Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic shares the spotlight among top Silicon Valley names for two major reasons. First, the company was founded by former OpenAI alumni who left after developing ideological differences with Sam Altman. Second, Anthropic claims to take a more responsible approach with its AI chatbot — and eponymous large language models — Claude, attempting to eliminate harmful or unethical responses.
Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer — and Instagram’s co-founder — spoke to the Financial Times about the company’s plans to improve “knowledge work,” helping them reclaim some time spent on “Excel or Google Docs.”
One way to accomplish that would be through agentic systems where Anthropic’s AI will be able to control your entire desktop from a set of natural-language commands. In theory, the concept is similar to ChatGPT’s Operator mode that browses the web for you based on your commands.
Simultaneously, Microsoft is bidding on voice commands to control your Windows laptops with the help of its Copilot+ chat interface.
Krieger envisions one way to deploy Claude to control your desktop will be with voice, as that would be “a more natural user interface.” Last year, Anthropic demoed its AI agent that can control computers using written commands.
Voice control, eventually, can be expected to be an extension of this existing functionality. Even though there is no clear timeline on when — or confirmation if — controlling your PC with voice feature becomes a reality, Anthropic already has a voice mode in the works.
The executive said the company is already prototyping voice control for Claude. Anthropic is betting on enterprise partnerships, rather than making its products immediately available to consumers, to gain an edge over rivals such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google.
“I hope Claude reaches as many people as possible, but the critical path is not through mass-market consumer adoption right now,” Krieger said.
However, if the voice functionality was to be available to Claude users, one of the most natural places would be the mobile app launched in August last year. For now, Claude’s voice mode kind of already exists in the form of Amazon’s overhauled Alexa+, which is powered by Claude’s large language models.
This was likely a result of Amazon’s $4 billion investment in the startup. The company may also be looking at other partners to launch its voice-based products, but has yet to reveal any alliances other than with Amazon.
Meanwhile, rivals OpenAI and Google already have proficient voice functionality through their respective voice modes in ChatGPT and Gemini.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.