Why Try AIHappy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly AI news roundup.
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In case you missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday deep dive:
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👩💻 AI releases
Anthropic brought the Claude Desktop app to AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. (Read my recent primer on Claude Code Desktop features.)
Figma launched a suite of new AI features like generative plugins, Weave tools, shader fills, and agent upgrades to help designers get more out of their canvas.
Google news:
Gemini 3.5 Flash now has built-in computer use, letting AI agents see, click, and type across browser, desktop, and mobile environments.
Gemini in Chrome now lets you select any text or image on screen and send it to Gemini so it can work on specific elements instead of the entire page.
Google Finance is out of beta with AI-generated market briefings and portfolio tracking. (It also comes with a new Android app.)
Mistral released OCR 4, a document extraction model that can read PDFs, presentations, and Word docs in 170 languages.
Perplexity launched Computer for Counsel, a legal AI agent that connects with external tools to help with contract drafting, document review, and research.
Runway launched Agent 2.0 that can turn a single prompt into marketing briefs and campaign assets for multiple platforms.
Sakana AI launched Fugu, a multi-agent system that automatically picks the best AI models for each part of your task to deliver top-tier results.
🔬 AI research
Anthropic launched Claude Tag that lets teams tag Claude in Slack to work on tasks, answer questions, and surface relevant updates. (Beta for Enterprise users.)
ByteDance previewed Seedance 2.5, a video model that can generate native 30-second 4K clips and handle up to 50 reference inputs.
OpenAI previewed the new flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model and its smaller siblings, Terra (everyday work) and Luna (fast and cheap). (Limited release for now.)
xAI began testing Grok 4.5 in private beta at SpaceX and Tesla, with early results allegedly competitive with frontier models like Claude Opus.
📖 AI resources
“AI Watchdog” [TOOL]: searchable database by The Atlantic that lets anyone look up artists, musicians, channels, etc. that were used to train AI models.
“FFASR Leaderboard” [BENCHMARK]: new benchmark to test speech-to-text agents on real-world challenges like accents, noise, and multiple languages.
🔀 AI random
Getty Images signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI to show licensed photos and videos in ChatGPT search results.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
Nailed it, GLM-5V-Turbo! That’s GPS-level precision right there.
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📹 Live & Learn #7: AI vision capabilities
Live & Learn concept in a nutshell:
I pick 3-5 tools in the same category
I test them live and rate them on 3-5 dimensions or challenges
I end up with a leaderboard based on my observations and ratings
This week’s Live & Learn was all about testing how well AI models “see” stuff:
Live & Learn is taking a hiatus for the next few weeks (vacation, family visits, etc.), but it’ll be back with a vengeance in August.
Stay tuned!