The Daily AI Briefing - 12/03/2025

Welcome to The Daily AI Briefing, here are today's headlines! In today's briefing, we're covering OpenAI's new DIY agent tools for businesses, the strategic partnership between Manus and Alibaba's Qwen team in China, a practical tutorial on connecting AI coding assistants to external tools, Meta's testing of its own AI training chip, and a quick look at the latest trending AI tools making waves in the industry. First up, OpenAI has released new DIY agent tools allowing businesses to build their own AI agents. The company just launched a suite of tools enabling custom bots to handle tasks like web browsing and file management, marking a significant push toward bringing autonomous AI assistants into the enterprise space. The new Responses API combines web search, file scanning, and computer use capabilities, replacing the older Assistants API, which will sunset in 2026. It gives companies the ability to develop agents using the same technology powering Operator, with built-in tools for searching the web and navigating computer interfaces. Additionally, a new open-source Agents SDK will help developers orchestrate single and multi-agent systems while providing safety guardrails and monitoring tools. Early adopters already include Stripe, which built an agent to handle invoicing, and Box, which created agents to search through enterprise documents. While 2025 has already been declared the year of AI agents, OpenAI's move to expand the ability for users to build and customize agentic tools may finally help bridge the gap between impressive demos and actual real-world utility. Moving to news from China, Manus has announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba's Qwen team to develop a Chinese version of its autonomous agent platform. This collaboration follows Manus's viral success over the past week and will integrate its agent capabilities with Qwen's open-source language models and computing infrastructure. Manus, which currently runs on both Anthropic's Claude and Qwen, plans to adapt its full feature set for Chinese users and domestic platforms. The partnership comes after Manus' invitation-only preview that demonstrated capabilities reportedly surpassing OpenAI's DeepResearch on agentic benchmarks. Qwen has also been busy, launching a new open-source reasoning model called QwQ-32B and major upgrades to its chat platform. While we've seen many viral AI products fade quickly, this partnership with one of China's top AI labs suggests Manus might have staying power beyond the initial hype. The collaboration highlights how real value in AI increasingly comes from packaging top models with the right tools, workflows, and interfaces. For developers, there's a practical tutorial making rounds on connecting AI coding assistants with external tools. This guide teaches how to connect popular AI coding assistants like Cursor or Windsurf to powerful external tools using MCP (model context protocol) servers for tackling more complex coding tasks. The process involves locating the MCP configuration area in your preferred coding assistant. For Windsurf users, you'll need to click the tools icon, select "Configure," and add the JSON code that connects to your desired service. Cursor users can open Settings, navigate to Features, then MCP Servers, and add a new server with the command that includes your API key. Once configured, you can start using enhanced capabilities by simply asking your AI assistant to access these external tools in your prompts. Many MCP tool providers offer detailed documentation on GitHub repositories, which serve as excellent resources for specific commands and capabilities available for each tool. In hardware news, Meta has begun testing its first in-house AI training chip according to a report from Reuters. This move aims to reduce the company's dependence on Nvidia and control its rapidly increasing AI infrastructure costs. The chip, being manufactured by TSMC, is part of Meta's MTIA series specifically designed