Pretraining teaches an AI model broad patterns from a large dataset before it is adapted to a particular application. A language model may predict missing or next tokens across diverse text, while a vision model may learn from labeled images, self-supervised objectives, or image-text pairs. The resulting model provides reusable representations and capabilities that reduce the data and computing needed for downstream tasks. Pretraining is expensive and shapes nearly everything that follows, including strengths, blind spots, bias, language coverage, and memorized information. Developers may adapt the base through prompting, retrieval, instruction tuning, or fine-tuning, but those later steps do not automatically remove limitations introduced by the original data and objective.
A study by the University of Maryland and Microsoft found that Polish outperforms English and other major languages in long-context AI prompts, surprising researchers.
OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser with ChatGPT integrated directly into its interface, blending AI assistance, search, and memory into everyday browsing.
Neobank Revolut has acquired Berlin-based AI travel agent start-up Swifty, integrating its conversational booking technology into Revolut’s loyalty and lifestyle platform for over 65 million users.
Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of the $12 billion AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, has joined Meta after previously rejecting what reports described as a $1.5 billion offer — a figure Meta has since called ‘inaccurate and ridiculous.’
Oracle has introduced an AI Agent Marketplace within its Fusion Applications suite, expanding AI Agent Studio and integrating top LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to accelerate enterprise AI transformation.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will deploy 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs beginning in 2026, underscoring the growing competition to Nvidia in the global race for AI computing capacity.
OpenAI has announced a strategic partnership with Broadcom to design and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators, expanding its hardware ecosystem beyond Nvidia and AMD.
Google has unveiled Gemini Enterprise, a next-generation AI platform designed for business productivity and collaboration, positioning itself directly against Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s enterprise solutions in the race for workplace AI dominance.
Google Cloud and Figma have launched an expanded partnership to embed Google’s generative AI models – including Gemini 2.5 Flash and Imagen 4 – directly into Figma’s design tools, reducing latency and accelerating creative workflows.
Zendesk has introduced an autonomous support agent it claims can resolve up to 80% of support issues without human intervention, supported by a suite of copilot, voice, admin, and analytics agents.