DeepSeek adds Search and Fetch APIs, run on its in-house search engine, giving agents and RAG apps live web content. Search returns ranked results; Fetch returns one page as Markdown. The company bills $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, capped at 100 and 25 QPS respectively.
Google says more than 400 news publications now participate in its News AI pilot program, expanded from launch partners including The Washington Post. New partners include Axios, CNN, The Financial Times, Forbes, the Texas Tribune and Post and Courier. Google pays publishers for content used in AI features like article overviews and audio briefings.
Exa previews ATLAS, a 547-task benchmark that grades search agents on wide, multi-hop research. Exa says its best tested system reaches 0.66 row F1 at $8.92 and 18 minutes per task, while no configuration under $1 per task gets half the rows correct. Exa plans to release the tasks, golden tables, and grader in coming weeks.
Perplexity has released pplx-embed-v2-late, two late-interaction embedding models of 0.6B and 9B parameters that handle text-to-text and text-to-image retrieval in one shared space. Both checkpoints are on Hugging Face and work with sentence-transformers and transformers. The company says the smaller model matches systems with five times its active parameters on the ViDoRe (V3) benchmark.
Student reliance on AI is linked to lower school performance as Google expands classroom tools to more than 170 million students and teachers, with 2025 PISA data showing AI users score 20 points below nonusers and districts unable to disable Search AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Mozilla launches the Firefox Smart Window beta with Mistral AI models in France and North America, offering tab-based answer sourcing and past-search retrieval while defaulting to no server-side conversation storage.
Developer Suganthan Mohanadasan launches a live x402 paywall that charges AI agents $0.01 per page, while Google confirms a publisher-payment pilot for content that materially contributes to AI Overviews, AI Mode, or Gemini answers.
Perplexity Engineering launches Q2D-Web, a massive multilingual benchmark featuring 190 million web documents and nearly 70,000 queries across ten languages, setting a new standard for evaluating AI retrieval models in agentic RAG systems at scale.
Ex-Yandex search chief Andrey Styskin's startup Keenable emerges from stealth with $26M in seed funding to build an AI-native web search index of over 100 billion documents, directly challenging Google and Microsoft's grip on search infrastructure for AI agents.
Yelp partners with OpenAI to bring real-time local reviews and business data directly into ChatGPT, a bold distribution bet that echoes — and risks repeating — the company's complicated and ultimately adversarial history with Google.