Anthropic last week launched Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, which offer advanced features in coding, reasoning, and AI agents. "Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to your instructions," advertised the company. Both models can use tools like web search and demonstrate improved memory capabilities. In addition, the company announced that Claude Code was generally available. It supports background tasks via GitHub Actions and native integrations with VS Code and JetBrains, displaying edits directly in users' files for pair programming. Anthropic, a start-up founded by ex-OpenAI researchers, released four new capabilities on the Anthropic API, enabling developers to build more powerful code execution tools, the MCP connector, Files API, and the ability to cache prompts for up to one hour. Claude Opus 4 powers known frontier agent products like Cursor, Replit, Block, Rakuten, and Cognition. Anthropic’s Claude 4 models arrived as the company looks to substantially grow revenue. Reportedly, the organization aims to reach $2.2 billion in earnings this year. NEW Claude Browser Use AI Agent: Automate ANYTHING… pic.twitter.com/V0sCZjHkQm — Julian Goldie SEO (@JulianGoldieSEO) May 24, 2025 Still manually searching for flights and leads? Claude 4 just changed everything. I just turned Claude Sonnet 4 into a browser-controlling AI super agent that finds flights, scrapes LinkedIn for leads, and navigates websites automatically. Here's what blew my mind: → It… pic.twitter.com/rs5PSLNKNu — Julian Goldie SEO (@JulianGoldieSEO) May 24, 2025
Google Gemini's Gemma open models reached a milestone of 150 million downloads this month. Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, also revealed that developers have created more than 70,000 variants of Gemma on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. This collection of lightweight models, built from the same research and technology that powers Gemini 2.0, was launched in February 2024 to compete with another open model like Meta’s Llama. In late April, it exceeded 1.2 billion downloads. The latest Gemma releases are multimodal, enabling users to work with images and text in 100 languages. Versions are also fine-tuned for particular applications, like drug discovery. Gemma and Llama have non-standard licensing terms, which some developers say they might be risky for commercial use of the models. Gemma just passed 150 million downloads and over 70k variants on Hugging Face🚀🚀🚀 What would you like to see in the next Gemma versions? — Omar Sanseviero (@osanseviero) May 11, 2025
Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York OpenAI launched a paid software engineering agent called Codex yesterday. The agent iteratively runs tests on its code until it achieves passing results. Issued as a research preview, Codex can work on many tasks in parallel, write features, answer questions about the user's codebase, fix bugs, and propose pull requests for review. Each task runs on a sandboxed virtual computer in the cloud, preloaded with the repository. According to OpenAI, it generates code that closely mirrors human style and PR preferences, adheres precisely to instructions, and can iteratively run tests until it receives a passing result. Codex, accessible through the sidebar in ChatGPT, is powered by Codex-1, a version of OpenAI o3 AI reasoning model optimized for software engineering tasks. OpenAI is also updating Codex CLI, the company’s recently launched open-source coding agent that runs in the user's terminal, with a version of its o4-mini model that’s optimized for software engineering. In OpenAI’s API, it costs $1.50 per 1M input tokens (750,000 words) and $6 per 1M output tokens.
Hugging Face released a free, web-agentic AI tool called Open Computer Agent this month, which behaves similarly to OpenAI's Operator. Users can prompt a task, and the agent opens the necessary programs and determines the required steps. It uses a Linux virtual machine preloaded with several applications, including Firefox. However, as Techcrunch described, "Be forewarned: It’s quite sluggish and occasionally makes mistakes." "It often runs into CAPTCHA tests that it’s unable to solve." The Hugging Face team’s goal is to demonstrate that open AI models are becoming more capable and cheaper to run on cloud infrastructure, not to build a state-of-the-art computer-using agent, as one of the developers expressed below. We're launching Computer Use in smolagents! 🥳 -> As vision models become more capable, they become able to power complex agentic workflows. Especially Qwen-VL models, that support built-in grounding, i.e. ability to locate any element in an image by its coordinates, thus to… pic.twitter.com/mI8MuWZkIS — m_ric (@AymericRoucher) May 6, 2025 Agentic technology is attracting increasing investment as enterprises look to boost productivity. A recent KPMG survey shows that 65% of companies are experimenting with AI agents. Experts say the AI agent segment might grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.
Harvard University's President Alan M. Garber will take a voluntary 25% pay cut for the fiscal year 2026, which runs from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026, on a salary not disclosed, but presumably upward of $1 million. Several other Harvard's top officials are making voluntary cuts on their own. Garber's pay cut is a gesture to share the financial strain that has hit faculty and staff since the Trump administration froze nearly $3 billion in funding. Over 80 faculty members — from several schools and academic units — have pledged to donate 10 percent of their salaries for up to a year to support the University if it continues to resist the Trump administration. In 2020, as provost, Garber took a similar 25% cut in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, President Lawrence S. Bacow and several deans accepted temporary reductions as Harvard confronted a projected $750 million revenue shortfall. Garber’s decision also mirrors similar moves from leaders of other schools. Brown University President Christina H. Paxson announced last month that she and two other senior administrators would take a 10 percent salary cut in fiscal year 2026. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced it would cut another $450 million in federal grants and contracts from Harvard. The Federal Government alleged Harvard had failed to check race-based discrimination and antisemitism. Earlier this month, it pledged to no longer award grants or contracts to the University. The cut, which covers grants awarded by eight unspecified federal agencies, is in addition to the $2.2 billion funding cut announced last month. Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, filed in April, remains in its early stages. Oral arguments are scheduled to begin on July 21, and the legal battle will be drawn out for months.
