By Mulubwa Chungu – Technical Lead, BongoHive Consult | Gen AI Core Team Support Lead

From OpenAI unleashing its multimodal image brain to robots learning to box, the spectrum of advances; software, agents, and hardware shows that intelligence is spilling out of chat windows and into every product surface (and even punching bags).

🎨 OpenAI ships gpt-image-1 to every developer

The image model that powered ChatGPT’s viral pictures is now a stand-alone Images API. Developers can request high-fidelity images for about US $0.20 each, and early partners such as Adobe Firefly and Figma are already wiring it into creative workflows. 

🪐 Perplexity bets on an agentic browser called Comet

CEO Aravind Srinivas says real assistants need full “over-the-shoulder” context, so Comet will watch every click to fuel hyper-personalised answers and ads. Launch is slated for May, with Motorola and other OEM deals in the works. Privacy groups are unimpressed, but the company is riding 30 million MAU and 600 million monthly queries. 

🔎 Anthropic’s Claude gets “Research” mode + Google Workspace

Claude can now chain web searches, cite sources, and pull context from Gmail, Docs, and Calendar. Early-beta users report smoother report-writing and action-item extraction, inching the model toward a true knowledge worker.🔊 Two-person Nari Labs releases Dia 1.6 B TTS

The 1.6-billion-parameter model generates multi-speaker dialogue with complete with laughter and coughs on consumer GPUs. In a week it shot to the top of Hugging Face downloads, underscoring how open models keep nipping at ElevenLabs-scale incumbents. 

🖼️ Character AI brings still photos to life with AvatarFX

Upload a single image, add a script, and the tool spits out a minute-long talking-head video with synced lips, gestures, and even songs. Think Hogwarts portraits on demand, straight from the browser.

🛠️ Kortix AI open-sources Suna, an “AI employee”

Suna records your desktop actions, distils repeatable workflows, and replays them autonomously—no APIs required. Released under Apache 2.0, it’s already trending on Product Hunt as the “open-source Manus.” 🏠 Physical Intelligence debuts π-0.5: a household robot brain

The vision-language-action model generalises from heterogeneous data so well that robots can make beds or wipe spills in homes never seen during training; a milestone for open-world generalisation. 

🥊 Unitree puts its US $16 k G1 humanoid in the boxing ring

A new promo shows two 1.27 m robots sparring, highlighting fast custom actuators and balance, just weeks before public demos in Boston and Beijing. Affordable humanoids are edging from research labs toward hobbyists and small-business tooling. 

What This Means

• Agents everywhere. Open-source (Suna) and closed-source (Comet, Claude) agents are moving beyond chat into full-stack autonomy.

• Open models punch above their weight. Nari Labs’ two-person team reached ElevenLabs-level TTS quality, proving community momentum can rival billion-dollar labs.

• Robotics joins the scaling game. π-0.5 and Unitree’s G1 illustrate the “foundation-model-meets-hardware” trend that Figure and Tesla champion. Training data and not just mechatronics will decide winners.

• Privacy trade-offs intensify. Comet’s all-seeing eye underscores how much personal data next-gen assistants may demand.

The takeaway

AI is no longer a sidebar; it’s baked into the tools we use, the content we create, and now the machines that share our living spaces. The pace won’t slow down, so the real question is how quickly can organisations stitch these pieces; vision, voice, reasoning, embodiment into products that matter.

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