OpenAI may shelve ChatGPT Agent just months after launch. Users dropped from four million to under one million, plagued by technical issues and unclear purpose: many didn’t know what to use it for or that it even existed. The branding didn’t help either, suggesting only this mode was agentic when ChatGPT already had agent capabilities.
Google Deepmind has made Project Genie publicly available. The experimental prototype, based on the Genie 3 world model shown in August, is now accessible to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US who are 18 or older.
The web app lets users create interactive worlds using text or images and explore them in real time. The system generates the environment as you move through it. Project Genie offers three main features: World Sketching for creating worlds with Nano Banana Pro and Gemini, World Exploration for moving through them, and World Remixing for changing existing worlds.
Google says the prototype still has issues: worlds don't always look realistic, characters sometimes respond slowly, and sessions are limited to 60 seconds. Some features announced in August, like promptable events, are still missing. Google plans to expand to other countries later.
The long-term goal of such world models is to serve as training environments for AI agents, allowing them to learn from simulated experiences instead of relying solely on pre-collected data.
OpenAI researcher Kevin Weil pushes back on reports that the company plans to claim a share of discoveries made by individual users, entrepreneurs, or scientists. The clarification follows a blog post by CFO Sarah Friar outlining plans for IP licensing agreements and outcome-based pricing that would let OpenAI share in the value its tools help create.
Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created.
Sarah Weil, via OpenAI
Weil clarified on X that Friar was referring to interest OpenAI has heard from large organizations in licensing or IP-based partnerships. The company is open to exploring creative ways to partner and align incentives, but "that's not something we're doing today." If it happens in the future, it would be a bespoke agreement with a company, "not something that would impact individual users," Weil says.
Microsoft posts record cloud revenue but the stock is down double digits. Investors question whether billions in AI spending will pay off, especially with nearly half the cloud backlog coming from one customer: OpenAI.
OpenAI's latest funding round might hit peak circularity. According to The Information, the AI company is in talks with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon about investments totaling up to $60 billion. Nvidia could put in as much as $30 billion, Amazon more than $10 billion—possibly even north of $20 billion—and Microsoft less than $10 billion. On top of that, existing investor SoftBank could contribute up to $30 billion. If these deals go through, the funding round could reach the previously rumored $100 billion mark at a valuation of around $730 billion.
Critics will likely point out how circular these deals really are. Several potential investors, including Microsoft and Amazon, also sell servers and cloud services to OpenAI. That means a chunk of the investment money flows right back to the investors themselves. These arrangements keep the AI hype machine running without the actual financial benefits of generative AI showing up in what end users pay.
AI coding assistant Cursor now indexes large codebases in 21 seconds instead of over four hours. The trick: instead of building an index from scratch for each new user, Cursor reuses existing indices from team members. According to the company's blog post, copies of the same codebase within a team are 92 percent identical on average, making this approach highly efficient.
A Cursor study found that the semantic search enabled by these indices improves AI response accuracy by 12.5 percent. The technology relies on Merkle trees - a data structure using cryptographic hashes - to ensure users only see code they're authorized to access. For typical projects, wait times for the first search query drop from nearly 8 seconds to just 525 milliseconds. The startup behind Cursor shipped version 2.0 with its own coding model in October 2025 and now generates around $500 million in annual revenue.
Google is working on a feature that lets users clone their own voice in AI Studio. According to TestingCatalog, a hidden option called "Create Your Voice" shows up when selecting the "Flash Native Audio Preview" model, which is currently tied to Gemini 2.5 Flash. Clicking it opens a window for recording and uploading audio, but the feature isn't functional yet. The discovery suggests Google is getting ready to ship native audio capabilities with Gemini 3 Flash. This would let developers create artificial voices based on recorded voice samples. Google released an update for Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio back in December 2025 that improved voice quality and made the model follow instructions more precisely.
In addition, a new option has been found that allows entire code collections to be imported via GitHub repositories. The start page is also apparently being revised and will display activities and usage statistics separately in future.
China has authorized ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to purchase Nvidia's H200 AI chips, Reuters reports, citing four people familiar with the matter. The three tech giants can import more than 400,000 H200 chips combined. Additional companies are on a waiting list for future approvals.
The approval came during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to China. Huang arrived in Shanghai last Friday and has since traveled to Beijing and other cities. The Chinese government is attaching conditions to the approvals that are still being finalized. A fifth source told Reuters the licenses are too restrictive, and customers aren't converting approvals into orders yet. Beijing has previously discussed requiring companies to buy a certain quota of domestic chips before they can import foreign semiconductors.
The H200 is Nvidia's second most powerful AI chip, delivering roughly six times the performance of the H20. Chinese companies have ordered more than two million H200 chips, according to Reuters - far more than Nvidia can deliver. Beijing had previously held off on allowing imports to support its domestic chip industry. The U.S. approved exports in early January.
