The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Meta, setting out its preliminary view that Meta breached EU antitrust rules by excluding third-party Artificial Intelligence ('AI') assistants from accessing and interacting with users on WhatsApp. Meta's conduct risks blocking competitors from entering or expanding in the rapidly growing market for AI assistants.
LLMs have made AI assistants a standard feature across SaaS. AI assistants allow users to instantly retrieve information and interact with a system through text-based prompts. Mathias Biilmann, in his article " Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters," discusses two distinct approaches to building AI assistants. The Closed Approach involves a conversational assistant embedded directly within a single SaaS product. Examples include Zoom's AI Companion, Salesforce CRM's Einstein, and Microsoft's Copilot. The Open Approach involves external conversational assistants, such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini,
In one commercial, a man confiding in his AI about a difficult conversation with his mother is interrupted by a jarring, high-energy pitch for "Golden Encounters," a dating site for "sensitive cubs." In another, a fitness query pivots abruptly into an ad for "StepBoost Max" insoles. Most of the response to the ads online was that they were spot on and brutally funny.
OpenClaw and Moltbot are the talk of the tech town right now, but cybersecurity researchers have flagged some concerns that you might want to think about. OpenClaw - first known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, all in the same week - has got the tech world buzzing thanks to its abilities to autonomously perform tasks like managing a user'sschedule. Meanwhile, Moltbook has gone viral for its Reddit-style social network, where AI agents post and interact with one another. No humans allowed - apart from observing.
For understandable reasons, much of the alarm being raised about AI technology focuses on a fairly narrow band of adverse effects. AI can hallucinate incorrect answers, which could lead to errors both trivial and damaging. There's also the phenomenon of AI chatbots encouraging their users to engage in harmful or even fatal behavior. But there's another side to this as well: are AI agents reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes?
In the world of earnings reports and pitch decks, the ultimate goal of our current AI boom is usually called something like artificial general intelligence (AGI), superintelligence, or-if you're really nerdy- recursive self-improving AI. But in the real world, we're all just looking for the Enterprise computer: a digital assistant you can talk to that doesn't just fully understand you, but can do things for you instantly.
I'm a little bit surprised they've moved so early into that, I mean, look, ads, there's nothing wrong with ads...they funded much of the consumer internet. And if done well, they can be useful,
You no longer need an Amazon device to summon Alexa since the AI assistant will be available on the Alexa.com website. Amazon will roll out the web client to its Alexa+ Early Access customers first, still featuring the company's new and improved AI assistant that was announced in February. The web model won't be much different from the existing Alexa+ that's already available on Echo devices, Fire TV and Fire tablets.
The AI assistant has access to the most powerful models and strict security controls, but controversy after controversy has brought Grok into disrepute. How suitable is the solution for business use? The new business versions of Grok offer access to xAI's most advanced models: Grok 3, Grok 4, and Grok 4 Heavy. The setup is similar in every way to the business propositions of ChatGPT and Claude. Grok Business costs
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity-powered by large language models (LLMs)-are emerging as parallel gatekeepers. They're quietly reshaping which brands get recommended long before a buyer ever reaches a search results page. In my previous article, I discussed how Google's AI Overviews are intercepting traffic (even for top-ranking sites). But there's another shift that many businesses haven't recognized: Search engines are no longer the only place where your customers' questions get answered.
Logitech's CEO says that AI-powered devices are a solution looking for a problem, despite being a strong proponent of AI and her firm pushing out exactly the kind of thing she's talking about. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hanneke Faber, head of the Swiss mouse and webcam maker, dismissed efforts of other hardware companies to build AI into their gadgets. "What's out there is a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist," she reportedly told Bloomberg.
It's not hard to understand the AI future Microsoft is betting billions on - a world where computers understand what you're saying and do things for you. It's right there in the ads for the latest Copilot PCs, where people cheerfully talk to their laptops and they talk back, answering questions in natural language and even doing things for them. The tagline is straightforward: "The computer you can talk to."
ClickUp has redesigned its productivity platform and released new AI assistant features as it aims to create a one-stop shop for customers. The company said core parts of this release were possible because of its acquisition of Qatalog, the enterprise search startup that had raised more than $29.5 million from backers like Salesforce Ventures, Atomico, Prototype Capital, Mosaic Ventures, Tiny VC, and Possible Ventures.
Generate Speech is the first time Adobe has added text-to-speech capabilities to Firefly, leveraging its own Firefly models, as well as models from ElevenLabs. At launch, Adobe says it'll support 15 languages with Generate Speech, and you'll be able to add emotion tags. These tags aren't universal, so you can add different tags to different parts of a line to change the inflection. Generate Soundtrack and Generate Speech are rolling out shortly to Firefly.
The company said the launch of Red Hat Developer Lightspeed, a portfolio of AI solutions, will equip developer teams with "intelligent, context-aware assistance" through virtual assistants. Available on the Red Hat Developer Hub, the first of these AI tools is accessible through the hub's chat interface. The company said this will help speed up non-coding-related tasks, including development of test plans, troubleshooting applications, and creating documentation. This AI assistant can be used via both publicly available and self-hosted large language models (LLMs).
The rise of generative AI in recent years has caused a massive strategic reorientation across the tech industry, as companies have scrambled to launch their own AI-powered products and services. Perhaps most memorably, Meta -- which three years ago changed its name from Facebook to signal its shift toward the metaverse (remember that thing?) -- announced that 2023 would be its "year of productivity," focused in large part on a pivot toward AI.
Cluely's AI assistant grew famous this April with a viral claim that its undetectable windows could "help you cheat on anything" - a claim that was quickly disproven when a string of proctoring services showed they could, in fact, detect use of the AI assistant. But in a matter of months, the company had raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz, becoming one of the most visible products in the crowded AI assistant space.
The report, "News Integrity in AI Assistants," is based on a study involving 22 public service media organizations in 18 countries to assess how four common AI assistants - OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, and Perplexity - answer questions about news and current affairs. Each organization asked a set of 30 news-related questions (e.g., "Who is the pope?" " Can Trump run for a third term?" " Did Elon Musk do a Nazi salute?"). More than 2,700 AI-generated responses were then assessed by journalists against five criteria: accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, editorialization, and context.
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are among the fastest-growing consumer apps of all time. Fifteen million U.S. adults treat ChatGPT and other GenAI platforms as their go-to for online search-and that number is expected to more than double by 2028. Letting ChatGPT search, synthesize, and summarize is a far better experience than scrolling through pages stuffed with ads and SEO-bait.
For most of its short life, my Tesla Model 3 has aged beautifully. Since I bought the car, in 2019, it has received a number of new features simply by updating its software. My navigation system no longer just directs me to EV chargers along my route-it also shows me, in real time, how many plugs are free. With the push of a button, I can activate "Car Wash Mode," and the Tesla will put itself in neutral and disable the windshield wipers.
Slack users can now start a private conversation with Claude, or add it to a group thread, simply by tagging @Claude, or by clicking a devoted icon at the top-right corner of their screen. Integrating Claude with Slack gives the chatbot permission to access threads in a user's workspace channels, as well as their direct messages and shared files -- but only those that they have direct access to.
During a fireside chat at LinkedIn's San Francisco office on Tuesday, Ryan Roslansky said using AI is like "having a second brain" that knows him "extremely well." It's why AI is helpful almost every time he sends important emails to his boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "A lot of the time when I'm sending a super high-stakes email to Satya Nadella or other CEOs or world leaders or etcetera, you've got to make sure you sound super smart when you do that," Roslansky said.
What if your best AI prompts didn't disappear into your unorganized chat history, but came back tomorrow as a reliable assistant? In this article, you'll learn how to turn one-off "aha" prompts into reusable assistants that are tailored to your audience, grounded in your knowledge, and consistent every time, saving you (and your team) from typing the same 448-word prompt ever again. No coding, just designing, and by the end, you'll have a custom AI assistant that can augment your team.
