The message from experts is clear: artificial intelligence (AI) can help professionals spend less time on repetitive, time-consuming tasks and more on value-adding activities. However, there's just one issue: what are these value-adding activities? Senior executives may like the sound of highly paid staff spending less time on mundane activities, but only if these professionals use their saved time effectively. So, how can you make the most of the time you save by using AI? Five experts share their top tips. Gabriela Vogel, vice president analyst in Gartner's Executive Leadership of Digital Business practice, said it's crucial to consider how professionals will use spare time in an age of AI -- and it's an area she's researching right now.

People have found a new use for ChatGPT: Figuring out locations from photos. OpenAI's latest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, can analyze images beyond just recognizing objects; they can zoom in, crop, and detect visual clues in photos to help identify places, landmarks, and even specific businesses. This capability is fascinating, but it's also raised some privacy concerns about how easily people can use AI to reverse-engineer location data from images. Also: ChatGPT just made it easy to find and edit all the AI images you've ever generated TechCrunch reported that people are uploading photos -- anything from restaurant menu snapshots to casual selfies -- and asking ChatGPT to guess where they were taken. The AI does this by looking at everything in the image: the type of buildings, landscape features, and even subtle hints like the architecture or the layout of a city.

Your LG TV might soon keep tabs on your emotional state to show you more relevant ads. In a recent press release, marketing and data science company Zenapse announced a partnership with LG to bring "emotionally intelligent insights and targeting" to connected televisions -- or ads targeted to your emotions. Zenapse will use a technology called "ZenVision" that watches content along with the viewer. It's automatic content recognition, or a form of surveillance that understands what type of content you watch, and most smart TVs use it (ZDNET editor Chris Bayer recommends turning this off, by the way). Traditional automatic content recognition builds a demographic profile including information like your age and location, but ZenVision, which is coming to LG televisions (the company didn't say which models specifically), takes that information and uses AI to build a psychological profile to show ads that will resonate with you.

ChatGPT, Sora, Operator, and the new image generator are cool, but they're not the most impressive things OpenAI has done. Before you have me committed, hear me out. Personally, they've improved my workflow and unlocked efficiencies that ultimately led to more revenue. Also: AI has grown beyond human knowledge, says Google's DeepMind unit In fact, on March 31, 2025, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, announced that ChatGPT gained one million new users in just one hour, driven by high demand for its newly launched image generation feature. In this article, we won't talk about benchmarks or how many gazillion data points were used to build a large language model.

The world of artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been preoccupied with advancing generative AI beyond simple tests that AI models easily pass. The famed Turing Test has been "beaten" in some sense, and controversy rages over whether the newest models are being built to game the benchmark tests that measure performance. The problem, say scholars at Google's DeepMind unit, is not the tests themselves but the limited way AI models are developed. The data used to train AI is too restricted and static, and will never propel AI to new and better abilities. In a paper posted by DeepMind last week, part of a forthcoming book by MIT Press, researchers propose that AI must be allowed to have "experiences" of a sort, interacting with the world to formulate goals based on signals from the environment.

Just weeks after unveiling Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google is on to its next top-performing model. On Thursday, the company released an "early version" of Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview in the Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. The model has a knowledge cutoff of January 2025. It can take text, images, video, and audio prompts, and has a one-million-token context window. Also: Gemini Pro 2.5 is a stunningly capable coding assistant - and a big threat to ChatGPT Google says the new version expands on Flash 2.0 with improved reasoning, but "without compromising its renowned speed or cost."

The latest in generative artificial intelligence includes AI agents that can access the web to find answers to questions. While promising, agentic technology is very much a work in progress. In a paper published last week, OpenAI researchers relate how the company's Deep Research technology, which was built to use the Web, does far better than OpenAI's other models when answering web questions. It also does far better than humans on tasks requiring hours of searching. Also: What are AI agents?

Google's Imagen 3 is a powerful AI text-to-image generator that earned ZDNET's pick as the best image generator -- even against competitors like Midjourney and OpenAI. As a result, the release of its Veo 2 text-to-video generator has been highly anticipated. Well, it's finally here, and it comes with a surprise. On Tuesday, Google announced via a blog post that its state-of-the-art Veo 2 video generator is now available in Gemini. This feature allows users to create eight-second video clips at 720p resolution in a 16:9 landscape format using a simple text prompt.

Imagine an AI agent that can not only conduct research on the web but also interact with websites to accomplish specific tasks -- all on its own. On Wednesday, the software giant announced an interactive new skill designed to empower the AI agents that people create using its Copilot Studio product. That skill is computer use. Any agent you build can work with a desktop application or website to carry out specific actions just as you might. Also: What are AI agents?

Following the recent launch of a new family of GPT-4.1 models, OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini on Wednesday, its latest addition to the existing line of reasoning models. The o3 model, previewed in December, is OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model to date, while o4-mini is a smaller, cheaper, and faster model. Simply put, reasoning models are trained to "think before they speak," which results in a longer time to process the prompt but higher-quality responses. However, they also have an important new addition: Visual understanding. Also: How to use ChatGPT: A beginner's guide to the most popular AI chatbot OpenAI o3 and o4-mini are OpenAI's first models to "think with images."