— Starting in the coming weeks, teens will no longer be able to access AI characters across our apps until the updated experience is ready, they write.
Continue reading “Meta disables AI character access for teens, but general AI use is fine”
Claude in Excel arrives in Pro plans, Cowork comes to Enterprise and Teams
Claude in Excel is now available on Pro plans.
Claude now accepts multiple files via drag and drop, avoids overwriting your existing cells, and handles longer sessions with auto compaction.
Get started: https://t.co/cAMDXM1h7r pic.twitter.com/yt9Gy2HLY3
— Claude (@claudeai) January 23, 2026
Working on both macOS and Windows, Claude in Excel is useful for testing scenarios without breaking formulas, navigating complex models, and debugging entire worksheets.
At the same time, Anthropic says that their recently launched Cowork agent is expanding availablity.
Continue reading “Claude in Excel arrives in Pro plans, Cowork comes to Enterprise and Teams”
Google DeepMind makes 4-dimensional videos from 2D inputs
This means they can create 3D worlds from a 2D camera, and it can also calculate the fourth dimension, which is time and movement.
— Anytime we look at the world, we perform an extraordinary feat of memory and prediction. We see and understand things as they are at a given moment in time, as they were a moment ago, and how they are going to be in the moment to follow, Google writes.
Enabling this will be especially useful for training robots, who need spatial real-time awareness about the world around it, and might not have fancy 3D cameras.
The technology is 18x to 300x faster than previous state of the art models, Google says — making the translations function in real-time.
The use case for the technology in addition to robotics is making 3D-models for augmented reality in smart glasses, and in building world models — which is the real advantage on the path to creating world-awareness for Artificial General Intelligence.
Read more: Google’s blog, Launch thread, research paper.
Apple is doing early work on an AirTag-sized AI pin, set for 2027
The device in early stage planning will be similar to a slightly thicker AirTag, paywalled The Information writes.
It will be thin, flat and circular, come with an aluminum shell and offer two cameras on the front to observe it’s surroundings and take pictures. It will also have a three microphone array for listening in — and an included speaker for output, writes MacRumors.
There is only one button on it, presumably for turning it on and off.
The presumptive idea for such a pin would be for use with an AI assistant without having to spring out a full feature phone just to check the surroundings — and it will probably work along with a phone in the Apple ecosystem.
The finished system could be able to launch as early as 2027, and Apple plans to produce around 20 million devices at launch, Engadget writes.
There is not much time to act; OpenAI said yesterday that their first device will be ready in late 2026.
Court filings: Microsoft has 27% stake in OpenAI worth ~$135 billion
From the papers, it seems Microsoft was ready with a whole new AI subsidiary to form after Sam Altman’s ouster as CEO in November 2023 — complete with a legal framework, ready to send to the Washington Secretary of State at a moments notice.
They had already budgeted for about $25 billion in costs to «absorb the OpenAI team.»
When Altman returned to OpenAI after a short while, he was already discussing possible board members with Microsoft.
The winner of the early story seems to be Microsoft, retaining leverage over «Major Decisions» up until the for profit reorganization of OpenAI.
Microsoft also retains the rights to OpenAI’s technology until 2032. Musk is suing for breach of contract/trust and is demanding $134 billion from OpenAI.
Read the full scoop at GeekWire.
Anthropic uses Claude to write new Claude «constitution»
— While writing the constitution, we sought feedback from various external experts (as well as asking for input from prior iterations of Claude), Anthropic says.
The new constitution is going to tell Claude how to behave in broader, more ethical terms, they write.
This is a departure from previous constitutions that were big long lists of specific principles and interactions, that detailed how Claude would act.
The bot needs to generalize more to decide on situations not predicted in the written guide, Anthropic says.
The constitution for Claude is the «foundational document» for how the bot should act, and is used in both training and inference (as in day-to-day use). It is supposed to be a living document, getting updated continuously as Anthropic sees how the bot behaves.
Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, the actual Constitution. Writeups on TechCrunch, Time.com, Axios.
Ukraine says to share valuable wartime drone data with allies to train AI
They will now «establish a system allowing its allies to train their artificial intelligence» on it, Reuters reports.
They are already launching a project with Palantir to produce an AI on the combat data.
The data includes «extensive battlefield information, logs of combat statistics and millions of hours of drone footage,» Reuters writes.
Training an AI for combat needs tons of real-world data, preferably from a real battlefield, not simulations — and this data will be immensely important for Ukraine’s allies, who are all busy developing combat AI drones as we speak.
Read more: Reuters, Financial Times and The Independent.
First new AI models from Meta released internally this month
The models «show a lot of promise» and are «very good,» he says.
Meta has been rumored for a while to have a couple of models in the works, including the Avocado model for text and an image/video-focused model named Mango.
These models now seem out of training are showing promise internally.
Bosworth also warns that there’s «a tremendous amount of work to do post-training.»
Meta hasn’t launched a new model since Llama 4 in April 2025, but Bosworth is hinting to Reuters that 2026-27 are «important years for bringing consumer products to market.»
Read the full scoop at Reuters.
It’s official: OpenAI rolls out age-gating globally
Age prediction works by taking in several factors such as usage time, account age and the time the user is active.
It is developed «in dialogue» with experts from the American Psychological Association, ConnectSafely, and Global Physicians Network.
After several wrongful death lawsuits involving teens, disturbing mental health conversations and stating that principles are in conflict, OpenAI was more or less forced into doing something on both teen use and parental controls.
Those deemed under 18 by the AI will be served a vanilla version of ChatGPT without beauty standards, violence or romantic role-play, to name a few examples.
If someone gets wrongfully lobbed into the teen experience, and it does make mistakes, they can upload a selfie for proper verification through Persona.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, CNBC, Engadget.
OpenAI commits to power buildouts for Stargate centers
This means for instance that they will cooperate with power utility companies at each site to ensure they are «paying our own way on energy.»
That could entail building out the infrastructure for each site where needed, or simply strengthening the grid.
They also address water usage, and note that Stargate Abilene will use as much water annually as the community uses in a day, thanks to «innovations in the cooling water systems design.»
OpenAI is even committing to slowing down workloads on days with adverse conditions, to lighten the load on the grid.
There have been at least 25 data center cancellations in the USA due to opposition from local communities, Gizmodo reports.
They are typically worried about rising electricity and water costs, which OpenAI is now directly addressing.
Read more: OpenAI’s blog, Reuters, Bloomberg.
Google’s Veo 3.1 hits 179 million Workspace users
Flow is a wrapper for AI generated videos, using the popular Veo 3.1 — one of the most advanced generators out there.
The expanded access is for Business and Enterprise (9 million users), and Education plans — which has 170 million users.
These plans can now also access the popular Nano Banana Pro service, letting users generate pictures from anything they can imagine.
The Flow service was previously reserved for Gemini Pro and Ultra users, who could generate 8 second, high quality 4K AI videos in widescreen or vertical formats, and daisy chain them for even longer ones.
The service now dwarves OpenAI’s Sora 2 service, which had 6 million total downloads in January 2026.
Read more: The Verge, and Google’s support document.
OpenAI’s latest numbers; 3x yearly financial/compute growth since 2023
Friar says revenue and compute grow in tandem with the advent of more powerful models — that they «scale with intelligence,» so to speak.
Looking at the numbers, compute has gone from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 1.9 GW in 2025, growing about 3x every year since ChatGPT’s debut.
Financially, OpenAI now has $20 billion in revenue, following the same curve as the compute scale and growing about 3x per year from $2 billion in 2024.
All this is of course before ads arrive on the free tier, and before OpenAI sees any results from its global rollout of the go subscription on their revenue.
On the compute side, OpenAI is chasing infrastructure like there is no tomorrow, closing in on more than 30 GW before 2030 in what would be truly explosive growth — and we can only wonder as to how advanced frontier AI models will get by then.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, .
Musk runs into a snag on data center gas turbines — they are now illegal
They produce much too high levels of nitrogen oxides, and must be regulated as combustion engines, the EPA says.
That means Musk’s and xAI’s Colossus plant will have to rethink their energy use, as they make widespread use of natural gas turbines to generate electricity for their facilities.
They will basically have to get Clean Air Act permits, and prove they aren’t harmful.
The local population have long been complaining of a rotten-egg-like stench in the atmosphere, CNBC writes, and smog is supposedly prevalent.
xAI uses 15 turbines for Colossus 1 and at one point had 59 turbines for Colossus 2, The Guardian writes.
Read more: The EPA Rule. Writeups on CNBC, Gizmodo and The Guardian.
Demis Hassabis: China is just «months» behind US in AI capabilities
They might be «just a matter of months» begin Western capabilities, he tells CNBC.
— The question is, can they innovate something new beyond the frontier? So I think they’ve shown they can catch up … and be very close to the frontier … But can they actually innovate something new, like a new transformer … that gets beyond the frontier? I don’t think that’s been shown yet, he tells the new podcast The Tech Download.
The key tech to unlock Chinese AI is access to chips, he says, where the USA is far ahead. The US recently okay’ed exports of the powerful H200 chip from Nvidia, but reception in China has been lukewarm from authorities.
— To invent something is about 100 times harder than it is to copy it, says Hassabis on the podcast. — That’s the next frontier really, and I haven’t seen evidence of that yet, but it’s very difficult.
Read the full scoop on CNBC.
OpenAI to start «public» advertising tests on ChatGPT
OpenAI says they won’t share your data or conversation to advertisers, and will «maintain a high standard» where you can turn off personalization if you want to.
They won’t be shown to under-18s, they say, nor will they show on sensitive topics, such as physical health, mental health or politics.
The neat part of the coming ads is that you click on them and query them for further detail, which is a feature not found in traditional advertising.
The Financial times estimates that OpenAI can earn somewhere around the «low billions» from advertising.
Ads won’t be shown for paying tiers, such as Plus, Pro and Enterprise.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement. Writeups on Reuters, The Verge and Ars Technica.