Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: open Clear Filter

Microsoft taps Anthropic for AI in Word and Excel, signaling distance from OpenAI

Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Microsoft will pay Anthropic for access to its AI models. They'll go toward new features in Office 365 platforms. Microsoft and OpenAI are distancing themselves from one another. Microsoft will slacken its dependence on OpenAI through a new partnership with Anthropic, The Information reported on Tuesday. The deal will enable Microsoft to embed Anthropic's AI systems into Microsoft 365 (fo

Microsoft ends OpenAI exclusivity in Office, adds rival Anthropic

Microsoft's Office 365 suite will soon incorporate AI models from Anthropic alongside existing OpenAI technology, The Information reported, ending years of exclusive reliance on OpenAI for generative AI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The shift reportedly follows internal testing that revealed Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 model excels at specific Office tasks where OpenAI's models fall short, particularly in visual design and spreadsheet automation, according to sources fam

GPT-5 Is Making Huge Factual Errors, Users Say

It's been just over a month since OpenAI dropped its long-awaited GPT-5 large language model (LLM) — and it hasn't stopped spewing an astonishing amount of strange falsehoods since then. From the AI experts at the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley Center for Artificial Intelligence and irked Redditors on r/ChatGPTPro, to even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that OpenAI's claim that GPT-5 boasts "PhD-level intelligence" comes with some serious asterisks.

Microsoft reportedly plans to start using Anthropic models to power some of Office 365's Copilot features

Microsoft reportedly plans to begin using Anthropic's latest Claude models to power some of the Copilot features in its Office 365 apps. In a report published Tuesday, The Information said the tech giant would announce the change "in the coming weeks." Microsoft currently relies on OpenAI's tech to power the majority of AI features found inside of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. As an outsider looking in, Microsoft's embrace of Anthropic's models would appear to signal a deepening split be

Microsoft to lessen reliance on OpenAI by buying AI from rival Anthropic

Microsoft will pay to use Anthropic’s AI in Office 365 apps, The Information reports, citing two sources. The move means that Anthropic’s tech will help power new features in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint alongside OpenAI’s, marking the end of Microsoft’s previous reliance solely on the ChatGPT-maker for its productivity suite. Microsoft’s move to diversify its AI partnerships comes amid a growing rift with OpenAI, which has pursued its own infrastructure projects as well as a and a pote

Abu Dhabi launches low-cost AI reasoning model in challenge to OpenAI, DeepSeek

Omer Taha Cetin | Anadolu | Getty Images A new challenger in the global artificial intelligence race has entered the ring. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), an AI-focused research university established by the United Arab Emirates, announced on Tuesday the release of a new, low-cost reasoning model to rival OpenAI and DeepSeek. It comes after DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, earlier this year shocked the world with the release of a reasoning model called R1 which

Three big things we still don’t know about AI’s energy burden

The problem with finding that number, as we explain in our piece published in May, was that AI companies are the only ones who have it. We pestered Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft, but each company refused to provide its figure. Researchers we spoke to who study AI’s impact on energy grids compared it to trying to measure the fuel efficiency of a car without ever being able to drive it, making guesses based on rumors of its engine size and what it sounds like going down the highway. But then this

OpenAI denies that it’s weighing a ‘last-ditch’ California exit amid regulatory pressure over its restructuring

In Brief OpenAI executives are discussing a potential relocation out of California as increasing political resistance threatens the company’s efforts to convert from nonprofit to for-profit status, according to The WSJ, though the company says it has no plans to leave. California’s attorney general is investigating whether OpenAI’s restructuring violates state charitable trust law, while a coalition of nonprofits, labor groups, philanthropies, and even rival Meta are pushing back against the c

I have left Branch and am no longer involved with Nova Launcher

So Long Hi everyone, I'm the founder and original developer of Nova Launcher. I've been the only one working on Nova for the past year. I needed to let you know that I have left Branch and am no longer involved with Nova Launcher. For the past several months I have been preparing the Open Source release of Nova Launcher. This work included cleaning up the codebase, reviewing licenses, removing or replacing proprietary code, and coordinating with legal to ensure a proper release. When Branch a

So Long [Nova Launcher's FOSS release blocked by its owners,despite obligations]

So Long Hi everyone, I'm the founder and original developer of Nova Launcher. I've been the only one working on Nova for the past year. I needed to let you know that I have left Branch and am no longer involved with Nova Launcher. For the past several months I have been preparing the Open Source release of Nova Launcher. This work included cleaning up the codebase, reviewing licenses, removing or replacing proprietary code, and coordinating with legal to ensure a proper release. When Branch a

Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’

X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to determine whether social media posts are really written by humans, he posted. The realization came while reading (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which were praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software programming service that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in May. Lately, that subreddit has been so filled with posts from self-proclaimed Code users announc

OpenAI Says It's Making a Full Hollywood Movie Using AI

OpenAI has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles to create a feature-length animated movie made largely with artificial intelligence. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the purported goal of using AI tech on the movie is to speed up production while also saving costs — and, presumably, serving as a giant tech demo for movie execs everywhere. The film will invite comparisons to the early days of CGI-animated movies in the mid-1990s. Funded heavily by Apple cofounder Ste

Report: OpenAI will launch its own AI chip next year

XH4D/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways: OpenAI is building an in-house AI chip with Broadcom. The effort is likely the result of a partnership valued at $10 billion. Many AI companies are launching their own chipmaking operations. OpenAI is gearing up to launch its own AI chip, part of a broader industry effort to gain independence from third-party semiconductor companies. The ChatGPT-maker will start mass

OpenAI Is Bringing an AI-Driven Feature-Length Animated Movie to Cannes

You knew it was bound to happen, and now, it has. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI is lending its services to the production of a feature-length animated film called Critterz, which is aiming to be done in time for next year’s Cannes Film Festival. That would put its production time at nine months, which is unheard of for a feature-length animated film, but that’s because it’ll be created using AI. According to the paper, using OpenAI’s resources, production companies Vertigo Films a

Nova Launcher’s founder and sole developer has left

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. After nearly everyone working on the Nova Launcher, one of the most recognizable names in Android launchers, was laid off last year, founder Kevin Barry, Nova’s sole remaining developer, said this weekend that he has left Nova’s parent company after being asked to stop working on the launcher and an effort to open-source it. Nova Launcher’s website currently shows a 404 er

OpenAI tech to be used to in a full-length animated film

OpenAI is throwing its resources behind a mostly AI-generated animated film that was the brainchild of one of the company's employees. As first reported by the Wall Street Journal , the film will be called Critterz and will follow forest creatures who go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger. Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI, started designing the characters three years ago with the intention of making a short film using OpenAI's DALL-E image-generation tool

OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

The OpenWrt Project is a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developers, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it;

OpenAI Wants This Film to Prove AI Animation Is Ready for the Big Screen

Can generative AI animate a decent movie? That question's getting an early test. OpenAI and production studio Vertigo Films have announced a plan to create a feature-length adaptation of a 2023 short film made as a demonstration for OpenAI's Dall-E image generator. The film, called Critterz, has a budget of less than $30 million, and producers hope to make the movie in about nine months -- in time for the Cannes Film Festival next May, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. The sho

Writing by manipulating visual representations of stories

Visual Story-Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations This system automatically visualizes a story (chronological events, character and their actions and movements) and allows users to edit the story by manipulating these visual representations. For example: Hover over the timeline allows reviewing the chronology of events and visualizing the movements of the characters Connecting two characters suggests edits to the text to reflect the new interaction Moving a character sugge

Why you’ll want to have two tabs open to watch the iPhone 17 event

There’s just one day to go until the iPhone 17 event, and the Awe Dropping announcements will of course be streaming online. You have a choice of three different ways to watch the event live, and if you’re watching from a browser, it’s worth having two different tabs open … While we’re expecting the presentations to be pre-recorded, as we’ve seen for the last few years, it is still streamed as if it were a live event. We previously outlined the three different ways to watch the livestream: A

Apple Reminders on macOS Tahoe includes this interesting piece of vintage UI design

Despite macOS going through a couple major redesigns over the past couple years with Big Sur in 2020 and now Tahoe in 2025, there’s still one app that includes a very old looking interface that predates these redesigns: Apple Reminders. If you open up Apple Reminders on the latest version of macOS, whether that be Tahoe beta or the stable version of Sequoia – you’ll find a little bit of a UI surprise when you open up the Photos picker to attach a photo to a reminder: What makes this interestin

To Help Workers Losing Their Jobs to AI, OpenAI Is Launching a Jobs Platform Run By AI

First it peddled the poison, and now it's selling the cure. OpenAI announced that it's launching a new AI-powered jobs platform next year that will use AI to match employers with potential candidates. Called the OpenAI Jobs Platform, the initiative will put it in direct competition with job juggernauts like LinkedIn, which has also been experimenting with integrating the tech. It marks a new direction for the company, perhaps as it tries to maintain some semblance of its altruistic image. As i

Topics: ai job jobs openai simo

Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

In 2024, three book authors, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic, accusing the start-up of illegally using their work to train its A.I. models. The suit is among the four dozen cases that copyright holders have brought against A.I. companies. Some have been dismissed by the courts. Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft need enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is copyrighted, to build its A.I. models. The companies have long claimed t

Silicon Valley’s most powerful alliance just got stronger

Eddy Cue deserves a raise. As the executive overseeing Apple’s services division, he’s highly incentivized to protect the tens of billions of dollars a year that Google pays to be the default search engine in Safari. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about it,” he said from the witness stand during Google’s antitrust trial earlier this year. Luckily for Cue, his court testimony appears to have had a significant impact on Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled this week that Google’s default payments to

OpenAI reorganizes research team behind ChatGPT’s personality

OpenAI is reorganizing its Model Behavior team, a small but influential group of researchers who shape how the company’s AI models interact with people, TechCrunch has learned. In an August memo to staff seen by TechCrunch, OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen said the Model Behavior team — which consists of roughly 14 researchers — would be joining the Post Training team, a larger research group responsible for improving the company’s AI models after their initial pre-training. As part o

Making a font of my handwriting

Recently I’ve been on a small campaign to try to make my personal website more… personal. Little ways to make it obvious it’s mine and personal, not just another piece of the boring corporate dystopia that is most of the web these days. I don’t quite want to fully regress to the Geocities era and fill the screen with animated under construction GIFs, but I do want to capture some of that vibe. I’d added some bits and pieces along those lines: floating images in articles now look like they’re st

OpenAI Spends $10 Billion to Get Into the Chip Business

OpenAI would like to stop being so reliant on Nvidia to handle its processing needs. To address that, the artificial intelligence startup is reportedly teaming up with Broadcom to develop its own chips, set to be available starting next year, according to the Financial Times. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI’s deal with the US-based semiconductor firm will see the two work together to create custom artificial intelligence chips, which will be used internally by OpenAI to train and ru

Making a Font of My Handwriting

Recently I’ve been on a small campaign to try to make my personal website more… personal. Little ways to make it obvious it’s mine and personal, not just another piece of the boring corporate dystopia that is most of the web these days. I don’t quite want to fully regress to the Geocities era and fill the screen with animated under construction GIFs, but I do want to capture some of that vibe. I’d added some bits and pieces along those lines: floating images in articles now look like they’re st

OpenAI Wants You to Get a Certificate in ChatGPT and Find Your Next Job

It's not quite getting a college degree in ChatGPT, but it's close. OpenAI said this week it is launching an AI-powered jobs platform and a new certification program offered through its OpenAI Academy. The OpenAI Jobs Platform, expected to launch in 2026, will use AI to connect candidates with employers. The company says the system is designed to better align worker skills with business needs, potentially putting it in direct competition with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. Alongside the hiring plat

Attorneys general warn OpenAI ‘harm to children will not be tolerated’

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings met with and sent an open letter to OpenAI to express their concerns over the safety of ChatGPT, particularly for children and teens. The warning comes a week after Bonta and 44 other attorneys general sent a letter to 12 of the top AI companies, following reports of sexually inappropriate interactions between AI chatbots and children. “Since the issuance of that letter, we learned of the heartbreaking death by