AI in practice Archive

Oct 17, 2025

OpenAI has paused the use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness in its Sora video tool after users created offensive content, including a clip showing him making monkey noises at a lectern. The King estate called for the ban.

OpenAI says it will revise its rules for deepfakes—called "cameos" in Sora. Although the company cites "strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures," it now says families and authorized groups should control how public figures are portrayed. Authorized representatives or estate owners can request removal from the tool.

Comment Source: OpenAI via X

Maximilian Schreiner

Oct 17, 2025

AI in practice

OpenAI expects to cut hardware costs by 20 to 30 percent through a joint chip development program with Broadcom, according to a Bloomberg report citing a person familiar with the company’s plans. The custom chips are scheduled to roll out by late 2026 and are part of a multibillion-dollar project valued at several tens of billions of dollars.

Typically, OpenAI budgets around $50 billion to build a 1-gigawatt data center, with roughly $35 billion spent on advanced chips. The new partnership aims to reduce those chip costs significantly.

But the plan comes with major risks. Developing custom silicon requires billions in investment, specialized technical expertise, and multiple design cycles. The rapid pace of AI innovation also increases the risk that the chips could become obsolete quickly. "There’s a steep learning curve," said semiconductor analyst Cody Acree from Benchmark.

Comment Source: Bloomberg

Matthias Bastian

Oct 17, 2025

AI in practice

With version 1.5, Manus is introducing its most capable AI agent system so far. The updated architecture cuts task processing times from 15 minutes to just 4, and internal tests report a 15 percent jump in output quality. Manus claims the agent can now build, test, and refine full web applications—including backend, user management, and database—directly on the platform. It also handles research, image generation, and analysis.

"We didn’t create a 'website builder' feature. We enhanced the core Manus platform to master a new, complex domain," Manus co-founder Tao Zhang says.

Both Manus-1.5 and Manus-1.5-Lite are launching as new releases. The Lite version is open to everyone, while the full version is reserved for subscribers. Microsoft has also integrated Manus into its agent suite for Windows.

Comment Source: Manus

Matthias Bastian

Oct 17, 2025

AI in practice

OpenAI is rolling out two updates. ChatGPT can now automatically manage its memory, so users no longer need to delete saved information by hand. For Sora, Pro users can now use storyboards on the web, and video generation limits have increased: all users can make videos up to 15 seconds long on the app and web, while Pro users can create videos up to 25 seconds on the web.

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Oct 16, 2025

AI in practice

Anthropic's Claude now integrates directly with Microsoft 365, letting users pull in content from Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. This means emails, calendars, and documents can show up right in a Claude chat, making it easier to bring company data into the conversation.

Anthropic is also adding a centralized search that covers company resources like HR documents and team guidelines. These features are available to Claude Team and Enterprise users, but admins have to enable them first.

The rollout follows Microsoft's recent Copilot integration in Windows, showing just how closely the competition for AI in the workplace is tied to the digital office ecosystem.

Comment Source: Anthropic

Matthias Bastian

Oct 16, 2025

AI in practice

Anthropic launches "Skills" so Claude can automatically pick prompts for specialized tasks

Matthias Bastian

Oct 16, 2025

AI in practice

Microsoft wants Copilot to become the main way people interact with Windows 11 systems

Maximilian Schreiner

Oct 16, 2025

AI in practice

According to two people familiar with the matter, AI startup Anthropic expects to nearly triple its annual revenue by 2026, Reuters reports. The company projects an annualized revenue of $9 billion by the end of 2025 and is targeting more than $20 billion in 2026 under its base scenario, or as much as $26 billion in the most optimistic case.

Anthropic told Reuters that its annualized revenue stood at around $7 billion as of October. Most of the company's growth comes from enterprise clients, who account for roughly 80 percent of its revenue. The startup was recently valued at $183 billion after raising $13 billion in new funding.

Comment Source: Reuters

Matthias Bastian

Oct 16, 2025

AI in practice

Google Labs Creative Director Henry Daubrez says the new Veo 3.1 update is being overhyped. Though it adds helpful features like image-to-image animation, he sees the changes as minor. Daubrez blames financial pressure in the AI industry for turning small updates into big marketing moments. Veo is part of Flow by Google.

"The bigger issue is that the enormous financial stakes around AI are turning timelines into marketing noise, with rumors inflated to the point where every incremental update gets treated like a paradigm shift."

Henry Daubrez

Comment Source: Daubrez via X

Matthias Bastian

Oct 15, 2025

AI in practice

Apple's new M5 chip is aimed at speeding up AI features on the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. Apple says the M5 delivers more than four times the GPU performance for AI tasks compared to the previous M4 chip. Each of the ten GPU cores includes a built-in "Neural Accelerator." The 16-core Neural Engine can process up to 38 trillion operations per second, making it 60 percent faster than the Neural Engine in the M4. The CPU is also up to 15 percent quicker at multi-threaded processing.

The chip uses a third-generation 3 nm manufacturing process, offers 153 GB/s of shared memory bandwidth (about 30 percent more than before), and supports up to 32 GB of unified memory. This allows larger AI models to run directly on the device. Apple expects that existing AI apps and tools like Apple Intelligence will see faster performance. Developers can access the AI hardware using Core ML, Metal 4, and Tensor APIs.

Comment Source: Apple