Sunday Rundown #138: Agentic Tasks & Horizontal Verticals
Live & Learn #3: Testing AI slide deck makers.
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly AI news roundup.
In case you missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday deep dive:
If you’re consistently missing out on my emails, remember to check your “Promotions” tab and mark whytryai@substack.com as a “Safe Sender.”
🗞️ AI news
Here’s what happened in AI this week:
👩💻 AI releases
Alibaba open-sourced Qwen3.6-27B, a cost-efficient 27B model that outperforms much larger ones on agentic coding tasks.
Anthropic news:
Claude Connectors expanded to 200+ everyday apps, letting Claude pull in relevant data mid-chat and chain multiple services together.
Cowork can now build Live Artifacts: dashboards and trackers connected to your data sources that auto-refresh when opened.
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek-V4, a reasoning model with a 1M-token context window that approaches the performance of top-tier closed models.
Google news:
AI Studio now gives Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers higher usage limits and new models for prototyping and vibe-coding projects.
Deep Research and Deep Research Max can perform autonomous research across your files or specialized data sources using MCP connections.
Gemini for Home added a Continued Conversation feature that lets your smart speaker retain context after a response and handle follow-up questions.
Microsoft added Copilot’s agentic capabilities to Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, letting it perform multi-step actions directly in your documents.
Moonshot AI open-sourced Kimi K2.6, a coding model that can coordinate 300 simultaneous sub-agents for complex, long-horizon programming projects.
OpenAI news:
ChatGPT for Clinicians helps verified US physicians, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists with medical research and documentation work.
ChatGPT Images 2.0 is a SOTA image-generation model with thinking capabilities that can reason through your prompts.
Codex Chronicle builds context from your screen activity, so Codex knows what you’re working on automatically. (Opt-in preview for Pro subscribers.)
GPT-5.5 is a flagship model for complex coding, research, and data analysis that is also more token-efficient than competing models.
Workspace Agents let teams build shared AI agents for long-running tasks in the cloud. (For ChatGPT for Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans.)
TwelveLabs launched Pegasus 1.5, which extracts structured, timestamped metadata from videos up to two hours long so you can better analyze them.
X launched Custom Timelines that lets you pin up to 75+ AI-curated topics to your home tab. (In early access for Premium subscribers.)
🔬 AI research
Alibaba announced Qwen3.6-Max-Preview, with improved agentic coding, world knowledge, and instruction following for real-world tasks.
📖 AI resources
“GPT 5.5, DeepSeek V4, and the Compute War” [VIDEO]: great level-headed deep-dive by AI Explained.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
Well, at least you’re aware of your own limitations, Gemini.
📹 Live & Learn #3: AI Slide Deck Makers
The “Live & Learn” format is really coming into its own, thanks to great feedback from everyone who responded to my surveys. Keep your suggestions coming!
From now on, there’s more structure to my live tests and the scoring.
Future “Live & Learn” sessions will:
Focus on 3-5 tools in the same category for an apples-to-apples comparison
Have 3-5 specific dimensions we rate them on
Wrap-up with a leaderboard we fill out together during the session
This week, we tested five AI slide deck makers and ended with a two-way tie for first place:
Next time, we’ll be testing AI tools that automatically create helpful visuals like charts and diagrams out of text. It’s happening on Friday, May 1, at 2:00 PM CET.
Please let me know what you want to get out of this particular session and “Live & Learn” in general:
(It’s just two open-ended questions with a few AI-assisted follow-ups.)
Thanks!