Users on higher tier plans can now use the Claude chatbot to do intensive research on the Web, bring back raw data and then transform what it finds into written insights, statistical analysis and charts.
Currently, access to the new feature is available to Claude Max users and Claude Team users – with access for Claude Pro users promised soon, according to writer Emila David.
Meanwhile, Claude has also been outfitted with a new memory feature for its Team and Enterprise users, which enables the app to remember projects, preferences and priorities.
In other news and analysis on AI writing:
*Major Survey App Gets AI Upgrade: SurveyMonkey – a key leader in automated surveying for years – has added a new suite of AI tools to its mix.
Users engaging in survey research with the tool can now:
–Use AI chat to surface instant insights and sophisticated data segmentation from the tool’s automated surveys
–Sift for themes in data brought back by SurveyMonkey using a new beta tool dubbed ‘Thematic Analysis.’
*AI Talking Heads Get Even More Lifelike: AI-generated, photorealistic talking heads – the kind that human news anchors up at night – are getting even more natural looking, accord to writer Rhiannon Williams.
Observes Williams, who tried out the latest generation of AI talking heads from Synthesia: “I found the video demonstrating my avatar as unnerving as it is technically impressive.
“It’s slick enough to pass as a high-definition recording of a chirpy corporate speech. And if you didn’t know me, you’d probably think that’s exactly what it was.
“This demonstration shows how much harder it’s becoming to distinguish the artificial from the real.”
*Skepticism Over the ‘Magic’ of AI Agents Persists: Despite blue-sky promises, AI agents – designed in a perfect world to handle tasks autonomously for you on the Web and elsewhere – are still getting a bad rap.
Observes writer Rory Bathgate: “Let’s be very clear here: AI agents are still not very good at their ‘jobs’, or at least pretty terrible at producing returns on investment.”
In fact, tech market research firm Gartner is predicting that 40% of agents currently used by business will be ‘put out to pasture’ by 2027.
*Top 20 Tools in AI Search Optimization (SEO): India-based business pub OfficeChai has come out with its list of the best AI tools right now for SEO.
Here are the top five:
–Surfer SEO
–Jasper
–Semrush
–MarketMuse
–Frase.io
*Embracing AI: A Leadership Guide: ChatGPT-maker OpenAI – which knows a thing or two about the tech – is out with a new guide for business leaders considering bringing in AI.
The easy-to-read 15-page guide offers tips on bringing management and staff onboard, ramping up and making the most of the tech.
The guide also features links to a number of key AI reports and case studies of successful AI implementations.
*OpenAI’s Speech-to-Text AI Gets Some Polish: Whisper – a speech-to-text transcriber from ChatGPT’s maker – just got more accurate.
Thanks to an upgrade from a group of outside researchers, the app is now much better transcribing speech as it happens in real-time.
Ever better, the tech is now able to deliver those transcriptions when run on everyday office computers.
*Microsoft Adds ChatGPT Competitor’s Tech to Office 365: In an interesting move, Microsoft is adding AI to some features of its Office 365 from ChatGPT rival Anthropic.
Specifically, Microsoft will be injecting Anthropic’s AI – which runs the Claude chatbot – into Office 365 apps like Excel, Powerpoint and Word.
Currently, Microsoft uses AI from a number of AI leaders to help run Office 365 and its in-house chatbot, Copilot.
*Oracle’s AI Play Stuns Investors: Half century old Oracle – a provider of database and cloud software – has suddenly emerged as a key player in AI.
The company – which helps companies like ChatGPT’s maker run their AI – announced last week that many of those AI contracts should swell its cloud revenue to $114 billion by 2029.
The result: Oracle’s stock, already up 45% for 2025, surged another 40% in just one day last week, according to writer Dan Gallagher.
*AI Big Picture: Arab Nation UAE Joins AI Open Source Movement: United Arab Emirates has released open source AI – or AI available for anyone to use for free – it says competes with the latest AI from ChatGPT’s maker.
Observes writer Cade Metz: “The Emirates is among several nations pouring billions of dollars into computer data centers and research to compete with leading nations like the United States and China in artificial intelligence.
“Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore are embracing the idea that the A.I. is so important, each should have its own version of the technology.”
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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 Amps-Up Performance appeared first on Robot Writers AI.
By Melissa Anchisi and Florian Meyer
In July, EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) announced their joint initiative to build a large language model (LLM). Now, this model is available and serves as a building block for developers and organisations for future applications such as chatbots, translation systems, or educational tools.
The model is named Apertus – Latin for “open” – highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented.
AI researchers, professionals, and experienced enthusiasts can either access the model through the strategic partner Swisscom or download it from Hugging Face – a platform for AI models and applications – and deploy it for their own projects. Apertus is freely available in two sizes – featuring 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, the smaller model being more appropriate for individual usage. Both models are released under a permissive open-source license, allowing use in education and research as well as broad societal and commercial applications.
As a fully open language model, Apertus allows researchers, professionals and enthusiasts to build upon the model and adapt it to their specific needs, as well as to inspect any part of the training process. This distinguishes Apertus from models that make only selected components accessible.
“With this release, we aim to provide a blueprint for how a trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI model can be developed,” says Martin Jaggi, Professor of Machine Learning at EPFL and member of the Steering Committee of the Swiss AI Initiative. The model will be regularly updated by the development team which includes specialized engineers and a large number of researchers from CSCS, ETH Zurich and EPFL.
With its open approach, EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS are venturing into new territory. “Apertus is not a conventional case of technology transfer from research to product. Instead, we see it as a driver of innovation and a means of strengthening AI expertise across research, society and industry,” says Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS and Professor at ETH Zurich. In line with their tradition, EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS are providing both foundational technology and infrastructure to foster innovation across the economy.
Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others.
“Apertus is built for the public good. It stands among the few fully open LLMs at this scale and is the first of its kind to embody multilingualism, transparency, and compliance as foundational design principles”, says Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the LLM project and Research Scientist at ETH Zurich.
“Swisscom is proud to be among the first to deploy this pioneering large language model on our sovereign Swiss AI Platform. As a strategic partner of the Swiss AI Initiative, we are supporting the access of Apertus during the Swiss {ai} Weeks. This underscores our commitment to shaping a secure and responsible AI ecosystem that serves the public interest and strengthens Switzerland’s digital sovereignty”, commented Daniel Dobos, Research Director at Swisscom.
While setting up Apertus is straightforward for professionals and proficient users, additional components such as servers, cloud infrastructure or specific user interfaces are required for practical use. The upcoming Swiss {ai} Weeks hackathons will be the first opportunity for developers to experiment hands-on with Apertus, test its capabilities, and provide feedback for improvements to future versions.
Swisscom will provide a dedicated interface to hackathon participants, making it easier to interact with the model. As of today, Swisscom business customers will be able to access the Apertus model via Swisscom’s sovereign Swiss AI platform.
Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the Public AI Inference Utility will make Apertus accessible as part of a global movement for public AI. “Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity,” says Joshua Tan, Lead Maintainer of the Public AI Inference Utility.
Apertus is designed with transparency at its core, thereby ensuring full reproducibility of the training process. Alongside the models, the research team has published a range of resources: comprehensive documentation and source code of the training process and datasets used, model weights including intermediate checkpoints – all released under the permissive open-source license, which also allows for commercial use. The terms and conditions are available via Hugging Face.
Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins.
“Apertus demonstrates that generative AI can be both powerful and open,” says Antoine Bosselut, Professor and Head of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at EPFL and Co-Lead of the Swiss AI Initiative. “The release of Apertus is not a final step, rather it’s the beginning of a journey, a long-term commitment to open, trustworthy, and sovereign AI foundations, for the public good worldwide. We are excited to see developers engage with the model at the Swiss {ai} Weeks hackathons. Their creativity and feedback will help us to improve future generations of the model.”
Future versions aim to expand the model family, improve efficiency, and explore domain-specific adaptations in fields like law, climate, health and education. They are also expected to integrate additional capabilities, while maintaining strong standards for transparency.
Small two-wheeled robots, equipped with high-tech sensors, will help to find survivors faster in the aftermath of disasters. © Tohoku University, 2023.
By Michael Allen
In the critical 72 hours after an earthquake or explosion, a race against the clock begins to find survivors. After that window, the chances of survival drop sharply.
When a powerful earthquake hit central Italy on 24 August 2016, killing 299 people, over 5 000 emergency workers were mobilised in search and rescue efforts that saved dozens from the rubble in the immediate aftermath.
The pressure to move fast can create risks for first responders, who often face unstable environments with little information about the dangers ahead. But this type of rescue work could soon become safer and more efficient thanks to a joint effort by EU and Japanese researchers.
Rescue organisations, research institutes and companies from both Europe and Japan worked together from 2019 to 2023 to develop a new generation of tools blending robotics, drone technology and chemical sensing to transform how emergency teams operate in disaster zones.
It is a prototype technology that did not exist before.
– Tiina Ristmäe, CURSOR
Their work was part of a four-year EU-funded international research initiative called CURSOR, which included partners from six EU countries, Norway and the UK. It also included Tohoku University, whose involvement was funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
The researchers hope that the sophisticated rescue kit they have developed will help rescue workers locate trapped survivors faster, while also improving their own safety.
“In the field of search and rescue, we don’t have many technologies that support first responders, and the technologies that we do have, have a lot of limitations,” said Tiina Ristmäe, a research coordinator at the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief and vice president of the International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation.
At the heart of the researcher’s work is a small robot called Soft Miniaturised Underground Robotic Finder (SMURF). The robot is designed to navigate through collapsed buildings and rubble piles to locate people who may be trapped underneath.
The idea is to allow rescue teams to do more of their work remotely, localising and finding humans from the most hazardous areas in the early stages of a rescue operation. The SMURF can be remotely controlled by operators who stay at a safe distance from the rubble.
“It is a prototype technology that did not exist before,” said Ristmäe. “We don’t send people, we send machines – robots – to do the often very dangerous job.”
The SMURF is compact and lightweight, with a two-wheel design that allows it to manoeuvre over debris and climb small obstacles.
“It moves and drops deep into the debris to find victims, with multiple robots covering the whole rubble pile,” said Professor Satoshi Tadokoro, a robotics expert at Tohoku University and one of the project’s lead scientists.
The development team tested many designs before settling on the final SMURF prototype.
“We investigated multiple options – multiple wheels or tracks, flying robots, jumping robots – but we concluded that this two-wheeled design is the most effective,” said Tadokoro.
The SMURF’s small “head” is packed with technology: video and thermal cameras, microphones and speakers for two-way communication, and a powerful chemical sensor known as the SNIFFER.
This sensor is capable of detecting substances that humans naturally emit, such as C02 and ammonia, and can even distinguish between living and deceased individuals.
Put to the test in real-world conditions, the SNIFFER has proved able to provide reliable information even when surrounded by competing stimuli, like smoke or rain.
According to the first responders who worked with the researchers, the information provided by the SNIFFER is highly valuable: it helps them to prioritise getting help to those who are still alive, said Ristmäe.
To further improve the reach of the SMURF, the researchers also integrated drone support into the system. Customised drones are used to deliver the robots directly to the areas where they’re needed most – places that may be hard or dangerous to access on foot.
Ιt moves and drops deep into the debris to find victims, with multiple robots covering the whole rubble pile.
– Professor Satoshi Tadokoro, Tohoku University
“You can transport several robots at the same time and drop them in different locations,” said Ristmäe.
Alongside these delivery drones, the CURSOR team developed a fleet of aerial tools designed to survey and assess disaster zones. One of the drones, dubbed the “mothership,” acts as a flying communications hub, linking all the devices on the ground with the rescue team’s command centre.
Other drones carry ground-penetrating radar to detect victims buried beneath debris. Additional drones capture overlapping high-definition footage that can be stitched together into detailed 3D maps of the affected area, helping teams to visualise the layout and plan their operations more strategically.
Along with speeding up search operations, these steps should slash the time emergency workers spend in dangerous locations like collapsed buildings.
The combined system has already undergone real-world testing, including large-scale field trials in Japan and across Europe.
One of the most comprehensive tests took place in November 2022 in Afidnes, Greece, where the full range of CURSOR technologies was used in a simulated disaster scenario.
Though not yet commercially available, the prototype rescue kit has sparked global interest.
“We’ve received hundreds of requests from people wanting to buy it,” said Ristmäe. “We have to explain it’s not deployable yet, but the demand is there.”
The CURSOR team hopes to secure more funding to further enhance the technology and eventually bring it to market, potentially transforming the future of disaster response.
Research in this article was funded by the EU’s Horizon Programme. The views of the interviewees don’t necessarily reflect those of the European Commission. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.
This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine.