The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
Sundar Pichai said the Gemini app has passed one billion monthly active users, up from 950 million reported in late July. It is Google's 14th product to reach that scale, and 63 per cent of users now speak to it rather than type. ChatGPT hit the same mark in June, so the assistant market now has two products of roughly equal reach.
Read moreAnthropic has started embedding invisible, machine-detectable markers in text Claude produces, satisfying the EU AI Act transparency code that requires AI content to be labelled. Some users have objected that it will expose work and coursework they pass off as their own. If you paste Claude output into anything you submit, assume it can be identified as AI-written.
Read moreBloomberg reports that Cognition, maker of the Devin coding agent, is in talks to raise at a $40 billion valuation, up from $26 billion in May. The figure is tied to hitting a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate, roughly double the $492 million it reported three months ago. Coding agents remain the fastest-monetising category in AI.
Read moreBrad Lightcap, at OpenAI since 2018 as finance chief and then chief operating officer, is leaving to start a new venture. He follows Fidji Simo, Bill Peebles and Kevin Weil out the door this year. The turnover is happening while the company prepares for an IPO, which makes the depth of its bench a live question for enterprise buyers.
Read moreIn a randomised trial, Google's AMIE system ran video consultations with actors playing patients and was rated on par with ten board-certified primary care physicians for history taking, diagnostic accuracy, management and communication. It was better than the doctors at guiding patients through self-examination. It remains a research system that has not been tested on real patients.
Read moreNovo Nordisk named AWS its preferred cloud and AI partner and opened a joint hub in London where agents rank drug candidates and link computational design to physical lab testing. AWS says one documentation workflow that took 40 to 50 people up to 15 weeks now takes three people minutes. More than 25,000 Novo staff already use its internal AI platform across 2,500 use cases.
Read moreSpeaking at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Andrew Ng each argued against letting a handful of companies control access to AI. Hinton separated open code from open weights and said the fight over open weights is already lost; Li rejected framing it as open versus closed. All three said regulation is needed and should not be left to tech executives.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.