AI Updates on 2025-09-02

Anthropic raises $13 billion Series F funding at $183 billion valuation, growing from $1 billion to $5 billion run-rate revenue in just eight months, making it one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history @AnthropicAI
Microsoft announces GPT-5 is now available to 100% of Copilot users on day one, alongside new features including Copilot 3D and worldwide Deep Research free access @mustafasuleyman

OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1 billion and appoints Vijaye Raji as CTO of Applications, with Srinivas Narayanan promoted to CTO of B2B Applications and Kevin Weil heading a new VP of AI for Science team @OpenAI
Microsoft secures new agreement with U.S. General Services Administration including no-cost Microsoft 365 Copilot offer, expected to deliver more than $3 billion in total savings to taxpayers in the first year @satyanadella
Research shows 52% of financial firms now use generative AI for fraud detection, personalized experiences, and efficient underwriting, transforming finance beyond just cost savings @NVIDIAAI
Average tenure at Meta increased from 2 years to 4 years since 2023 layoffs, with similar changes across Big Tech indicating employees are not leaving like before due to market conditions @GergelyOrosz
New research confirms AI progress is well ahead of expert predictions from 2022, with super forecasters giving only 2.3% and 8.6% probability of AI achieving Math Olympiad gold by 2025, which has already been accomplished @emollick

OpenAI announces plans to route sensitive conversations to reasoning models like GPT-5 and implement parental controls within a month, responding to safety incidents where ChatGPT failed to detect mental distress @TechCrunch
MIT Technology Review reports therapists are secretly using ChatGPT for client sessions, causing some clients to feel triggered by the undisclosed AI assistance @techreview
AI for Humanity shifts position on AI regulation, stating that gatekeeping access to general-purpose technology is not a sustainable response to low-confidence evidence of serious risk @natolambert

Excel introduces new COPILOT function for AI-powered categorization and analysis directly in spreadsheet cells, representing a different approach to AI integration compared to ChatGPT Agent's whole-spreadsheet editing capabilities @emollick
Mistral AI launches Le Chat with memory capabilities that learn from past interactions and 20+ out-of-the-box connectors, positioning it as the most Enterprise-ready AI assistant @MistralAI
Linear integrates Agent Sessions with lifecycle APIs, enabling seamless agent-to-agent handoffs where AI agents can update descriptions, build sub-issues, and provide PM assistance @clairevo
Google Gemini App introduces nano-banana feature allowing users to create figurine-style images from photos with a single prompt, demonstrating advanced image generation capabilities @GeminiApp
WordPress introduces Telex, a new AI tool for content creation and management, alongside other AI experiments at WordCamp US 2025 @TechCrunch
Amazon launches Lens Live, a real-time visual search component that brings live functionality to Amazon Lens for product discovery @TechCrunch

Stanford announces the first BEHAVIOR Challenge at NeurIPS 2025, featuring 50 long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks with 1,200 hours of high-quality demonstrations to evaluate embodied AI and robotics solutions @drfeifei
Kaggle announces a 5-Day AI Intensive Course on AI Agents with Google, scheduled for November 10-14, offering hands-on experience in building and deploying next-generation AI agents @kaggle
Research clarifies that gpt-realtime has a mix of data specific to itself, making it neither exactly GPT-4o nor GPT-5, with a knowledge cutoff of October 1, 2023 @simonw
Hugging Face research team announces AMA on r/LocalLLaMA to discuss work behind SmolLM, FineWeb and hints at potential new releases @huggingface