Prentis, a new AI laboratory co-founded by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, and Mark Pincus, the Zynga founder, is in talks to raise $100m. The lab is betting that automating routine computer tasks will soon outpace coding as artificial intelligence's biggest use case. Source
Cognition, an AI coding company, has acquired Poke, a conversational AI startup. The acquisition integrates Poke's conversational style and interaction model into Cognition's coding agent Devin, reflecting a belief among AI firms that how assistants interact with users is as important as the underlying models powering them. Source
Anthropic has launched Opus 5, a new large language model that the company says comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains while being both cheaper and less restrictive, likely making it preferable in most use cases. Source
As Washington debates responses to Chinese artificial intelligence and alleged model distillation, AI companies including Nvidia and Mistral are urging policymakers to avoid broad restrictions on open-weight AI models. The industry push reflects concern that sweeping controls could stifle the development of open-source alternatives. Source
Meta is upgrading its AI chatbot with new productivity features to compete with rivals including Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude. The update will allow Meta AI to tap into users' calendars to help plan events and generate daily briefings, as well as perform in-depth research that users can steer as it progresses. Source