OpenAI has appointed Fidji Simo as CEO of its new Applications division, reporting directly to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Simo will be responsible for driving growth in core business areas such as product and operations. Previously, she served as Chair of the Board at Instacart and was already a member of OpenAI's board of directors. In its own words, the move reflects OpenAI's efforts to expand its organizational structure as it moves from a pure research organization to one focused on building products and scaling infrastructure, along with nonprofit initiatives. Altman remains CEO of OpenAI and will focus more on research, compute, and safety. Simo plans to step down from her role at Instacart in the coming months and join OpenAI later this year.
Anthropic has launched a web search feature for its Claude API, letting developers combine Claude models with up-to-date web data without building their own search infrastructure. Claude decides when a web search makes sense based on the user's prompt, generates targeted queries, analyzes the results, and delivers answers with source links. The system can also handle multi-step research tasks. Web search is available for Claude 3.7 Sonnet, 3.5 Sonnet, and 3.5 Haiku, and costs $10 per 1,000 searches. Organizations can allow or block specific domains and manage web search access at the organizational level. The feature is also available for Claude Code, which can use it to look up API documentation or technical articles.
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Microsoft's Phi 4 model generates 56 sentences before responding to "Hi", developer Simon Willison found. This behavior, known as "overthinking", was confirmed by Microsoft's Dimitris Papailiopoulos, who says it's problematic for simple tasks but intentional for complex ones. He plans to address the issue. Microsoft released the open Phi 4 reasoning models in early May.
Phi 4's reasoning process shown in screenshot by Simon Willison.
