Welcome to Neural. Much has unfolded in AI Land since we last spoke.Amazon has officially announced Alexa+, OpenAI has made a feature cheaper that used to cost $200/month, Anthropic unveiled and released Claude 3.7, and Perplexity has previewed its new AI-driven Comet browser for agentic search.“Alexa, what is an LLM?” At a media event that Amazon chose not to stream, former Microsoft Surface guy turned Amazon Alexa champion Panos Panay revealed Alexa+, the Amazon Echo-based voice assistant for the large language model era.
If you’ve ever used OpenAI’s ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode, you’re already familiar with the caliber of Alexa+ AI.Amazon’s modernized version of Alexa promises personality and contextual awareness including memory of previous conversations.Bloomberg’s Matt Day and Mark Gurman were in attendance: Amazon is powering Alexa+ with Amazon Nova and Anthropic models.
Alexa+ launches in March for $19.99/month or free for Amazon Prime subscribers.Access is provided through Echo speakers as well as the new alexa.com.Meanwhile, Apple’s Siri voice assistant can only punt requests off to ChatGPT for a somewhat comparable experience.
Claude 3.7 is here to code Speaking of Anthropic, the company launched its promised update to Claude in the form of Claude 3.7 Sonnet.Just as Anthropic teased, Claude 3.7 Sonnet combines reasoning and fast responses into a single model — something OpenAI wants to bring to ChatGPT with GPT-5 later this year.Anthropic is also leaning into Claude’s coding prowess with a new command line tool for agentic coding called Claude Code: Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code are live now.
OpenAI opens up more AI And speaking of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode, the company has found a way to bring the conversational voice assistant to more users while using fewer resources, thanks to the smaller GPT-4o mini model.OpenAI continues to offer a more advanced version of Advanced Voice for $20/month for Plus subscribers or $200/month for Pro customers.If you’ve never tried Advanced Voice, give it a try in the ChatGPT app on iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
The most significant artificial intelligence innovation from OpenAI this year is ChatGPT Deep Research.Previously only available for $200/month, Deep Research is now available for Plus, Team, Edu, and Enterprise customers for the first time.Pro customers still have the best experience with up to 120 deep research queries per month, compared to just 10 for Plus users.
However, access to the same agentic technology at a tenth of the price is compelling.This also marks the first agent tool from OpenAI to reach Plus customers.OpenAI’s Operator tool for achieving tasks through an agent-driven browser is still only available for Pro customers.
Comet, the agentic search browser Speaking of agentic technology, Perplexity has teased its upcoming agent-driven browser called Comet.Want to know more? You’ll have to wait, or you can join the waitlist here.Perplexity is also hiring engineers to help build Comet, suggesting we won’t see the “agentic search” browser any time soon.
Separately, The Browser Company behind Arc has steadily continued building Dia, another browser that aims to integrate AI seamlessly into web browsing.Pivoting from an AI-featured browser to an AI-first browser is a choice.If all else fails, The Browser Company could position itself as the non-monopolistic buyer of Chrome if Google is forced by the DOJ to sell.
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