ChatGPT Agent launches to automate complex digital tasks

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: OpenAI launches ChatGPT Agent to automate complex digital tasks + Mistral updates Le Chat and releases audio based model

💰 Funding: Mira Murati closes $2Bn Seed Round for Thinking Machines Lab

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. OpenAI has launched ChatGPT agent, a powerful new tool in ChatGPT that can autonomously perform complex digital tasks like managing calendars, creating presentations, and writing code, while implementing real-time safety monitors and disabling memory to reduce risk of abuse.

2. Mistral has released Voxtral, an open-weight audio model family capable of production-grade speech understanding and transcription, offering a multilingual, affordable alternative to closed corporate systems like Whisper and ElevenLabs.

3. Mistral has also upgraded its Le Chat assistant with deep research capabilities, multilingual reasoning, project-based organization, and advanced image editing—all deployable on-premises—positioning it as a full-featured productivity platform and a serious competitor to OpenAI and Google in sensitive enterprise environments.

4. Anthropic’s new Claude-powered Financial Analysis Solution integrates real-time data from top financial providers and platforms like Snowflake and FactSet with industry-leading AI capabilities—validated by benchmarks and enterprise adoption—to help firms like AIG, NBIM, and Bridgewater dramatically improve productivity, decision-making, and compliance.

5. Apple has introduced two new multilingual, multimodal foundation models as the backbone of Apple Intelligence features across devices and services—a compact, Apple-silicon-optimized on-device model and a scalable server model powered by a new MoE transformer architecture—all designed to deliver features with strong performance, privacy, and developer accessibility via a Swift-centric API.

6. A coalition of AI leaders from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and others have published a position paper urging deeper research into monitoring “chains-of-thought” in reasoning models — a step-by-step process that may offer rare transparency into how advanced AI makes decisions but risks being lost without further study.

7. Runway’s new motion capture model Act-Two transforms a single performance video and character reference into highly detailed, full-body character animations with head, face, hand, and body tracking

8. At a landmark summit in Pittsburgh, President Trump announced over $90Bn in private investments to turn Pennsylvania into a national AI and energy hub through new data centers, nuclear reactors, and workforce training, drawing bipartisan political support and major industry players while sparking public protests over fossil fuels and surveillance tech.

9. Google will invest $25Bn in data center and AI infrastructure across the U.S.’s largest electric grid, PJM, and an additional $3Bn to modernize Pennsylvania hydropower plants, aligning with a nationwide push to meet AI-driven electricity demand and decarbonization goals.

10. Nvidia is resuming sales of its China-compliant H20 AI chips after U.S. export bans were reversed following CEO Jensen Huang’s meeting with Trump, a move that comes amid trade talks over rare-earth elements and has sparked controversy—U.S. officials downplay the chip’s significance, while critics argue it undermines established export control policy.

11. The U.S. has paused a multi-billion dollar deal allowing the UAE to buy Nvidia AI chips due to rising national security concerns that the hardware could be smuggled to China, despite previous regional assurances and amid new moves to tighten global chip export controls.

12. Slack is integrating AI across its platform with smarter search across connected apps, automated Huddles transcriptions and summaries, contextual message explanations, and Canvas writing assistants — all part of a broader redesign aimed at boosting productivity and collaboration.

13. xAI is under fire from top AI safety researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic for releasing its Grok 4 chatbot without standard safety evaluations or documentation, after the model exhibited antisemitic and manipulative behavior, prompting renewed calls for government oversight and regulation.

💰 Top Funding News:

1.  Thinking Machines Lab, which is developing frontier AI models and plans to release open-source tools for researchers and startups, raised a $2B seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, and Jane Street.

2. Anthropic is attracting investor interest at a valuation north of $100Bn — nearly doubling its previous round’s value — as soaring revenue from its Claude chatbot and backing from Amazon and Alphabet position it as a leading contender in the AI arms race.

3. AI search challenger Perplexity has leapt to an $18Bn valuation just months after a $14Bn round, as surging revenue, a powerful new AI browser, and backers like Bezos and Nvidia fuel investor excitement about its ambitions to disrupt Google and commercialize AI at scale.

4. Lovable, which lets users build apps and websites with natural language using large language models, raised a $200M Series A led by Accel with participation from 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird, Visionaries Club, and notable angel investors.

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