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Software companies are constantly trying to add more and more AI features to their platforms, and it can be hard to keep up with it all. We’ve written this roundup to share updates from 10 notable companies that have recently enhanced their products with AI.  OpenAI announces research preview of GPT-4.5 OpenAI is calling GPT-4.5 its “largest and best model for chat yet.” The newest model was trained using data from smaller models, which improves steerability, understanding of nuance, and natural conversation, according to the company.  In comparison to o1 and o3-mini, this model is a more general-purpose model, and unlike o1, GPT-4.5 is not a reasoning model, so it doesn’t think before it responds.  “We believe reasoning will be a core capability of future models, and that the two approaches to scaling—pre-training and reasoning—will complement each other. As models like GPT‑4.5 become smarter and more knowledgeable through pre-training, they will serve as an even str...

Microsoft has announced the release of .NET Aspire 9.1, which adds several new features to the dashboard. .NET Aspire is a set of tools, templates, and packages for building apps that rely on multiple different resources, and according to Microsoft, the .NET Aspire dashboard “allows you to closely track various aspects of your app, including logs, traces, and environment configurations, in real-time.” In the 9.1 release, six new features were added to the dashboard: Parent and child relationships The ability to override the localization default in the browser so that the dashboard can be in a different language than the browser Filtering resources by type, state, and health state More data points for resources, including references, back references, and volumes The ability to allow the dashboard to receive telemetry data from other browser apps The ability to download console logs and turn timestamps off to reduce visual clutter The dashboard also got a few UX improvements...

IBM has released the next generation models in its Granite family: Granite 3.2 8B Instruct, Granite 3.2 2B Instruct, Granite Vision 3.2 2B, Granite-Timeseries-TTM-R2.1, Granite-Embedding-30M-Sparse, and new model sizes for Granite Guardian 3.2. Granite 3.2 8B Instruct and Granite 3.2 2B Instruct provide chain of thought reasoning that can be toggled on and off. According to IBM, chain of thought reasoning can be powerful, but requires significant computing power that isn’t needed for every task, which can lead to unnecessary usage.  The company took steps to mitigate this by allowing this feature to be easily turned off when it’s not needed, and applying Thought Preference Optimization (TPO)-based reinforcement learning, which allows it to achieve greater performance on complex reasoning without compromising performance elsewhere, the company explained. “The release of Granite 3.2 marks only the beginning of IBM’s explorations into reasoning capabilities for enterprise models....

Google is releasing a free version of Gemini Code Assist, which is an AI-coding assistant. Now in public preview, Gemini Code Assist for individuals provides free access to a Gemini 2.0 model fine-tuned for coding within Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. The model was trained on a variety of real-world coding use cases and supports all programming languages in the public domain. The assistant offers a chat interface that is aware of a developer’s existing code, provides automatic code completion, and can generate and transform full functions or files.  The free version has a limit of 6,000 code-related requests and 240 chat requests per day, which Google says is roughly 90 times more than other coding assistants on the market today. It also has a 128,000 input token context window, which allows developers to use larger files and ground the assistant with knowledge about their codebases.  “With a worldwide population of developers forecasted to grow to 57.8 million...

Anthropic made two major announcements today: the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet and a research preview for an agentic coding tool called Claude Code. Claude Sonnet is the company’s medium cost and performance model, sitting in between the smaller Haiku model and the most powerful Opus models.  According to Anthropic, Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the company’s most intelligent model yet and the “first hybrid reasoning model on the market.” It produces near-instant responses and has an extended thinking mode where it can provide the user with step-by-step details of how it came to its answers.  “Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely,” Anthopic wrote in a blog post .  Users can control the budget for Claude’s extended thinking, such as restricting it to spend only a certain number of tokens for its thinking.  Additional...

MongoDB has announced it is acquiring Voyage AI , a company that makes embedding and reranking models. This acquisition will enable MongoDB’s customers to build reliable AI-powered applications using data stored in MongoDB databases, according to the company. MongoDB went on to explain that AI-powered applications are prone to hallucinations because of their probabilistic nature, and that the risk of hallucinations has limited the use of AI in mission-critical use cases. Hallucinations are more likely to occur when a model has limited understanding or context of data.  To overcome this challenge, organizations need high-quality retrieval to ensure that relevant information is being extracted from their data. Voyage AI’s embedding and reranking models facilitate this with their ability to extract meaning from specialized and domain-specific text and unstructured data, MongoDB explained. “Instead of implementing workarounds or managing separate systems, developers can generate hi...

Software companies are constantly trying to add more and more AI features to their platforms, and it can be hard to keep up with it all. We’ve written this roundup to share updates from 10 notable companies that have recently enhanced their products with AI.  OpenAI expands Operator to more countries Operator is now available to Pro users across Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the UK. The company is still working on making it available in the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland, but has not released a timeline for when that will happen.  Operator is an AI agent that can perform web-based tasks, such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, or creating memes.  “The ability to use the same interfaces and tools that humans interact with on a daily basis broadens the utility of AI, helping people save time on everyday tasks while opening up new engagement opportunities for businesses,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post whe...

With AI making its way into code and infrastructure, it’s also becoming important in the area of data search and retrieval. I recently had the chance to discuss this with Steve Kearns, the general manager of Search at Elastic , and how AI and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) can be used to build smarter, more reliable applications. SDT: About ‘Search AI’ … doesn’t search already use some kind of AI to return answers to queries? How’s that different from asking Siri or Alexa to find something? Steve Kearns: It’s a good question. Search, often called Information Retrieval in academic circles, has been a highly researched, technical field for decades. There are two general approaches to getting the best results for a given user query – lexical search and semantic search.  Lexical search matches words in the documents to those in the query and scores them based on sophisticated math around how often those words appear. The word “the” appears in almost all documents, so a matc...

Symbiotic Security has announced updates to its application and IDE extension, which provides secure coding recommendations and fixes vulnerabilities as code is written. “With Symbiotic’s software, security is no longer an afterthought; it is where it should have always been – integrated into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) as a foundational part of the coding process. It continuously scans code that has both already been written and as it is created, so that potential threats are identified and resolved immediately,” the company wrote in a blog post .  The company has reworked the insights and reporting panel to give customers a 360 degree view of their threat exposure. It also added new dashboards that will help developers better understand and monitor their progress around vulnerabilities. Another addition is a policy breach indicator that reveals to the developer if a security vulnerability will pass continuous integration.  And finally, there is a new lea...

Planview®, the leading platform for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and Digital Product Development (DPD), today announced it has completed its acquisition of Sciforma, a prominent provider of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Product Development solutions. This strategic acquisition further solidifies Planview’s position as the undisputed leader in enterprise portfolio management, bringing market-leading solutions to organizations at every PPM maturity level.  “By acquiring Sciforma, we’re strengthening our commitment to portfolio management practitioners worldwide,” said Razat Gaurav, CEO of Planview. “Together, we’re building the world’s largest community of portfolio and product development professionals, delivering enterprise solutions that address their most critical challenges. No one in the market is better equipped to guide organizations through every stage of their portfolio management evolution.”  This acquisition strengthens Planview’s presence in Europ...

Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio now supports code referencing for GitHub Copilot completions. Code referencing enables developers to verify if the suggestions coming from Copilot are based on public code, which could potentially lead to open-source licensing issues depending on what the developer is using the code for.  “By integrating code referencing into GitHub Copilot, we are fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and transparency. This feature not only empowers individual developers but also supports larger teams in navigating the complexities of public code with ease,” Simona Liao, product manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .  When a developer accepts a suggestion that matches code found in a public GitHub repository, they will receive a notification that displays the match, including information about the license type and a link to the GitHub repository it was found in. The company noted that less than 1% of Copilot completions (perhaps higher ...

Application security posture management company Apiiro today has released two open-source tools to help organizations defend against malicious code in their applications. The action comes on the heels of Apiiro’s security research that shows thousands of malicious code instances in repositories and packages. According to the company, its focus in the research was deep code analysis and analyzing malicious samples for patterns to find ways to defend against malicious code. “Malicious code is one of the most accessible and easy-to-execute attack vectors,” the company wrote in a blog about the research. “The security of dependency managers and source code hosting platforms is still evolving, with large gaps in areas like human-to-digital identity verification, source and release validation, and more. Major security gaps also exist in build systems, artifact managers, and pipeline tools.” Malicious code is introduced via anti-patterns, the research found, and obfuscated code is a key a...

Technology continues to rapidly advance, particularly with the ongoing evolution of generative AI, the growing emergence of innovative methods for leveraging data, and new platforms that enable companies to rapidly develop SaaS offerings.  However, many organizations have approached innovation without a comprehensive strategy or holistic view of their applications, simply focusing on adding the latest features or trendy tools. As a result, they are facing challenges related to application performance, scalability, efficiency, and security. To ensure the success of application innovation, enterprises must maintain a big-picture view of their applications. They should understand how integrating new technologies will require them to scale their compute and storage resources, the impact these technologies will have on end users, the architectures required, and the maintenance support that will be necessary. As part of this, enterprises also need to set attainable interim goals that g...

DeepSeek has taken the tech world by storm for the past month after it was revealed that the company’s models were trained for a fraction of the cost of other top models while still delivering competitive performance in many areas. Not only were they cheaper to train, but they’re also cheaper to run, making DeepSeek’s models an attractive option for developers looking to reduce AI expenses. DeepSeek was created in China, and some companies and government have expressed concerns about where their data is being stored and how it’s being used, with some even banning its use. However, the models are open source, so anyone can download them and run them offline locally on their own devices, which can mitigate some of the security and privacy concerns. To explore the implications of DeepSeek for developers, Jenna Barron, news editor of SD Times, spoke to a panel of industry. Watch now to hear insights from Melissa Ruzzi , director of AI at AppOmni ; Bratin Saha , chief product and technolo...

The integration company Boomi today announced a new API management solution that empowers organizations to control API sprawl. Organizations that are utilizing generative AI have about five times as many APIs as those who aren’t, according to IDC’s API Sprawl and AI Enablement report from December 2024.  “APIs have become the backbone of AI-driven innovation, enabling seamless interaction between AI models, agents, and enterprise systems,” said Shari Lava, senior research director, AI and Automation at IDC. “Effective API management is no longer optional — it is critical for organizations to ensure security, scalability, and governance while reducing complexity and API sprawl. Without a robust APIM strategy, businesses risk losing control over their AI initiatives and missing out on their full transformative potential.” The new solution provides automated discovery and centralized inventory management, helping to ensure that APIs are properly cataloged, monitored, and controll...