Looking for an automated way to record, analyze, and summarize meetings and other conversations? You can now do that with any paid ChatGPT subscription, as long as you use a Mac. Also: Is ChatGPT Plus really worth 20 when the free version offers so many premium features? On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that its new Record mode is now accessible to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. The recording capability, which kicked off in June, was initially restricted to the more expensive ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Edu plans.

Over the last year, chain of thought (CoT) -- an AI model's ability to articulate its approach to a query in natural language -- has become an impressive development in generative AI, especially in agentic systems. Now, several researchers agree it may also be critical to AI safety efforts. On Tuesday, researchers from competing companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google DeepMind, as well as institutions like the Center for AI Safety, Apollo Research, and the UK AI Security Institute, came together in a new position paper titled "Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI." The paper details how observing CoT could reveal key insights about a model's ability to misbehave -- and warns that training models to become more advanced could cut off those insights. A model uses chain of thought to explain the steps it's taking to tackle a problem, sometimes speaking its internal monologue as if no one is listening. This gives researchers a peek into its decision-making (and sometimes even its morals).

Just a year and a half ago, the latest and greatest of Adobe's Firefly generative AI offerings involved producing high-quality images from text with customization options, such as reference images. Since then, Adobe has pivoted into text-to-video generation and is now adding a slew of features to make it even more competitive. Also: Forget Sora: Adobe launches'commercially safe' AI video generator. On Thursday, Adobe released a series of upgrades to its video capabilities that give users more control over the final generation, more options to create the video, and even more modalities to create. Even though creating realistic AI-generated videos is an impressive feat that shows how far AI generation has come, one crucial aspect of video generation has been missing: sound.

Artificial intelligence companies are "fundamentally unprepared" for the consequences of creating systems with human-level intellectual performance, according to a leading AI safety group. The Future of Life Institute (FLI) said none of the firms on its AI safety index scored higher than a D for "existential safety planning". One of the five reviewers of the FLI's report said that, despite aiming to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), none of the companies scrutinised had "anything like a coherent, actionable plan" to ensure the systems remained safe and controllable. AGI refers to a theoretical stage of AI development at which a system is capable of matching a human in carrying out any intellectual task. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has said its mission is to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity".

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. New AI models are commonly judged on a variety of metrics, including their ability to solve math problems, answer text questions, and write code. The big AI companies use a variety of standardized assessments to measure the effectiveness of their models, such as Humanity's Last Exam, a 2,500-question test designed for AI benchmarking. Typically, when a company like Anthropic or OpenAI releases a new model, it shows improvements on these tests. Unsurprisingly, Grok 4 scores higher than Grok 3 on some key metrics, but it also has to battle in the court of public opinion.

What's worse, being stuck in traffic or on another interminable Microsoft Teams call? Mercedes is teaming up with Microsoft to allow you to take Teams calls while on the go -- and is talking about adding Microsoft Copilot to its suite of luxury cars, too. Microsoft and Mercedes-Benz said Wednesday that the new Mercedes CLA will be able to tap into an in-vehicle camera and give drivers access to a Meetings for Teams application. Somehow, Mercedes is also including Microsoft Intune inside the car, so business workers will be able to access private business data, too. Mercedes is making this part of what it calls MBUX, the Mercedes-Benz user experience.

A new report from Totally Human Media reveals that nearly 20 percent of video games released on Steam in 2025 use generative AI. The report from Totally Human, which uses machine learning and generative AI to recommend games, books, shows, and movies, reported that approximately 7,818 games on Steam disclosed using Generative AI. That represents about 7 percent of the entire available Steam library. For games released on the platform in 2025, just under 20 percent -- or about 1 in 5 games -- utilized AI, or disclosed doing so, at least. Game Rant reported that the most popular game to make that Generative AI disclosure is My Summer Car, a vehicle simulation game that lets users build, fix, tune, and perform maintenance to their car.

Artificial intelligence companions have gone mainstream amongst teens, according to a new report. The findings may surprise parents familiar with AI chatbot products like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, but haven't heard about platforms that specifically allow users to form friendships and romantic relationships with so-called AI companions. The latter category includes products like Replika, Nomi, Talkie, and Character.AI. Some of the platforms are for users 18 and older, though teens may lie about their age to gain access. A nationally representative survey of 1,060 teens ages 13 to 17 conducted this spring by Common Sense Media, an advocacy and research nonprofit in the U.S., found that 52 percent of respondents regularly use AI companions.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and OpenAI chief Sam Altman see insatiable demand for artificial intelligence (AI) that makes it imperative to keep building ever more computing capacity. Speaking via teleconference at SoftBank World, the two business partners argued that advancing AI would lead to new jobs that are not yet imagined, and the advancement of robotics will help kickstart a "self-improvement" loop. "As we drive the cost of AI down, more people want to use it," Altman said in response to Son's question about diminishing returns from further expansion. "So if we make the cost of AI 10 times cheaper, people wanna use it 30 times as much or whatever. And the demand for intelligence in the world just seems to be huge."

OpenAI researcher Jason Wei is joining Meta's new superintelligence lab, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Wei worked on OpenAI's o3 and deep research models, according to his personal website. He joined OpenAI in 2023 after a stint at Google, where he worked on chain-of-thought research, which involves training an AI model to process complex queries step-by-step. At OpenAI, Wei became a self-described "diehard" for reinforcement learning, a method of training or refining an AI model with positive or negative feedback. It's become a promising area of AI research--one that several of the researchers Meta has hired for its superintelligence team specialize in.