The Daily AI Briefing - 21/03/2025

Welcome to The Daily AI Briefing, here are today's headlines! Today we're covering Claude's major web search upgrade, OpenAI's personality-rich voice AI, photo colorization with Gemini, Apple's AI leadership shakeup, and several significant product launches and business moves in the AI space. These developments showcase the rapid evolution of AI capabilities and the intense competition among tech giants to deliver more powerful and user-friendly AI experiences. First up, Anthropic has given Claude a significant upgrade with real-time web search capabilities. Claude 3.7 Sonnet can now access current information from the internet, automatically determining when to search for more accurate or up-to-date information. This feature includes direct citations, allowing users to verify sources and fact-check responses easily. The web search functionality is currently available to all paid Claude users in the United States, with international and free-tier rollouts planned soon. Users can activate this feature by toggling on the 'Web Search' tool in their profile settings. This update effectively closes a major feature gap between Claude and competitors like ChatGPT and Gemini. OpenAI has launched next-generation audio models that bring personality to AI voices. The new gpt-4o-mini-tts model can adapt its speaking style based on simple text prompts – imagine asking it to "speak like a pirate" or use a "bedtime story voice." The GPT-4o-transcribe speech-to-text models achieve state-of-the-art performance in accuracy and reliability, outperforming existing Whisper models. OpenAI has also released openai.fm, a public demo platform where users can test different voice styles. These models are available through OpenAI's API, with integration support through the Agents SDK for developers building voice-enabled AI assistants. This advancement significantly improves the naturalness and customizability of AI voice interactions. Google's Gemini is making photo colorization accessible to everyone. Users can now colorize black and white photos using Gemini 2.0 Flash's native image generation feature. The process is remarkably simple: visit Google AI Studio, select "Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental" from the Models dropdown, upload a black-and-white image, type "Colorize this image," and hit Run. Beyond basic colorization, users can make creative edits with additional prompts like "Add snow on the trees" or "Change the lighting to golden hour." This user-friendly approach brings powerful image manipulation capabilities to non-technical users. Apple is dramatically restructuring its AI leadership amid concerns about Siri's development. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Mike Rockwell, known for creating the Vision Pro, is taking over Siri development to accelerate its delayed AI features. Siri's most significant AI upgrades, including personalization features teased with iPhone 16 marketing, have faced delays with no clear release timeline. In a significant organizational shift, Rockwell will now report directly to software chief Craig Federighi, completely removing Siri from current AI leader John Giannandrea's oversight. This follows an internal assessment that found substantial issues with Siri's development, including missed deadlines and implementation challenges. The changes reflect discussions at Apple's exclusive annual leadership summit, where AI strategy emerged as a critical priority. In other news, several exciting AI tools have been released, including Nvidia's open-source reasoning models called Llama Nemotron, LG's EXAONE Deep reasoning model series, and xAI's image generation model grok-2-image-1212, now available via API. OpenAI has released its o1-pro model via API, charging developers premium rates of $150 and $600 per million input and output tokens – ten times the price of regular o1. On the business front, Perplexity is set to raise nearly $1 billion at an $18 billion valuation, potentially doubling its