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AI Daily: GPT-5.6 Series Drops, Codex Vanishes; Tencent Eyes Manus; MiniMax CEO Takes Zero Salary

Welcome to AI Daily, your daily pit stop for everything happening in the world of artificial intelligence. Today's roundup is packed: new models, big investments, and a CEO putting his money where his mouth is.

ChatGPT Moves Into Chrome's Sidebar

OpenAI has given its ChatGPT extension a serious upgrade. Now, instead of hopping between tabs or opening a separate app, you can chat with the AI right in Chrome's sidebar. It can browse web pages, read content, coordinate tasks across different tabs, and even access your local files and installed plugins. Think of it as turning your browser from a passive window into an active AI workspace.

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OpenAI Drops GPT-5.6: Sol, Terra, Luna – and No Codex

OpenAI quietly released the GPT-5.6 model series, featuring three variants: Sol, Terra, and Luna. The big focus here is cybersecurity and cost-effectiveness. These models reportedly shine in threat modeling and code review tasks. But here's the twist: the standalone Codex model has disappeared, seemingly folded into the new lineup. OpenAI also launched ChatGPT Work, an enterprise office assistant tool, signaling a deeper push into the B2B market.

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Anthropic's 'Reflect' Feature: Your AI Usage Report Card

Anthropic introduced a new feature called Reflect. It analyzes how you use its AI assistant and generates a personalized summary – think of it as a health report for your prompting habits. It covers four dimensions like task delegation and goal description. And yes, privacy is a priority: it won't peek at your incognito chats.

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Tencent to Take Over Manus as Largest Shareholder

Tencent is reportedly planning to acquire a controlling stake in Singapore-based AI startup Manus, valuing the company at $2 billion. The move is seen as a strategic play to strengthen Tencent's position in the AGI ecosystem. Manus's founder has deep ties with Tencent, having previously received investment from the tech giant. The startup also has plans to list in Hong Kong, though it may need to restructure to meet Chinese regulatory requirements.

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ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 Goes Public on July 16

ByteDance's latest video generation model, Seedance 2.5, will open its API to everyone on July 16. After a gray-scale testing phase, the model is now ready for full commercialization. It supports 30-second single-segment native video output, can handle up to 50 full-modal reference materials, and introduces more controllable video editing features. This is a big step for AI video tools in film, creativity, and advertising.

Ant Group's LingBot-VA2.0: A Robot Model Built from Scratch

Ant Group unveiled LingBot-VA2.0, an embodied world action model that's pre-trained from scratch using a self-regressive architecture. Unlike many robot models that simulate in digital worlds, this one is designed for the physical world from day one. It uses a semantic visual-action tokenizer for better instruction following, a strict causal pre-training paradigm, and achieves real-time reasoning at 150Hz on a single card – solving the common problem of low execution efficiency.

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MiniMax Founder Takes Zero Salary Until AGI

MiniMax, the Chinese AI startup, completed a new funding round of 16 billion HKD. Founder Yan Junjie made a bold pledge: he will take zero salary until AGI is achieved. He also plans to use his shares to motivate the team and the open-source community. Industry analysts say the financial reserves will help the company push toward commercialization.

Samsung's 4nm AI Chip 'GAIA' Samples to Lenovo, HP

Samsung is developing a generative AI acceleration chip called GAIA, built on a 4nm process. It has already provided prototype samples to PC makers like Lenovo and HP. GAIA uses a storage-centric architecture, integrating computing units with memory to reduce data transmission latency and power consumption. Unlike NVIDIA and Qualcomm's integrated approaches, GAIA is designed as an independent AI module that works alongside existing PC platforms.

Key Points

  • ChatGPT extension now runs in Chrome's sidebar, accessing web pages, tabs, and local files.
  • GPT-5.6 series (Sol, Terra, Luna) focuses on cybersecurity and cost; Codex is gone.
  • Anthropic's Reflect analyzes AI usage habits with privacy safeguards.
  • Tencent plans to become Manus's largest shareholder at $2B valuation.
  • ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 API opens July 16 for public use.
  • Ant Group's LingBot-VA2.0 is a pre-trained embodied world action model.
  • MiniMax founder takes zero salary until AGI; company raises 16B HKD.
  • Samsung's GAIA 4nm AI chip samples sent to Lenovo and HP.