Artificial Intelligence

Jan 16, 2026

OpenAI is pushing "Open Responses," an open interface that works with language models from different providers. The project builds on OpenAI's Responses API and lets developers write code once and run it with any AI model.

Currently, Google, Anthropic, and Meta all handle their APIs differently, which means developers have to rewrite code when switching between models. Open Responses tries to fix that with a shared format for requests, responses, streaming, and tool calls. Vercel, Hugging Face, LM Studio, Ollama, and vLLM have already signed on.

Of course, if successful, this move works in OpenAI's favor. If its API becomes the default, competitors would need to adapt to OpenAI's approach, while existing OpenAI customers wouldn't have to change a thing. The "open" label also lets the company signal a spirit of collaboration, even though it's not sharing any technology beyond what's already public.

Comment Source: OpenAI via X | Open Responses

Matthias Bastian

Jan 16, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI will soon test ads in ChatGPT despite CEO Sam Altman once calling the idea dystopian

OpenAI will start testing ads in ChatGPT, despite CEO Sam Altman’s earlier objections. With a valuation of up to $750 billion to justify and only around five percent of users paying for the service, the company is under enormous pressure to find new revenue streams.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 16, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has expanded access to its new Claude Cowork feature. When Cowork debuted on Monday, it was limited to Max subscribers, a $200 per month tier that put it out of reach for most users. Pro subscribers can now access the feature for $20 per month, though Anthropic warns they may hit usage limits faster since Cowork consumes more tokens than regular chat. Max subscribers still get higher usage limits.

Cowork brings the agent-based capabilities of Claude Code to the desktop app for everyday tasks that don't require programming knowledge. With computer access enabled, Claude can handle more complex tasks on its own: sorting files, gathering context from multiple documents, and similar workflows. For now, the feature remains exclusive to the macOS desktop app.

Anthropic has already shipped several updates since Monday's launch: users can now rename sessions, connections to external services are more reliable, file previews work better, and the app prompts for confirmation before deleting files.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 16, 2026

AI research

Terence Tao says GPT-5.2 Pro cracked an Erdős problem, but warns the win says more about speed than difficulty

Terence Tao says OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro has solved an open Erdős problem largely on its own for the first time. He calls it a milestone but warns against reading too much into it. For Tao, the more exciting development lies elsewhere.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 16, 2026

AI research

Study warns AI could homogenize human creativity as models converge on "Artificial Hivemind"

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 16, 2026

AI and society

Taiwan agrees to $250 billion US chip investment as Washington cuts tariffs

A sweeping US–Taiwan trade deal ties lower tariffs to massive onshore investment: Taiwanese chipmakers are pledging at least $250 billion for American fabs, while Washington wields quotas—and the threat of 100 percent tariffs—to pull more of the world’s most advanced semiconductor production onto US soil.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 16, 2026

AI in practice

Cloudflare is acquiring British startup Human Native to create a new payment system for AI training data. The company runs a marketplace for AI training data and converts multimedia content into structured, licensable datasets.

The move addresses a growing problem: AI crawlers scrape the web on a massive scale without paying website operators. Instead of letting AI companies grab content for free, publishers could make their data available through an index and get paid for it.

Cloudflare has already been developing tools like "AI Crawl Control" and "Pay Per Crawl" that let website operators control who can use their content for AI training. The company also co-founded the x402 Foundation with Coinbase to enable automatic machine-to-machine payments. Cloudflare runs its own AI platform and recently expanded it by acquiring Replicate.

Comment Source: Cloudflare | Human Native

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 16, 2026

AI research

Andrea Vallone, a senior safety researcher at OpenAI, has moved to Anthropic. She'll be working on the alignment team, which focuses on AI model risks. Vallone spent three years at OpenAI, where she founded the "Model Policy" research team and contributed to major projects including GPT-4, GPT-5, and the company's reasoning models.

Over the past year, Vallone led OpenAI's research on an increasingly urgent question: how should AI models respond when users show signs of emotional dependency or mental health struggles? Some users, including teenagers, have taken their own lives after conversations with chatbots. Several families have filed lawsuits, and the U.S. Senate has held hearings on the issue.

At Anthropic, Vallone will report to Jan Leike. Leike himself was head of safety research at OpenAI before leaving the company in May 2024. At the time, Leike publicly criticized OpenAI, saying safety had taken a backseat to shipping new products.

Comment Source: LinkedIn

Matthias Bastian

Jan 15, 2026

Short News

Wikipedia has landed major AI companies as partners: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity have joined the Wikimedia Enterprise partner program, with Google, Ecosia, and others already on board. These companies use the APIs to integrate Wikipedia content into their products.

Wikipedia is considered one of the highest-quality datasets for training large language models, and its content powers chatbots, search engines, and voice assistants. The Wikimedia Foundation argues that human-curated knowledge is more valuable than ever in the AI era, but without financial contributions from companies profiting from this data, the open knowledge model could be at risk.

In late October, Wikipedia raised concerns about declining traffic from AI systems that display its content without sending users to the website and later called for fair licensing through its API.

This tension is likely to grow. Chatbots are extracting value from the web at scale, and the legal landscape remains murky. Not every site can follow Wikipedia's path, or that of Tailwind, by offsetting lost revenue through partnerships and paid APIs.

Comment Source: Wikimedia Enterprise

Jonathan Kemper

Jan 15, 2026

AI in practice

Google's new open TranslateGemma models bring translation for 55 languages to laptops and phones

TranslateGemma shows how targeted training helps Google squeeze more performance out of smaller models: the 12B version translates better than a base model twice its size and runs on a regular laptop. With the growing Gemma family, Google is staking its claim in the race for open AI models.

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