The newest update to Claude reveals that its maker is no longer interested in chasing ChatGPT with continual updates in the AI chatbot market.
Instead, the ChatGPT competitor – now in version 4 — has been reinvented to focus more on computer coding, deep research and other complex tasks, according to writer Hayden Field.
Observes Field: “Anthropic said Claude Opus 4 is the ‘best coding model in the world’ and could autonomously work for nearly a full corporate workday — seven hours.”
The move will most likely come as a great disappointment to a number of writers who currently prefer working with Claude in chatbot mode.
In other news and analysis on AI writing:
*New Claude and Sonnet ‘Great for Research Tasks:’ The latest updates to Anthropic’s AI engines are clocking great advances when it comes to deep research, according to the editors of “The Neuron,” an AI newsletter.
Observe the editors: “These models can also now ‘think’ while using tools like Web search, work on tasks for hours without losing focus – and even keep notes about what they’re doing.”
*The AI Research Gains for Writers Keep Coming: Google just announced a new, experimental research mode for its Google Gemini 2.5 Pro chatbot that goes beyond the AI’s current research capabilities.
Dubbed ‘Deep Think,’ the new mode is designed to enable Gemini to consider multiple hypotheses before responding to a question or research task.
*Oops: Chicago Sun-Times Publishes AI-Generated Gibberish: In yet another egg-on-my-face AI moment, a Chicago newspaper has published an AI guide to summer fun that features made-up books and experts.
According to writer Mia Sato, the AI-generated, hallucinatory guide was created by Hearst Media and then published by the Chicago Sun-Times without so much as a quick glance to verify accuracy.
‘Facts-take-a-holiday’ moments in the guide include the non-existent book, “Nightshade Market,” the nonexistent food expert, Dr. Catherine Frost and the non-existent professor of leisure studies, Dr. Jennifer Campos.
*Google Promising Enhanced Auto-Replies for Gmail in Q3: Google’s ‘Smart Replies’ – an AI feature for Gmail that auto-generates email replies for users – will get a power-boost by this fall, according to writer Ayushmann Chawla.
Observes Chawla: “The update promises more personalized, context-rich suggestions by pulling data not just from your Gmail thread, but also from your Google Drive, calendar and other linked Workspace tools.”
Even better: Google is also promising that the writing tone of those Gmail auto-replies will be modulated based on your relationship with the recipient, according to Chawla.
*Google Search Releases New ‘AI Mode:’ Google is promising to roll out a new way to search the Web with an ‘AI Mode’ that combines the power of the Google search engine with the AI powers of the Google chatbot, Gemini.
Observes Elizabeth Reid, VP, head of search, Google: “Under the hood, AI Mode uses our query fan-out technique, breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf.
“This enables Search to dive deeper into the web than a traditional search on Google, helping you discover even more of what the web has to offer and find incredible, hyper-relevant content that matches your question.”
U.S. Google Chrome users should already be able to find the ‘AI Mode’ button just beneath the search box on Google.
*New AI Voice Researcher Interviews Thousands Simultaneously: In one of those collective ‘gulp!’ moments among journalists worldwide, new AI has emerged that’s designed to:
–interview thousands by AI voice simultaneously
–auto-analyze all responses gleaned from those interviews in real-time to extract trends and actionable insights
–archive everything it finds, hears and opines about for easy reference
While the product, dubbed ‘Hey Marvin,’ is designed to solicit customer feedback, it can also be used to conduct multiple interviews for news stories.
Observes Prayag Narula, CEO, Hey Marvin: “What makes it so powerful is that it enables free-flowing, qualitative, engaging conversations — but on demand and at scale.
”We’re talking hundreds, even thousands of people — something that was previously only seen at large scale using a small army of volunteers in moments like presidential elections.”
*ChatGPT Competitor MS Copilot Gets Image Generation Upgrade: Microsoft Copilot – which runs on AI engines like ChatGPT and similar – has added advanced ChatGPT-4o AI imaging to its feature set.
Observes writer Kevin Okemwa: “OpenAI’s GPT-4o model brings a plethora of new image generation capabilities to Microsoft Copilot.
Adds Okemwa: Those include “the capability to edit your creations, transform an existing image’s style, generate photorealistic images, render accurate and readable text, and follow complex directions.”
ChatGPT’s maker released the advanced image maker back in March.
*Microsoft Promises Access to 11,000+ More Open Source ChatGPT Competitors: Writers and others looking to try out alternate – and often cheaper – ChatGPT competitors should be cheered by Microsoft’s decision to feature many of those in its Azure AI Foundry.
The tech titan just cut a deal with Hugging Face – a depository of nearly two million open source AI engines — to feature 11,000+ of those AI engines on Microsoft Azure, according to writer Ankush Das.
Says Asha Sharma, a VP at Microsoft: “We’re giving developers the freedom to pick the best model for the job — and helping organizations innovate safely and at scale.”
*AI Big Picture: Microsoft Releases 50+ AI Tools to Help Build the ‘Agentic Web:’ Writers and others looking to build AI agents to perform deep research and similar tasks on the Web will want to take a look at new tools Microsoft has designed for those tasks.
Observes writer Michael Nunez: “Microsoft launched a comprehensive strategy to position itself at the center of what it calls the ‘open agentic Web’ at its annual Build conference this morning, introducing dozens of AI tools and platforms designed to help developers create autonomous systems that can make decisions and complete tasks with limited human intervention.”
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.
The post ChatGPT Competitor Abandons Chabot Updates appeared first on Robot Writers AI.
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