Tech Pulse
Stay updated with the latest in Data and GenAI technology, development, and innovation.
Codex is available to Plus Users
OpenAI's Codex, a cloud-based AI software engineering agent, is now available to ChatGPT Plus users. This availability for Plus users signifies a broader push by OpenAI to make advanced AI coding assistance more accessible.
Apache Spark 4.0.0 Released
Apache Spark 4.0.0, the latest major release of the popular unified analytics engine, was officially released on May 23, 2025. This release marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Spark, bringing substantial advancements across the board to enhance performance, accessibility, and developer productivity for large-scale data analytics and AI workloads.
Codex is Here!
OpenAI's Codex is an artificial intelligence model designed to translate natural language into code. Essentially, you can tell it what you want to achieve in plain English, and it will generate programming code to accomplish that task.
GitHub Copilot rolled out Agent Mode with MCP support
GitHub Copilot is rolling out Agent Mode with MCP support to all VS Code users. This update enhances Copilot's capabilities, allowing it to take action on user prompts by completing necessary subtasks and suggesting terminal commands. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables Agent Mode to access various tools and context, providing more interactive coding support. Additionally, GitHub has announced a new Copilot Pro+ plan and the general availability of models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Users can also now access next edit suggestions and the Copilot code review agent.
Snowflake Announces General Availability of Cortex COMPLETE Structured Outputs
nowflake announced the general availability of Cortex COMPLETE Structured Outputs. This feature allows users to define desired outputs and their formats via a schema, simplifying prompting, reducing the need for post-processing in AI data pipelines, and enabling seamless integration with systems requiring deterministic responses.
Danone Adopts Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to Enhance Decision-Making
Global food and beverage company Danone adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to serve as its core data foundation for analytics and AI. This integration is expected to improve data accuracy and reduce 'data-to-decision' time by up to 30%, enabling smarter and faster decision-making across the organization.
Macquarie Initiates Coverage of Snowflake with Neutral Rating
Financial services firm Macquarie began coverage of Snowflake, assigning a "Neutral" rating. The assessment reflects a balanced view of Snowflake's growth prospects in the competitive cloud data platform market.
General availability of Lakeflow Connect
Databricks announced the general availability of Lakeflow Connect, a no-code data ingestion tool that enables seamless integration from SaaS applications and databases into the Databricks platform. This enhancement aims to simplify data workflows for users.
xAI Acquires X in $113B All-Stock Deal to Merge Cutting-Edge AI with Global Reach
xAI has acquired X in an all-stock deal valuing the combined entity at $113B, bringing together xAI’s cutting-edge AI models and infrastructure with X’s massive 600M+ user base and real-time content ecosystem. The merger integrates data, distribution, compute power, and top-tier talent to build a platform that not only reflects the world but actively drives innovation and accelerates human progress.
Alibaba Launches Open-Source AI Model for Cost-Effective AI Agents
Alibaba introduced Qwen2, an open-source AI model designed to power cost-effective AI agents. Qwen2 supports multiple languages and can run on low-resource environments, making it ideal for startups and developers building scalable AI tools.
Databricks and Anthropic Partner for Claude Integration
Databricks and Anthropic have announced a five-year partnership. This will bring Anthropic's Claude models directly to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. This integration will allow over 10,000 customers to build and deploy AI agents that can understand and process their own business data. The latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet model is now available on Databricks across major cloud platforms. The partnership aims to help businesses get more value from their AI investments by making it easier to create, use, and manage AI agents securely. Key advantages include the ability to build specialised AI agents, seamless integration of Claude models into the Databricks platform, and unified governance for data and AI development. This collaboration seeks to unlock the full potential of enterprise data through AI.
Introducing Gemini 2.5 Pro: Google DeepMind's Most Intelligent AI Mode
Gemini 2.5 Pro, which Google DeepMind considers their most intelligent AI model. It improves upon the existing Gemini models by including native multimodality and a long context window. A key feature is the models' ability to reason through their thoughts before generating a response, which leads to better performance and accuracy. The Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental version is specifically highlighted as being excellent for coding and handling complex prompts, and is currently their most advanced coding model. This model achieves significantly improved results across various benchmarks, reaching state-of-the-art in maths and science evaluations. It also offers a 1-million token context window. Developers can access and experiment with Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental via Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. The model supports a wide range of inputs, including text, images, video, and audio, with text being the output format.
OpenAI Introduces GPT-4o's Advanced Image Generation Capabilities
OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o's native image generation feature, marking a significant advancement in AI-driven content creation. This integration allows GPT-4o to produce precise, accurate, and photorealistic images directly within ChatGPT, enhancing the model's multimodal capabilities. Users can now generate and edit images seamlessly through natural language prompts, facilitating applications in design, education, and creative storytelling. This development underscores OpenAI's commitment to creating versatile AI tools that cater to a broad spectrum of user needs.
Nvidia's GTC 2025 Conference Announcements
CEO Jensen Huang revealed upcoming advancements in AI hardware, including the Blackwell Ultra graphics architecture and Vera Rubin AI chip. He projected significant growth in data center revenue driven by demand for GPUs.
Apple Delays AI Enhancements for Siri Until 2026
Apple announced on March 7, 2025, that the rollout of significant AI enhancements to its voice assistant, Siri, has been delayed until 2026. The company stated that it is working on a more personalized version of Siri that would better understand user context and perform tasks across various applications. However, internal testing revealed that the features were not functioning reliably enough for release, prompting the delay.
OpenAI Releases GPT-4.5: Next-Generation Conversational AI with Enhanced Accuracy and Context
OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, marking a significant leap forward in conversational AI. This new model not only excels in creative tasks and everyday interactions but also brings a fresh edge by offering blunt, even edgy responses when requested. According to Sam Altman, GPT-4.5 is the first model that truly feels like conversing with a highly attentive person. With improvements that make it three times better at fact-checking and far less error-prone than GPT-4, and enhanced capabilities in understanding context, tone, and emotion, GPT-4.5 is set to change the game in how we interact with AI.
Alexa+ : New Alexa Generative Artificial Intelligence
Amazon has unveiled its latest advancement in voice technology with the release of Alexa+. This innovative update leverages cutting-edge generative AI to enhance Alexa's natural language understanding, enabling more dynamic and context-aware interactions. With this upgrade, Alexa delivers richer conversational experiences, improved response accuracy, and a more intuitive user interface.
Anthropic Launches Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Advanced Hybrid Reasoning AI Model
Anthropic has unveiled Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its latest breakthrough in conversational AI. This advanced model features hybrid reasoning, allowing it to deliver both rapid responses and detailed, step-by-step analysis in a single interaction. With enhanced coding accuracy—achieving 70.3% on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark—and the ability to generate outputs up to 128,000 tokens, Claude 3.7 Sonnet is poised to revolutionize content creation and software development. Additionally, Anthropic introduces Claude Code, an innovative coding assistant designed to collaborate with developers by searching, editing, and managing code directly from your terminal. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now accessible via the Claude app, Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google’s Vertex AI.
Microsoft Creates New State of Matter for Quantum Computing Breakthrough
Satya Nadella announced a quantum computing breakthrough, creating a new state of matter using topoconductors to power the Majorana 1 quantum processing unit. This advancement allows for faster, more reliable, and smaller qubits, about 1/100th of a millimetre, paving the way for a million-qubit processor. This technology aims to solve problems beyond the capabilities of current computers, with the goal of creating a meaningful quantum computer in years, not decades. The focus is on building technology that increases productivity and benefits economies globally.
Automatic Liquid Clustering in Databricks (Public Preview)
Databricks now offers automatic liquid clustering for Unity Catalog managed tables, available on DBR 15.4 and above. This innovative feature intelligently selects optimal clustering keys by continuously monitoring query patterns and data distribution, dynamically optimizing the data layout to improve query performance. By adapting to evolving workloads, automatic liquid clustering reduces latency and minimizes the need for manual tuning. With this public preview, data engineers can enjoy enhanced efficiency and lower operational overhead while ensuring that their tables are always optimally organized for rapid data access.
Introducing Grok 3
Grok is an AI tool that offers unfiltered answers and advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing. It stands out with its ability to generate images from text, providing photorealistic rendering. Grok enhances understanding with real-time insights and can decipher documents and images, converting visuals into insights. Additionally, it assists with productivity tasks like essay writing, coding, and problem-solving, and is available across web, iOS, and Android platforms.
OpenAI Enhances ChatGPT with File & Image Uploads
OpenAI has significantly upgraded ChatGPT by enabling file and image uploads for both the o1 and o3-mini models. This enhancement allows users to interact with ChatGPT in richer ways, providing visual and document-based context for their conversations. In addition to this, OpenAI has also dramatically increased the usage limits for ChatGPT Plus users on the o3-mini-high model. The previous limit has been multiplied by seven, now allowing Plus subscribers up to 50 uses per day. This substantial increase provides more flexibility and access to the advanced capabilities of the o3-mini-high model.
Databricks Runtime 16.2 is GA
Databricks has announced that Databricks Runtime 16.2 and Databricks Runtime 16.2 ML are now generally available. This new release delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and security, along with enhanced support for machine learning workloads. With these updates, users can optimize their data processing and ML model development workflows for faster and more efficient operations. For more details, see Databricks Runtime 16.2 and Databricks Runtime 16.2 for Machine Learning.
Deep Research: The Next Agentic Step for OpenAI
Deep research is a new agentic capability in ChatGPT designed for complex, multi-step research tasks, completing in minutes what would take humans hours. It independently finds, analyses, and synthesises online sources, leveraging reasoning to interpret diverse data like text, images, and PDFs. This tool generates comprehensive, well-documented reports with citations. Unlike GPT-4o, which is geared toward real-time conversations, deep research focuses on in-depth analysis and verified answers. Trained using reinforcement learning on difficult browsing and reasoning tasks, it can use tools such as a browser and Python to conduct research. It has achieved high scores on expert-level tests, demonstrating its ability to seek out specialized information. Although powerful, deep research has some limitations, such as the potential to hallucinate facts, struggle with differentiating authoritative sources, and make errors in formatting. It is currently available to Pro users with up to 100 queries per month, with access rolling out to Plus and Team users next.
OpenAI's o3-mini: Smarter AI, Safer Decisions
OpenAI's o3-mini redefines AI by integrating advanced reasoning, structured thought processes, and safety-focused mechanisms. Unlike traditional models, it evaluates multiple approaches before formulating responses, ensuring accuracy and reliability. With a record-breaking performance in coding and problem-solving, o3-mini stands out as a powerhouse of intelligence. Its resistance to jailbreaks, reduced hallucination rates, and fairness evaluations make it one of the safest and most ethical AI models. Moreover, its multilingual proficiency enhances accessibility worldwide. As AI evolves, o3-mini sets a new standard for responsible, adaptive, and high-performing artificial intelligence.
Databricks Release - Jan 2025
In January 2025, Databricks released a number of new features and platform improvements. Some of the key updates include: - Predictive optimization can now be enabled at the catalog or schema level. - Filtering full datasets for large tables is now supported. - Clean Rooms is now generally available, with new APIs for automation, self-collaboration within a single metastore, and support for output tables on Azure. Also, you can now create a Clean Room with a HIPAA compliance security profile. - Delta Live Tables now supports publishing to tables in multiple schemas and catalogs. - Databricks Runtime 16.2 is now available as a Beta release. - OAuth token federation is now available in public preview. - Notebook load times have been improved. - Notebooks are now supported as workspace files. - Failed tasks in continuous jobs are now automatically retried.
Apache Spark 4.0.0 Preview-2
Apache Spark 4.0.0 is upcoming and a preview-2 version is available. Spark Connect is a major feature in this release. The preview version allows users to explore new features and debug from their local machines using hashtag#SparkConnect and hashtag#vsCode. The vision of running Apache Spark from anywhere is a key aspect of this release. The full release of Spark 4.0 will include enhanced usability and debuggability with Spark Connect's GA (Generally Available) release
Gemini 2.0 Flash
Gemini's new 2.0 Flash model is now available for all users on web and mobile. This upgrade is designed for better agent-like interactions, providing faster responses and improved performance on common tasks like brainstorming, learning, and writing. Gemini Advanced users retain their existing benefits, including the large context window for file uploads, priority access to advanced features, extra storage, and more. Gemini Advanced users will continue to have access to a 1M token context window for up to 1,500 pages of file uploads, priority access to features such as Deep Research and Gems, 2TB of storage, and more.
Stargate Could A Groundbreaking AI Project
The future of Artificial Intelligence is no longer a distant dream—it’s being built right now with a scale and ambition like never before. The Stargate Project, a collaboration between tech giants like Oracle, SoftBank, and OpenAI, marks a monumental step toward revolutionizing AI and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. This isn’t just about technological progress; it’s about creating a foundation to advance Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—AI systems capable of performing any intellectual task a human can. Stargate is not only focused on AI for today but is paving the way for AGI to benefit humanity as a whole.
DeepSeek R1 Shocked AI World
DeepSeek isn’t just another player in the AI revolution—it’s a trailblazer pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities, accessibility, and reasoning. Think of it as a team of expert puzzle-solvers who are not only mastering AI development but also sharing their insights with the world. With groundbreaking models and innovative training techniques, DeepSeek is making AI smarter, more efficient, and widely accessible.