Google tests prominent Temporary Chat button in Gemini app homepage

Google Deepmind has expanded the Gemini API to enable multi-tool chaining, allowing developers to combine built-in tools like Google Search and Google Maps with custom functions in a single request. Results from one tool now automatically pass to the next through context circulation, eliminating the need for separate sequential handling.

Perplexity has released Comet, its AI-powered browser, as a free standalone app for iPhone users. Originally launched on PC at $200 per month, the iOS version joins recently-released Android and existing Windows and Mac versions. The browser combines web browsing with AI assistance for summarization, research, and task automation.

Google has expanded Personal Intelligence, its hyper-personalized Gemini mode, from $20/month subscribers to all users. The feature integrates data from Gmail, Search history, Google Photos, and other Google services to provide contextual assistance, though it remains entirely opt-in.

OpenAI released GPT-4o mini on July 18, 2024, a compact multimodal model with 128,000 token context window priced at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. The model achieves 82% on MMLU and claims to rank higher than GPT-4 on chat preference leaderboards while costing 60% less than GPT-3.5 Turbo.

Amazon Nova 2 Lite expands context window to 1 million tokens, introduces extended thinking with developer controls, and adds native tool use and web grounding. AWS claims Nova 2 Lite surpasses Nova 1 Pro on multi-step reasoning while costing 7x less and running up to 5x faster.

Midjourney has released an early version of V8 for community testing, achieving roughly 5x faster image generation and introducing native 2K resolution via --hd mode. However, premium features including --hd, --q 4, style references, and mood boards cost four times as much as standard generation, with Relax mode unavailable at launch.

Meta's recently acquired AI startup Manus launched a desktop application enabling its AI agent to directly access local files, tools, and applications on personal computers through a 'My Computer' feature. Previously cloud-only, the move positions Manus to compete with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that sparked recent industry momentum. Unlike OpenClaw's free, MIT-licensed offering, Manus operates as a paid subscription service.

DuckDuckGo's Duck.ai chatbot platform now includes OpenAI's GPT-5 mini for free users and GPT-5.2 for subscribers, both with reasoning capabilities. The platform continues to anonymize all conversations by default, stripping metadata before routing chats to model providers including Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI.

OpenAI has released GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, compact models optimized for coding and subagent tasks. The new models deliver significant performance improvements—GPT-5.4 mini reaches 54.4% on SWE-Bench Pro versus 45.7% for GPT-5 mini—but cost 3-4x more per input token than their predecessors.

Mistral has released Leanstral, a 120B-parameter code verification agent built with the Lean programming language, claiming it outperforms larger open-source models and offers significant cost advantages over Anthropic's Claude suite. The model achieves a pass@2 score of 26.3—beating Claude Sonnet by 2.6 points—while costing $36 to run compared to Sonnet's $549.

Google has deployed its second major Gemini for Home update this month, reducing response latency by 40% for common commands and substantially shortening voice responses for alarms, timers, and calendar events. The update adds five new alarm/timer capabilities including world event-based triggers and recurring alarms, while expanding Gemini Live translation to 30 languages and rolling out Home features to 19 additional countries.

OpenAI has released GPT-5.4 mini, the lightweight variant of its agentic coding model GPT-5.4, in GitHub Copilot. The model represents OpenAI's highest-performing mini offering to date for code generation and completion tasks.