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Tech News
A scientist who has logged 10,000 papers in a reference manager over 13 years describes moving from trying to read every paper closely to a selective, task-driven approach to the literature. The piece also warns that AI tools like ChatGPT, despite improved search and summarization, still risk producing uncritical or fabricated citations if used without careful reading.
9to5Mac's report details four months of using OpenAI's Codex agent on the Mac, highlighting its April addition of a Computer Use plugin that lets the AI see, click, and type within apps using its own cursor. The feature traces back to Sky, an AI assistant previewed by former Apple Shortcuts creator Ari Weinstein's startup, which OpenAI acquired before folding its tech into Codex.
The Department of Defense has expanded its GenAI.mil platform to include secure, customized versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT and xAI's Grok, giving its roughly 3 million civilian and military personnel access to generative AI tools built for military use. The portal, which launched last year with Google's Gemini, already has more than 1.7 million users and shields data from the collection practices typical of consumer AI products.
OpenAI reported elevated errors and latency on ChatGPT Work, its enterprise AI agent, for about three hours on Monday, while Microsoft separately confirmed degraded functionality across Exchange Online. Downdetector logged over 1,100 reports for OpenAI products and nearly 4,600 for Microsoft Outlook around 2:24 p.m. ET, though the companies gave no indication the two incidents were related.
European regulators have designated ChatGPT as a search engine under EU digital regulations, placing it under stricter oversight requirements. Reddit and Roblox have also received similar classifications, bringing them under the same heightened regulatory scrutiny.
OpenClaw released version 2026.8.1, branded as 2.0, marking its biggest update since launching last November. The overhaul began as a plan to simplify installation and rebuild the browser client but expanded into a full codebase rework, involving 933 contributors and over 16,000 merged pull requests.
The European Commission classified ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms after each surpassed 45 million average monthly EU users. This designation subjects all three to the Digital Services Act's toughest compliance requirements, joining 28 other services already under this heightened oversight.
OpenAI has published internal reference details describing an 'automations' capability within ChatGPT, meant to trigger actions when a user requests something to happen later, repeatedly, or upon a future condition. This includes reminders, recurring summaries, scheduled searches, and management of existing scheduled tasks.
The European Commission classified OpenAI's ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox as very large online platforms under the Digital Services Act after each surpassed 45 million monthly EU users. This status brings tougher requirements including removing illegal content and safeguarding minors' privacy and security, with a deadline of end of December to comply.
OpenAI announced its advertising unit, launched within ChatGPT in February, now generates $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate. The ads are now live in over 40 countries, with self-service access expanding Monday to India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, primarily reaching free-tier and Go subscription users.
OpenAI confirmed a partial outage of ChatGPT Work beginning around 11:04 AM ET on Monday, August 31, causing elevated errors and latency for users on multiple subscription tiers. Plus subscribers appear hit hardest, with Work mode unavailable for some, leaving them unable to start or continue tasks. As of 12:02 PM ET, OpenAI said the issue was still unresolved and a fix was in progress.
A ZDNET contributor shares how they've been using ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's agentic AI tool, to handle five recurring small-business tasks, including sorting through PR email correspondence from OpenAI and other outlets. The writer describes connecting Gmail to the tool only temporarily for large tasks and disconnecting afterward as a security precaution, while noting prompts often need refinement to get useful results.