AI at Work edition

AI at Work · 17 Aug 2026

17 Aug 2026 · 15 articles

ChatGPT’s Computer History tracks your clicks and keystrokes

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request. The feature

Summary published by AI | The Verge · 16 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

Rogue AI aren’t science fiction anymore

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents

Summary published by AI | The Verge · 16 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

AI-generated books are flooding Amazon and tanking sales for human authors

AI-generated books make up 20 percent of Amazon's self-published catalog but bring in only 12 percent of sales. A new study finds that revenue per book is dropping for human-written titles too, in seven of eight genres. The findings could give copyright plaintiffs the market-harm data their cases against AI companies have been missing.

Summary published by The Decoder · 15 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

World Labs turns one real-world robot task into thousands of simulated variations for training

World Labs, the startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled a simulation engine that trains robot controllers entirely in virtual environments. From a single real-world task, the system generates thousands of controlled variations. The trained models then ran for one hour each on five different robot platforms without human intervention. How well the results hold up in more complex…

Summary published by The Decoder · 15 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

6 ways to automate Calendly with Zapier

I have sent probably four hundred emails in my life that just said some version of "does 2pm Thursday work for you?" Calendly exists so none of us has to do that anymore. Invitees see your real availability and pick a slot without the back and forth. That solves the booking problem. It doesn't solve everything else that comes with a new meeting, like syncing it to your team's calendar or logging…

Summary published by The Zapier Blog · 14 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

The 4 primary roles of AI in automated workflows

My in-laws have wired every light in their house to Alexa. But no one can ever remember if they're sitting in the "living room" or the "family room," so three commands and one accidental playlist later, someone always ends up just leaning over and hitting the light switch. A lot of AI workflows are built the same way—for example, someone calls a model to check if a number is above a threshold.…

Summary published by The Zapier Blog · 14 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT started as a chatbot and tech demo for OpenAI's large language models (LLMs). It's now something closer to a general-purpose AI platform—one that can search the web, generate images, write code, reason through complex problems, and execute multi-step actions across apps. As OpenAI has kept pushing ChatGPT forward with new models and features, a question that sounds simple has gotten…

Summary published by The Zapier Blog · 14 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

Create a Reasoning-Focused LLM: A Practical Guide to Streaming, Curating, and Fine-Tuning the SupraLabs Reasoning Corpus

This tutorial provides a complete workflow for building a compact, reasoning-focused language model. By streaming the SupraLabs reasoning corpus from Hugging Face, we apply quality filters and curate data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Using SmolLM2-135M-Instruct and LoRA, we demonstrate an end-to-end pipeline—from dataset analysis and heuristic cleaning to efficient training and…

Summary published by MarkTechPost · 14 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

Liquid AI Releases LFM2.5-VL-3B: A 3B Vision-Language Model That Reads Screens, Grounds Objects, and Calls Tools On-Device

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-VL-3B, a 3.1B-parameter vision-language model built for on-device deployment. It averages 80.7 on ScreenSpot-v2 and lifts RefCOCO grounding from 57.1 to 87.9. Function calling is new to the VL line, with ToolSandbox moving from 26.4 to 59.5. The model fits in roughly 3 GB and decodes 228 tokens/s on an Apple M5 Max.

Summary published by MarkTechPost · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗

SpaceXAI Releases Grok 4.6: A 500K-Context Frontier Model Tuned for Long-Running Agents, Coding, and Knowledge Work

SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026 — a post-training upgrade over Grok 4.5, not a larger base model. It ties GPT-5.6 Sol Max at 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ships 500K context and a new xhigh reasoning level, and holds pricing at $2/$6 per million tokens. The coding benchmarks are where it still loses.

Summary published by MarkTechPost · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗