video generation could be heading for ChatGPT «soon»

Sora video generation in ChatGPT would expand access, but also increase costs. (Picture: generated)
The Information and ChatGPT-watcher Tibor Blaho are both reporting an upcoming release of video generation in the main ChatGPT app.

According to The Information’s x.com post, the release seems imminent, while Blaho has spotted Sora generation mentions and ID’s in the latest Andoid beta ChatGPT App.

Sora 2 was launched as a quasi social network with its own app in October 2025 and was invite-only.

Judging by early search interest on Google for «Sora invite code» soon after launch, interest for the app greatly exceeded capacity and available invites.

It produces 10-second clips from prompts or pictures and promises to put your likeness in anything you can imagine. It briefly went viral, running up some 920 million weekly users before dropping from #1 to #165 in the App Store.

Putting the app’s features into the mainline GPT app will bring it up to par with Google’s AI subscriptions, which gives users access to the video generator Veo 3 on the $25 Pro plan.

Read more: The Information (paywalled), Tibor Blaho on X, and Reuters.

AI lab Thinking Machines gets investment, gigawatt compute from Nvidia

With no product and an experienced team, Murati’s Thinking Machines lab is rounding up funding. (Picture: Nvidia)
Founded by OpenAI’s former Chief Technology Officer after the 2024 leadership spat, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines has scored a big deal with Nvidia.

The startup has entered into «a multiyear strategic partnership» that will provide them with both money and significant Vera Rubin compute early next year — about the same level the first version of Grok was trained on.

The parties are not disclosing a sum total, but 1 GW of Nvidia compute is estimated to be worth about $50 billion, Reuters notes.

Murati’s AI lab has been largely secretive about its actual products, releasing a configurable API in December 2025 and vowing to make AI models more accessible, capable and, yes, customizable.

They raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation from Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia in July 2025.

Read more: Joint press release, writeups on Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.

Meta announces new processor generation focused on inference

Meta’s MTIA-chips are supposed to support recommendations and AI for «billions» of people. (Picture: Meta)
Tapping their long-time partner Broadcom, Meta’s new in-house chips are built to scale from recommendation engines to advanced AI workflows.

The new generation Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) isn’t built to replace the chips sourced from AMD or Nvidia, but are intended to supplement them and achieve «the lowest possible price.»

MTIA-chips are taking a different tack on developing AI models, optimizing for inference — the process of answering AI queries — instead of training. Most chips are customized for training, which is more compute intensive, but the majority of a chip’s life is spent putting together answers in production.

— Chip designs are based on projected workloads, but by the time the hardware reaches production — often two years later — those workloads may have shifted substantially, Meta says in their press release.

The new chips «have either already been deployed or are scheduled for deployment in 2026 or 2027,» Meta says — and they don’t disclose just how many of these they are making.

Read more: Meta’s press release. Writeups on Reuters and CNBC.

Claude for Excel and Powerpoint now shares info, and gets skills

Excel and PowerPoint editions of Claude can now talk to each other. (Picture: Anthropic)
As of today, Claude shares your conversation «across all open files,» so actions in one file can be «informed» by what’s happening in the other.

That eases some hassle for those who do a lot of work in PowerPoint and Excel, and removes the need to reintroduce the task or use extra steps.

It means that users can pull financials into a workbook and drop the valuation summary into a PowerPoint slide without switching tabs or re-explaining at every step.

At the same time, Anthropic is launching skills for workflows — that can be shared and dropped into other apps in an organization, so everyone can use the same time-saving actions stored in them.

Skills are stored prompts for workflows, and work as an old-school template; with everything set and working on repetitive tasks that are easy to automate.

Read more: Anthropic’s presentation and launch tweet. Writeups on VentureBeat and The Decoder.

As 140 million people use ChatGPT for learning math, OpenAI adds visuals

That’s a big number out of 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, accounting for about a sixth of the total usage and outperforming even health questions.

In their announcement, OpenAI says that more than half of U.S. adults struggle with math, and don’t feel confident teaching it to their kids.

Continue reading “As 140 million people use ChatGPT for learning math, OpenAI adds visuals”

French Canal+ partners with Gemini to index content, ease production

Gemini will scan Canal+’s library and create a massive recommendation engine. (Picture: generated)
In a multi-year deal first reported by Reuters, the now global TV platform is looking to improve its recommendation engine and help production teams.

Starting in June 2026, Canal+ will be providing producers with access to Veo 3, which will help creators «pre-visualize scenes before shooting,» or help recreate history from a single image.

They will also be indexing its extensive content library to use in a Gemini-powered recommendation engine, creating a massive, multimodal database of sound, video, and text data.

Canal+ recently bought the pan-African boradcaster MultiChoice, extending the reach of its app and services to some 70 countries, as they are racing toward a target of 100 million streaming users, and hope to compete with the American streaming giants.

Read more: Canal+ press release, Reuters report.

Ex-Meta chief AI scientist raises $1 billion to build world models

After leaving Meta at the end of 2025, LeCun’s new startup is already raking in the money. (Picture: generated)
Hot off the $1B raise for Fei Fei Li’s World Labs, the former AI boss at Meta, Yann LeCun, is raising as much for his Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence.

CEO Alexandre LeBrun notes to TechCrunch that world models are the latest buzzword in AI, but cautions that the startup is doing «fundamental research» and won’t be launching any products «for years.»

LeCun and LeBrun both say that generative AI models work by predicting text or images, and are severely limited when it comes to interacting with the real, messy, and unpredictable world.

AMI sees their clients as being in «industrial process control, automation, wearable devices, robotics, healthcare, and beyond,» according to their front page.

According to Reuters, their technology might show up in Meta’s AI glasses «in the short term.»

Read more: Reuters, TechCrunch and Wired.

Google announces slew of Gemini improvements to Workspace

Workspace got smarter, and can now draw on files, emails, chats and the web. (Picture: Google)
Sheets, Slides and Docs are getting some extra help from Gemini in a huge update to the service.

— Today, we’re making Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive more personal, capable and collaborative to help you get things done, faster, Google says.

All these apps can now draw on information from your Drive, Gmail, Chat and web search to draft things like emails and docs, or pull numbers for spreadsheets based on, say, an email conversation, meeting notes or separate sources in Drive. All it takes is a single prompt.

Google is especially proud of their agentic performance on Sheets, getting very close to the human expert benchmark on the SpreadsheetBench dataset.

The features are rolling out to all Ultra and Pro subscribers globally today, but is only available in English. Google is looking to bring on «more languages soon.»

Read more: Google’s announcement, launch thread. Writeups on 9to5Google and TechCrunch.

Meta acquires Moltbook team to work on Superintelligence Labs

Meta acquihires the Moltbook team for an undisclosed sum. (Picture: composite)
Meta won’t say what they paid, but are excited for how the team joining «opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses,» they tell Axios.

The agent-only social platform Moltbook took the web by storm in late January, providing a fascinating view of AI agents talking to other agents.

It is based on the equally viral agent platform OpenClaw, which was bought by OpenAI and kept open source less than a month ago.

Meta is taking a different track with Moltbook, deciding to keep it open «temporarily,» with stronger identity requirements — connecting the bots to their owners.

The founders, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, will be joining the Meta Superintelligence Lab on future efforts, and Meta tells TechCrunch that «we look forward to working together to bring innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone.»

Read more: Axios broke the news, further info on CNBC, and TechCrunch.