Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
At its Payments Forum in San Francisco, Visa and OpenAI agreed to embed Visa's rails into ChatGPT — so AI agents can discover products, check out, and pay across any Visa-accepting merchant, with spending caps and approvals built in.
SiliconANGLE
Read more →Google dropped its mid-tier Gemini subscription from $7.99 to $4.99 a month and doubled the storage to 400GB. The discounting that started in India has now reached the US — and analysts are calling it the start of AI's commoditization era.
TechCrunch
Read more →Google's new Gemini 3.5 Live Translate streams near real-time speech-to-speech translation in 70+ languages while preserving the speaker's tone, pace, and pitch — rolling out across the Translate app, Google Meet, AI Studio, and the Gemini Live API.
At Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO, Apple confirmed a rebuilt Siri running on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model — and a new Extensions system that lets users pick Gemini, ChatGPT, or Anthropic's Claude to power Apple Intelligence.
BuildFastWithAI
Read more →Agent Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads on demand to specialize at a task. Here’s how they work, how to build one, and why they’ve become a cross-vendor open standard.
Anthropic
Read more →xAI's Connectors plug Grok into the apps people already work in — GitHub, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Notion, Linear — plus any MCP server. The sharper move is Grok Skills: instead of building a rival format, xAI reads Anthropic's Claude Code conventions directly, loading CLAUDE.md and .claude skill packs with zero configuration.
xAI
Read more →OpenAI is recasting Codex as an agent for every knowledge worker, not just engineers. A June 2 update adds six role-specific plugins bundling 62 apps and 110 skills, a prompt-to-app builder called Codex Sites, and Annotations that now reach documents, spreadsheets and slides. Codex is at 5 million weekly users, with non-developers its fastest-growing cohort.
OpenAI / VentureBeat
Read more →OpenAI's new Lockdown Mode strips ChatGPT down to a more defensive core — switching off live web browsing, agent mode, deep research, web images and file downloads — to make it harder for hidden prompt-injection attacks to exfiltrate sensitive data. It's rolling out beyond enterprise to Business and personal accounts, but OpenAI is candid that it doesn't stop injections outright.
OpenAI / TechCrunch
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An internal Meta memo lays out an aggressive wearables roadmap: an always-listening AI pendant built on its Limitless acquisition, four new smart-glasses models in 2026, and an enterprise 'Wearables for Work' service — all aimed at selling 10 million devices in the back half of the year.
Engadget
Read more →In a busy few days, xAI previewed Grok Imagine 1.5, a single-image-to-video model that debuted at No. 1 on the Artificial Analysis arena with audio baked into every clip — and named Grok the default engine behind the voices on Vapi’s 2.5-million-agent platform.
xAI
Read more →OpenAI is rolling out “Dreaming,” a rebuilt ChatGPT memory that synthesizes context from past chats automatically and keeps it current — no more telling the assistant what to remember. It starts with US Plus and Pro users after a roughly 5x cut in compute cost.
OpenAI
Read more →Seen the violet “ultracode” in Claude Code and wondered what “Ultra Code Mode” is? Here is the focused how-it-works guide: what the setting does, how to turn it on with /effort ultracode or the ultracode keyword, what happens under the hood, and when not to use it.
Claude Code Docs
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Build 2026’s headline was MAI-Thinking-1 — Microsoft’s first from-scratch reasoning model, claiming Opus 4.6-level coding at 35B active parameters — alongside MAI-Code, Image, Voice and Transcribe, the Microsoft IQ context layer, a GitHub Copilot desktop app, and an agent-governance stack.
Microsoft
Read more →Jensen Huang’s GTC Taipei keynote put Vera Rubin into full production with HBM4 from Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, unveiled the agent-first Vera CPU (1.8x vs x86), RTX Spark AI PCs landing this fall, and Cosmos 3 for physical AI.
CRN Asia
Read more →A BitsMinds analysis. The frontier fight has moved from models to the agents wrapped around them. We line up the three coding agents developers actually argue about in 2026 — Anthropic’s terminal-native Claude Code, OpenAI’s everywhere-at-once Codex, and Google’s agent-first Antigravity IDE — across form factor, autonomy, verification, model choice and price. The short version: Claude Code owns deep terminal autonomy, Codex wins ubiquity, and Antigravity is the open, free, multi-agent cockpit. Here is the full scorecard.
BitsMinds Analysis
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GitHub retired Copilot premium requests in June 2026 and replaced them with metered AI Credits worth $0.01 each, drawn down by actual token usage. Here is what every plan includes and what still costs nothing.
The GitHub Blog
Read more →Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has published renderings and details of iOS 27 ahead of Apple’s June 8 WWDC, centered on a long-promised Siri overhaul. The rebuilt assistant is said to run on a custom Google Gemini model — reported at roughly 1.2 trillion parameters — hosted on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, living inside the Dynamic Island and gaining a standalone, ChatGPT-style app with chat history, voice and document upload.
Bloomberg
Read more →Meta is putting a price tag on AI for the first time. As it rolls out paid tiers across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, the company is folding everything into a new “Meta One” subscription brand — including two AI plans, Meta One Plus at $7.99 a month and Meta One Premium at $19.99 a month, with deeper reasoning and more image and video generation. The AI tiers begin testing next month in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia; the free Meta AI stays free.
CNBC / TechCrunch / Bloomberg
Read more →On May 27, Robinhood opened its platform to autonomous AI agents via Model Context Protocol, letting Claude, ChatGPT and other LLMs read portfolios, analyze risk and execute equity trades out of a sandboxed wallet. Options, crypto, futures and prediction markets are next; an agentic Gold credit card ships alongside.
TechCrunch / CNBC
Read more →Luxury phone-maker Vertu unveiled the Alphafold on May 28 — a foldable Android starting at $6,880 (and topping out near $46,800) whose headline feature is Hermes Agent, an enterprise AI that connects to ERP, CRM and 80+ apps and routes prompts across Claude, GPT, Gemini and open-source models. The first 115-unit batch ships this week.
TechCrunch
Read more →Microsoft has made computer-using agents in Copilot Studio generally available across every commercial region, becoming the first major hyperscaler to put production-grade "computer use" into enterprises' hands. The agents operate desktop and web apps directly through the interface — clicking, typing and navigating like a person — using OpenAI's CUA and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5, wrapped in Azure Key Vault, Microsoft Purview auditing and human-in-the-loop review.
Microsoft
Read more →In its May 21 release, OpenAI gave Codex permission to keep clicking, typing and navigating macOS apps even after the screen is off. The new "Locked Use" mode — triggered remotely from the ChatGPT mobile app — turns a Mac sitting on your desk into a 24/7 agent runtime, with short-lived authorization and a hard relock the moment you touch the keyboard.
OpenAI Developers / MacRumors
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A new genai.apple.com subdomain spotted on May 23 — sitting dormant but reserved — is the clearest signal yet that WWDC 2026 will be the keynote where Apple finally ships the Siri overhaul it promised in 2024, reportedly powered by a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model from Google.
9to5Mac / MacRumors
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At Google Marketing Live 2026, Google unveiled Ask Advisor — one Gemini agent that spans Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and the Marketing Platform — alongside conversational ad formats built for AI Mode search.