Discover the Best AI Tools

We test the top AI tools for writing, video, images & music — so you don't have to.

Explore AI Tools

This Free Google AI Turns Your Boring Documents Into a Podcast

-
Image
Picture this: you upload a 40-page report you have been dreading, click one button, and a few minutes later two AI hosts are casually discussing it like it is the hot topic of the day. They joke, they interrupt each other, they explain the tricky parts in plain English. It sounds like a real podcast. Nobody recorded anything. This is not a startup demo or a $20-a-month trick. It is NotebookLM, Google’s free AI research tool, and its Audio Overviews feature is honestly one of the wildest things AI can do right now. What Is This AI Podcast Trick? NotebookLM is Google’s notebook-style AI assistant. Instead of chatting with a general AI that pulls answers from everywhere, you feed it YOUR documents — PDFs, Google Docs, web links, YouTube video transcripts, even pasted text — and it only talks about what you gave it. That grounding is what makes it trustworthy: every answer traces back to your sources. Audio Overviews take those sources and generate a podcast-style conversation between two ...
Post a Comment

OpenAI Just Launched GPT-6.1 Sol — Near-Flagship Smarts at One-Fifth the Price

-
GPT-6.1 Sol launch cover — near-Astra performance at one-fifth the price

OpenAI logo

What just happened

On the biggest stage of its year — the DevDay 2026 keynote in San Francisco — OpenAI launched a new AI model called GPT-6.1 Sol. It's not the flashiest thing announced at the event (that was Dots, the always-on agents), but it might be the most useful one for anyone building with AI.

Near-flagship brains, fraction of the bill

GPT-6.1 Sol sits between the workhorse GPT-6 Luna and the flagship GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI says the new model comes close to Astra on demanding tasks like coding, debugging, understanding documents, and multi-step jobs — while costing about one-fifth per task. On the DeepSWE 1.1 coding benchmark, GPT-6.1 Sol matched Astra while running roughly five times cheaper. For the average person, think of it as first-class answers at an economy price.

Fewer made-up answers

OpenAI also reports the new model hallucinates less. When using its "low reasoning effort" setting, factual mistakes fell from 11.4% to 7.7%. Its error rate is now within 1.9 percentage points of Astra across reasoning settings. It also claims to fail less often when told to stay within limits, flag broken tools, and avoid doing things it wasn't authorized to do. Coming right after OpenAI shelved its even bigger GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns, this feels like a deliberate message: speed and smarts, but safer.

Where you can get it

Starting today, GPT-6.1 Sol is available to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex. Developers can use it through the API as gpt-6.1-sol. It's not in the regular chat window yet. OpenAI also teased an "Ultrafast" version coming soon that should generate tokens up to eight times faster inside Codex. API pricing is $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens, and just $0.10 per million cached input tokens — a 95% discount.

The take

This is the price war in action. Anthropic just made Claude Sonnet 5.5 faster and cheaper; OpenAI is answering with a model that's nearly as good as its best at a fraction of the price. For beginners, the practical upshot is simple: better AI tools are about to cost less — whether you use them directly or they power the apps you use.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Top 5 Best AI Tools in 2026 (I Tested Them All)

-
Image
Look, I'll be honest with you. Every other day someone asks me "which AI should I actually use?" — and every other day there's a new tool claiming to be the best. So I did what any curious person would do: I spent weeks actually using these tools, not just reading about them. Here are the 5 AI tools that genuinely earned a place in my daily routine in 2026. No hype, no sponsored picks — just what actually works. 1. ChatGPT Best for: Almost everything — the safest all-rounder If you only pick one AI tool this year, make it this one. I've used ChatGPT for writing emails, debugging code, planning trips, learning new skills — you name it. It's fast, it remembers context well, and the ecosystem around it (voice mode, image generation, custom GPTs) is unmatched. It's like that friend who's decent at everything. Price: Free plan available; Plus at $20/month unlocks the best models. Try ChatGPT → 2. Claude Best for: Writing, long document...
Read more

YouTube Just Rolled Out a Batch of AI Tools for Creators — Here's What They Do

-
Image
YouTube wants AI to sit beside every creator — from the first script idea to the thumbnail that finally gets the click. At its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City on Wednesday, the company unveiled a slate of AI tools for creators, covered by Reuters and TechCrunch the same day. What's new The biggest changes land in YouTube Studio , the app creators use to run their channels. The standout is AI feedback on drafts : upload an unpublished video and the tool critiques its pacing, structure, and storytelling before it ever goes public. Alongside it comes a new research feed that shows what's working on the platform right now, so creators can put their own spin on it. Thumbnails — the single highest-leverage pixel on YouTube — get the deepest upgrade. Studio can now generate thumbnails and titles from a video's content, matched to the creator's style . A new dynamic thumbnail feature creates three options and shows each one to a different slice of the audi...
Read more

Meet Jev: The AI Model That Makes Decisions Instead of Writing Text

-
Image
A New Kind of AI Model On September 21, 2026, AI startup TypeSafe AI opened up its new model Jev to everyone — no waitlist, with access starting at $5 in credits. But Jev is not another chatbot. It is a new kind of AI model that does not generate text at all. It makes decisions. What Is Jev? Jev is a transformer-based model that outputs probabilities — what TypeSafe AI calls calibrated decisions. Instead of writing paragraphs, it answers the small questions AI agents constantly face: which tool should I call next, should I retry this task, which option is most likely to work. And it answers in under half a second. One of the people behind it is Diogo Almeida, a researcher whose work enabled the instruction-following ability that made ChatGPT possible. The Price Angle Here is where it gets interesting for anyone running AI agents. Jev costs $0.042 per million input tokens, and output is completely free. Five dollars in credits buys roughly 120 million tokens. For companies running fleet...
Read more