AIToday
Welcome back
Today's Top AI News
Curated from 200+ sources across AI & machine learning
Google’s new Deep Research and Deep Research Max agents can search the web and your private data
Google on Monday unveiled the most significant upgrade to its autonomous research agent capabilities since the product's debut, launching two new agents — Deep Research and Deep Research Max — that for the first time allow developers to fuse open web data with proprietary enterprise information through a single API call, produce native charts and infographics inside research reports, and connect to arbitrary third-party data sources through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The release, built on Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro model, marks an inflection point in the rapidly intensifying race to build AI systems that can autonomously conduct the kind of exhaustive, multi-source research that has traditionally consumed hours or days of human analyst time. It also represents Google's clearest bid yet to position its AI infrastructure as the backbone for enterprise research workflows in finance, life sciences, and market intelligence — industries where the stakes of getting information wrong are e
ChatGPT’s new Images 2.0 model is surprisingly good at generating text
Astera Labs Stock Hits Buy Point After This News
General AI
Are services the new software? This venture capitalist thinks the future is in selling AI-delivered outcomes, not AI-powered products
Sequoia partner Julien Bek penned a viral essay arguing there's a gold mine in AI-native service firms
Bond, a new social media platform, wants to use AI to help you kick your doomscrolling habit
Bond wants you to get off the couch and get back into the real world, its creator says. The new platform's AI system is designed to motivate users to do things away from the app.
Voyage Launches the First AI-Native RPG Platform, Signaling the Future of Gaming
SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2026--Latitude today launched Voyage, the world’s first AI role-playing game (RPG) platform. Voyage is the first RPG where nothing is scripted: every world is player-created, every character thinks for itself and every choice has real consequences.
Schematic Raises $6.5M To Help Companies Update Their Pricing Faster And Easier In The AI Era
Schematic, a startup that aims to simplify pricing and packaging for software and AI companies, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
John Ternus’ first big problem is AI
Less than a year ago, Apple made headlines for a lack of AI announcements at its annual WWDC event. Ten months later, the company has announced that hardware executive John Ternus will succeed longtime CEO Tim Cook as chief executive - and the official release doesn't mention AI once. Ternus, currently Apple's SVP of hardware engineering, will take over as CEO on September 1st, after Cook's decade and a half in the role. Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the company and the first Apple CEO in about 30 years to come from the hardware sector. According to Apple, he's led hardware engineering work for every model of iPad, as well as the most rec … Read the full story at The Verge.
Update: Meta Platforms to Track Employees' Mouse Movements, Keystrokes for AI Training
(Changes sourcing in first paragraph, company comment added in fourth, fifth and sixth paragraphs).
Vercel breach exposes the OAuth gap most security teams cannot detect, scope or contain
One employee at Vercel adopted an AI tool. One employee at that AI vendor got hit with an infostealer. That combination created a walk-in path to Vercel’s production environments through an OAuth grant that nobody had reviewed. Vercel, the cloud platform behind Next.js and its millions of weekly npm downloads, confirmed on Sunday that attackers gained unauthorized access to internal systems. Mandiant was brought in. Law enforcement was notified. Investigations remain active. An update on Monday confirmed that Vercel collaborated with GitHub, Microsoft, npm, and Socket to verify that no Vercel npm packages were compromised. Vercel also announced it is now defaulting environment variable creation to “sensitive.” Next.js, Turbopack, AI SDK, and all Vercel-published npm packages remain uncompromised after a coordinated audit with GitHub, Microsoft, npm, and Socket. Context.ai was the entry point. OX Security’s analysis found that a Vercel employee installed the Context.ai browser extension
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its AI likeness detection tool to celebrities, giving talent and their reps a way to find and remove deepfakes.
Australia's Syenta raises $26 million to ease AI chip bottleneck, former Intel CEO joins board
Syenta, an Australian semiconductor technology startup, said on Tuesday that it has raised $26 million for a new manufacturing technique that could help ease persistent supply chain bottlenecks for artificial intelligence. Along with the funding, the company said it will open an office in the U.S. state of Arizona, near the manufacturing facilities of Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, and that former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will be joining its board of directors. Modern AI chips such as those from Nvidia, Google and others are not a single chip, but rather multiple chips bonded together with what is known as advanced packaging technology, mostly from TSMC.
Tim Cook’s Legacy Is Turning Apple Into a Subscription
The soon-to-exit Apple CEO went all in on services. Now, the incoming CEO, John Ternus, will need to embrace the AI era.
Mozilla Used Anthropic’s Mythos to Find and Fix 151 Bugs in Firefox
The Firefox team doesn’t think emerging AI capabilities will upend cybersecurity long term, but they warn that software developers are likely in for a rocky transition.
AI Dungeon maker Latitude unveils Voyage, a platform for creating AI-powered RPGs
Latitude's new AI-native platform, Voyage, aims to help gamers create their very own role-playing game.
Amazon deepens AI partnership with Anthropic with $5B investment
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has announced a $5 billion investment in AI company Anthropic, alongside plans for up to an additional $20 billion in future funding tied to commercial milestones. The funding builds on an earlier investment of approximately $8 billion and is part of a broader...
AI news from 200+ sources
Get Started FreeModels & Gen AI
OpenAI’s updated image generator can now pull information from the web
An image generated by ChatGPT Images 2.0. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI is rolling out the latest version of its AI-powered image generator with new "thinking capabilities," allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt. In a blog post, OpenAI says ChatGPT Images 2.0 can now create more "sophisticated" images, with improvements to its ability to follow instructions, preserve details of your choosing, and generate text. It's powered by OpenAI's new GPT Image 2 model, with new thinking capabilities available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. When a thinking model is selected, the chatbot's image generator can pull information from the web, cr … Read the full story at The Verge.
Building agent-first governance and security
As AI agents increasingly work alongside humans across organizations, companies could be inadvertently opening a new attack surface. Insecure agents can be manipulated to access sensitive systems and proprietary data, increasing enterprise risk. In some modern enterprises, non-human identities (NHI) are outpacing human identities, and that trend will explode with agentic AI. Solid governance and…
Google launches Deep Research and Deep Research Max agents to automate complex research
Google Deepmind is rolling out Deep Research Max, a new AI agent built on Gemini 3.1 Pro that runs autonomous research across the web and proprietary data sources. For the first time, developers can plug in financial feeds and other specialized sources through the Model Context Protocol. The benchmarks come with the usual lack of transparency. The article Google launches Deep Research and Deep Research Max agents to automate complex research appeared first on The Decoder.
OpenAI Beefs Up ChatGPT’s Image Generation Model
The ChatGPT Images 2.0 model is here. Our testing shows it’s better at creating more detailed images and rendering text, but it still struggles with languages other than English.
AI research lab NeoCognition lands $40M seed to build agents that learn like humans
Founded by an OSU researcher, the startup is developing AI agents that can become experts in any domain.
OpenAI's ChatGPT Images 2.0 is here and it does multilingual text, full infographics, slides, maps, even manga — seemingly flawlessly
It's been only a few months since OpenAI released its last big improvement to AI image generations in ChatGPT and through its application programming interface (API) — namely, a new image generation model known as GPT-Image-1.5, released in December 2025, which brought about improved instruction following, colors, and lighting. Now, after weeks of testing, the company that kicked off the generative AI boom is unveiling a far more dramatic and even more impressive update: ChatGPT Images 2.0, which has been available not-so-secretly for several weeks on LM Arena AI, a third-party testing platform used by OpenAI and other major AI model providers to get early feedback, under the name "duct tape." Throughout that time, it's already blown early users' minds with its capacity to generate long blocks of text or disparate text panels within the same image, its insanely realistic generation of user interfaces and screenshots from popular websites and platforms, its reproduction of real life fig
3 new ways Ads Advisor is making Google Ads safer and faster
Three new agentic safety and policy features integrated into Ads Advisor will help protect and streamline your Google Ads account.
Kimi K2.6 runs agents for days — and exposes the limits of enterprise orchestration
Most orchestration frameworks were built for agents that run for seconds or minutes. Now that agents are running for hours — and in some cases days — those frameworks are starting to crack. Several model providers, such as Anthropic with Claude Code and OpenAI with Codex, introduced early support for long-horizon agents through multi-session tasks, subagents and background execution. However, these systems sometimes assume agents are still operating within bounded-time workflows even when they run for extended periods. Open-source model provider Moonshot AI wants to push beyond that with its new model, Kimi K2.6. Moonshot says the model is designed for continuous execution, with internal use cases including agents that ran for hours and, in one case, five straight days, handling monitoring and incident response autonomously. But this growing use of this type of agent is exposing a critical gap in orchestration: most orchestration frameworks were not designed for this type of continuo
QIMMA قِمّة ⛰: A Quality-First Arabic LLM Leaderboard
Robotics
Dronamics Opens Japan Subsidiary, Names Asia Air Survey as First Japanese Investor
Dronamics has announced a strategic investment from Asia Air Survey Co., Ltd. (TSE: 9233). The company is also establishing a Japanese subsidiary, Dronamics Japan Holdings Co., Ltd. Asia Air Survey, investing through its Corporate Venture Capital arm, becomes the first Japanese investor in Dronamics. Black Swan Drone Targets Japan’s Geospatial Sector Founded in 1954, Asia Air Survey […] The post Dronamics Opens Japan Subsidiary, Names Asia Air Survey as First Japanese Investor appeared first on DRONELIFE.
The New Unicorn Count Reached A 4-Year High In March, Led By Robotics, Frontier Labs And AI Infrastructure
A total of 37 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in March, the highest monthly count in close to four years, Crunchbase data shows. The robotics sector led unicorn creation last month, with six new billion-dollar startups.
Agibot unveils new generation of embodied AI robots and models for real-world deployment
Agibot has unveiled a new generation of embodied AI robots and foundation models, signaling what the company describes as a shift toward large-scale deployment of “physical AI” across industrial and commercial environments. The announcements were made at the company’s 2026 Partner Conference, where Agibot introduced multiple robotic platforms and AI systems built around its “One […]
China flashes new tech swagger to world markets convulsed by war
The world's factory floor is increasingly getting retrofitted for a new era of artificial intelligence and robotics, churning out technological innovation the world craves.
Business & Industry
The AI governance mirage: Why 72% of enterprises don’t have the control and security they think they do
Decision makers at 72% of organizations claim to have two or more AI platforms that they identify as their "primary" layer, according to a survey of 40 enterprise companies conducted by VentureBeat last month, revealing real gaps in security and control. For enterprise management and technical leaders, and especially security leaders, these multiple AI platforms extend the attack surfaces of most enterprises at a time when AI-driven attacks have become increasingly potent. The multiple platforms — which include offerings from hyperscaler or AI labs like Microsoft Azure, Google, OpenAI or Anthropic, or big application companies like Epic, Workday or ServiceNow — reflect a state of sprawl that has emerged as these big software providers rush to offer their own AI to their enterprise customers. Those customers, in their own rush to scale AI, are finding they aren’t building a singular strategy — in fact they may be building a collection of contradictions. The strategic paradox: why lead