| | | Letter from the editor
Sabrina Ortiz, Senior Editor, AI
Each morning, I sift through a barrage of emails from every company in the AI space to identify the most significant developments -- whether that’s a tool you can use right now (that actually adds value to your life) or a technological advancement that has the potential to change the future.
AI moves quickly; developments that used to take years to unfold happen in a couple of months. Everyone is competing to release the latest shiny object. I’m here to cut through the hype and share the biggest news of the week with you every Friday.
OpenAI just released ChatGPT Agent Mode, a product that brings the promise of AI agents to the present. It can handle tasks for you from start to finish, like creating slideshows, ordering products, and even booking trips -- or at least that's what OpenAI claims. Try it here.
The appeal of agents is simple: Why give an intern a play-by-play of what you want done when you could just ask an experienced employee to do it?
At its AWS Summit this week, Amazon focused on agentic AI solutions for enterprises, launching a new virtual store within AWS Marketplace where customers can choose agents from Anthropic, IBM, Perplexity, Salesforce, and other vendors. Deepak Singh, VP of developer agents and experiences at AWS, even told me agentic AI is going “to be a change for society and business that is as important as the internet."
While agentic AI took off, it also sparked concern. In a rare collaboration, researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google urged developers to preserve chain of thought, a reasoning method generative AI models use to answer queries. It's critical to AI safety monitoring, but could be phased out as agentic models get more capable. Meanwhile, Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, despite high profits -- the company saved $500 million, thanks to AI.
Whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, AI is changing everything from how you order your groceries to how businesses carry out everyday operations -- which will require some mental reframing and upskilling.
Stay tuned for next week's coverage as we continue to monitor all things AI. Until next roundup.
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