Microsoft introduces a health-focused edition of Copilot AI
Microsoft recently set up a healthcare-focused edition of its Copilot AI to convene information from various sources, the reason given for this development was to help improve public understanding in their medical interactions. The software giant pitched Copilot Health as a way to prepare for medical appointments or understand test results, though emphasised the AI is not intended to replace real-life doctors. Microsoft stated its existing consumer products already handle more than 50 million health questions per day. These range from seeking knowledge about symptoms to garnering information on medical conditions and treatments. Copilot Health collates information from “your health records, wearable data and health history” to provide comprehensible details. Users in the US are first in line to gain access the service, which employs details from 50,000 domestic hospitals and related facilities through unified health records provider HealthEx. AI company Anthropic also tapped HealthEx in a medical move for its Claude chatbot unveiled in January. Perhaps aptly for a medical interaction, Microsoft is inviting would be US users to join a waiting list to access the service as part of a “careful, phased rollout”. It caveated the service “is not intended to diagnose, treat or prevent diseases or other conditions” and should not be relied
Anthropic’s Claude can now draw interactive charts and diagrams
Anthropic’s Claude has always been great at coding and working with text, but where Google and OpenAI invested heavily in audio, image, and video models, Anthropic mostly ignored this space. On Thursday, however, Anthropic updated Claude to now also draw interactive charts, diagrams, and visualizations on demand. The idea here is to have Claude build something graphical “to aid users’ understanding as it’s discussing the topic at hand,” the company says in its announcement. This is now rolling out as a beta to all Claude users on all plan types. These graphical artifacts are part of the chat, appear inline, and are meant to be ephemeral, changing over the course of a conversation. They are not, Anthropic stresses, permanent artifacts like the documents Claude can create, and hence won’t appear in the Artifacts drawer in the Claude app. To have Claude create a visualization, for example, the easiest way is to simply ask for one, but at times, the model may also decide that creating a graphic may be the best way to handle a question. Anthropic’s canonical example for this is asking Claude to explain how compound interest works. It’ll create an interactive chart that’s pretty much what you would find if you searched for
SpaceX acquires xAI in $1.25T mega-merger: A Complete Guide
Elon Musk just announced the merger of his AI startup xAI with SpaceX, forming what's now the highest-valued private company on the planet at a reported $1.25T — combining his rockets, Grok, and the X platform all under one entity. The details: xAI will operate as a division within SpaceX, with Musk pitching a vision of launching AI data centers into orbit to overcome Earth's energy constraints. The merger comes ahead of an anticipated SpaceX IPO later this year, expected to push the company’s valuation to $1.25T. Musk estimated that space-based AI compute will be cheaper than traditional data centers within 2-3 years, powered by near-constant solar energy. He also said space-based data centers will “enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars… and expansion to the Universe.” Why it matters: Elon’s tech empire is consolidating fast, calling this merger "the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth." Data centers in space may sound wild, but Musk isn't alone in eyeing that solution — and with SpaceX now in the mix, nobody is better positioned to own that opportunity. Source: The Rundown
Microsoft unveils method to detect sleeper agent backdoors
Researchers from Microsoft have unveiled a scanning method to identify poisoned models without knowing the trigger or intended outcome. Organisations integrating open-weight large language models (LLMs) face a specific supply chain vulnerability where distinct memory leaks and internal attention patterns expose hidden threats known as “sleeper agents”. These poisoned models contain backdoors that lie dormant during standard safety testing, but execute malicious behaviours – ranging from generating vulnerable code to hate speech – when a specific “trigger” phrase appears in the input. Microsoft has published a paper, ‘The Trigger in the Haystack,’ detailing a methodology to detect these models. The approach exploits the tendency of poisoned models to memorise their training data and exhibit specific internal signals when processing a trigger. For enterprise leaders, this capability fills a gap in the procurement of third-party AI models. The high cost of training LLMs incentivises the reuse of fine-tuned models from public repositories. This economic reality favours adversaries, who can compromise a single widely-used model to affect numerous downstream users. How the scanner works The detection system relies on the observation that sleeper agents differ from benign models in their handling of specific data sequences. The researchers discovered that prompting a model with its own chat template
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Black Forest Labs launches open source Flux.2 [klein] to generate AI images in less than a second
The German AI startup Black Forest Labs (BFL), founded by former Stability AI engineers, is continuing to build out its suite of open source AI image generators with the release of FLUX.2 [klein], a new pair of small models — one open and one non-commercial — that emphasizes speed and lower compute requirements, with the models generating images in less than a second on a Nvidia GB200. The [klein] series, released yesterday, includes two primary parameter counts: 4 billion (4B) and 9 billion (9B). The model weights are available on Hugging Face and code on Github. While the larger models in the FLUX.2 family ([max] and [pro]), released in November of 2025, chase the limits of photorealism and "grounding search" capabilities, [klein] is designed specifically for consumer hardware and latency-critical workflows. In great news for enterprises, the 4B version is available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning they — or any organization or developer — can use the [klein] models for their commercial purposes without paying BFL or any intermediaries a dime. However, a number of AI image and media creation platforms including Fal.ai have begun offering it for extremely low cost as well through their application programming interfaces (APIs) and as a direct-to-user tool.
OpenAI launches a Codex desktop app for macOS to run multiple AI coding agents in parallel
OpenAI on Monday released a new desktop application for its Codex artificial intelligence coding system, a tool the company says transforms software development from a collaborative exercise with a single AI assistant into something more akin to managing a team of autonomous workers. The Codex app for macOS functions as what OpenAI executives describe as a "command center for agents," allowing developers to delegate multiple coding tasks simultaneously, automate repetitive work, and supervise AI systems that can run for up to 30 minutes independently before returning completed code. "This is the most loved internal product we've ever had," Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, told VentureBeat in a press briefing ahead of Monday's launch. "It's been totally an amazing thing for us to be using recently at OpenAI." The release arrives at a pivotal moment for the enterprise AI market. According to a survey of 100 Global 2000 companies published last week by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, 78% of enterprise CIOs now use OpenAI models in production, though competitors Anthropic and Google are gaining ground rapidly. Anthropic posted the largest share increase of any frontier lab since May 2025, growing 25% in enterprise penetration, with 44% of enterprises now using Anthropic in production. The
Claude Code: Anthropic’s wildly popular AI coding app
ChatGPT may be the best-known artificial intelligence chatbot on the market, but the latest iteration of AI startup Anthropic’s coding bot, Claude Code, is newly entering the spotlight. By simplifying the process of writing code, the tool hints at a more democratized digital era. But for engineers, feelings about this progress in the AI industry are complicated. What can you do with Claude Code? This AI tool can generate code based on a prompt, allowing people with little to no coding experience build their own websites, programs and apps, in a trend known as vibecoding. Unlike other widely used chatbots, Claude Code can “operate autonomously, with broad access to user files, a web browser and other applications,” said The Wall Street Journal. While technologists have “predicted a coming era of AI ‘agents’ capable of doing just about anything for humans,” progress has been slow, said the Journal. Using Claude Code was the “first time many users interacted with this kind of AI,” offering an “inkling of what may be in store.” Though it debuted last May, the bot’s popularity “truly exploded late last month,” said The Atlantic. A recent update “improved the tool’s capabilities,” and with a “surplus of free time over winter break,
Exclusive: Yahoo launches afternoon audio digest powered by AI
Yahoo has launched a new afternoon AI-powered audio news briefing, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo News Kat Downs Mulder exclusively tells Axios. Why it matters: AI is powering a new wave of audio formats in newsrooms as audiences increasingly crave on-demand listening. How it works: "Your Daily Digest" will be available weekdays from 12pm to 5pm local device time in the Yahoo News app on iOS and Android in the U.S. It follows the release of an AI-generated morning edition earlier this year. Episodes are six to eight minutes long and summarize the top stories from the top three categories that users engage with the most in the app, including lifestyle, entertainment and current events. The digest pulls from Yahoo's vast network of news sources, including its own reporting and its partner content. "We ground the AI very specifically in these specific articles from our network," Downs Mulder says. "There is a very tight loop between what the summary is allowed to produce and the original source text itself, and then, of course, we have quality checks." Between the lines: The feature builds on Yahoo's acquisition of the Artifact app in 2024, where it has used the tech to revamp its news app with improved personalization. "Audio is a really core
Samsung revives its Bixby assistant with an AI brain transplant from Perplexity
Samsung’s Bixby is back. Or at least, a newly revamped and upgraded version of the AI assistant is back. Bixby is returning with a conversational facelift, a Perplexity-powered brain, and a spot in Samsung's One UI 8.5 beta operating system, which began rolling out to Galaxy S25 testers this week. Bixby promises to sound more natural, understand conversational context, and actually do things you want. Samsung confirmed the new version of Bixby will debut publicly with the first stable One UI 8.5 build in a blog post, which it mysteriously deleted not long after posting it. The announcement said Bixby will arrive alongside the Galaxy S26 series in the coming weeks. For now, it’s limited to a beta release in select markets, but its ambitions are global. The biggest change may be that Bixby finally understands what you mean, grasping context in ways it never had before. Ask it to keep the screen on while you’re using your phone, and it will toggle the setting itself without wandering off on the internet. The new Bixby aims to eliminate the moments of error so many former users complained about. And Bixby's model won't be alone in the smartphone. Samsung has integrated Perplexity, the AI search tool
AI Learning App for Kids Revolutionizes Education: Former Google Trio Launches Interactive Sparkli Platform
In a significant development for educational technology, three former Google employees have launched Sparkli, an innovative AI-powered learning app designed specifically for children aged 5-12. This interactive platform, announced in early 2025, addresses critical gaps in modern education by combining generative AI with pedagogical principles to create immersive learning experiences that move beyond traditional text-based approaches. AI Learning App for Kids Addresses Educational Gaps The founders, Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang, identified a fundamental problem in children’s education while parenting their own children. “Kids possess natural curiosity about complex topics like planetary science or mechanical engineering,” explained Poojary during an exclusive interview. “However, existing AI tools typically provide text-heavy explanations that fail to engage young learners effectively.” Consequently, the team developed Sparkli to transform abstract concepts into interactive adventures. Educational research consistently demonstrates that interactive learning improves knowledge retention by 40-75% compared to passive methods. Sparkli leverages this principle through AI-generated expeditions that incorporate multiple media formats. Each learning module includes: Interactive simulations and games Audio explanations with adjustable complexity Visual content including images and short videos Progress-based quizzes without right/wrong pressure Daily highlighted topics across diverse subjects Technical Innovation and Educational Foundation Sparkli represents a convergence of advanced technology and educational science.
