AI Updates on 2025-05-16

OpenAI introduces Codex, a software engineering agent powered by codex-1 (a version of o3 optimized for software engineering) that can independently navigate codebases, implement changes, and propose pull requests @OpenAI @sama @gdb
Cursor announces a new Tab model that can jump across files, rolling out to users in their latest update @cursor_ai
Windsurf introduces SWE-1, their first frontier model for complex software engineering tasks, claiming performance comparable to Claude-3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini-2.5 Pro on challenging benchmarks @windsurf_ai
Microsoft's 4o Image Generation is now live in Copilot, offering capabilities like rendering accurate text, editing creations, and making photorealistic images @Copilot

xAI publishes their Grok system prompts openly on GitHub following an incident with "unauthorized modifications" to the prompt that directed Grok to provide specific responses on political topics @xai
Codex-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on SWEbench, a benchmark for software engineering tasks @sama
New meta-analysis of 51 studies shows AI has a large positive impact on students' learning performance (0.867 SD) and moderate positive impact on learning perception (0.456 SD) and higher-order thinking (0.457 SD) @mustafasuleyman
Researchers from Berkeley AI Research introduce Real2Render2Real, a method to scale robot datasets without teleoperating, dynamic simulation, or robot hardware - using just smartphone scans and human hand demo videos @berkeley_ai

Codex enables developers to run multiple software engineering tasks in parallel, helping with bug fixes, feature implementation, and code navigation @OpenAI @sama
Google AI Studio rolls out a new built-in usage dashboard allowing users to easily check request and token volumes and spending @OfficialLoganK
Google AI Studio introduces a new generative media experience bringing together Veo 2, Gemini 2.0 native image generation/editing, and Imagen 3 @OfficialLoganK
Google offers Gemini Advanced free to U.S. college students through finals 2026 @GeminiApp
Hugging Face announces integration with Kaggle, allowing users to use any model from Hugging Face directly in Kaggle without downloading and uploading models as datasets @huggingface
Hotel bookings natively on Perplexity are quietly growing, with potential to disrupt the ad industry @AravSrinivas
PDF downloads for deep research reports now fully rolled out to Free, Edu, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT @OpenAI

Meta reportedly delaying its biggest AI model launch, Llama 4 Behemoth, due to poor internal performance, AI leadership reorganization, and researcher departures @deedydas
Sam Altman envisions the future of work being like Starcraft or Age of Empires, with users directing "200 microagents" to fix problems, gather information, and design new systems @sama
Google One recently crossed 150 million subscribers, a 50% increase since February 2024, partly driven by AI features @demishassabis
OpenAI and Anthropic both establishing offices in Europe, with OpenAI setting up in Zurich, likely to hire from Google's large presence there @GergelyOrosz

Jeff Clune advocates that every AI company should be required by law to publish their system prompts openly, similar to xAI's recent move following their incident @jeffclune
Arvind Narayanan publishes a critique on the implications of AI that's "grounded in the state of AI today" rather than focusing on hypothetical AGI scenarios @emollick
Ethan Mollick notes that most key experiments showing impressive AI abilities in academic research were done on GPT-4, a model now considered obsolete, suggesting current capabilities are likely higher @emollick
François Chollet emphasizes that there's "a lot more signal in system failures than in regular operations" when analyzing AI systems @fchollet