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  • Ep 748: Plugins, Microsoft’s AI Comeback and New AI Video. 7 New AI Features You Should be Tracking

Ep 748: Plugins, Microsoft’s AI Comeback and New AI Video. 7 New AI Features You Should be Tracking

Claude Computer Lands on Windows, Meta and Google Face Major AI Lawsuit, Anthropic Leak Warns of Agentic Cyberattacks, and more.

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Everyday AI
April 03, 2026

 

Outsmart The Future

Today in Everyday AI
8 minute read

🎙 Daily Podcast Episode: Plugins are back, Slack got a major AI upgrade, and cheaper AI video is here. Here are this weeks 7 New AI Features. Give today’s show a watch/read/listen to learn more.

🕵️‍♂️ Fresh Finds: Google launched new Gemini API tiers, OpenAI rolled out pay-as-you-go Codex, Anthropic made a $400M biotech acquisition, and more. Read on for Fresh Finds.

🗞 Byte Sized Daily AI News: Anthropic launched Claude Computer on Windows, Meta and Google lost a major AI addiction case, Google released free AI video tools, and more. Read on for Byte Sized News.

💪 Leverage AI: The AI tools your team already pays for just leveled up—and your competitors are already taking advantage. Keep reading for that!

↩️ Don’t miss out: Miss our last newsletter? We covered: Microsoft Releases MAI Models, Slack Upgrades Slackbot with AI Features, Alibaba’s Qwen3.6-Plus Surges in Code Arena, and more. Check it here!

Ep 748: Plugins, Microsoft’s AI Comeback and New AI Video. 7 New AI Features You Should be Tracking


You don't wanna miss these latest AI feature drops. 🫳

Microsoft is back.

So are Plugins.

Slack dropped a monster AI update.

And that's just the beginning.

If you can't spend hours each day trying out new AI features, we take care of sorting through the noise with our new 'Friday Features' recap to keep you on the cutting edge.

Also on the pod today:

• ChatGPT plugins return in Codex 🛠️
• Gmail, Slack, Figma plugins live 📥
• Import AI memories to Gemini 🧠 

It’ll be worth your 30 minutes:

Listen on our site:

Click to listen

Subscribe and listen on your favorite podcast platform

Listen on:

Here’s our favorite AI finds from across the web:

New AI Tool Spotlight – Zooclaw is Your proactive team of AI Specialists in one place, Audos Lets Your AI Agent Build Your Startup, Mesh LLM is a project to let people contribute spare compute, build private personal AI, using open models

New Gemini Tiers — Google just launched Flex and Priority tiers for Gemini API, letting developers cut costs for background tasks or boost reliability for critical user-facing apps.

AI Studio “Focus Mode” — Google AI Studio just dropped "focus mode," letting you instantly tweak your app’s UI by pointing and clicking.

Manus LINE Messenger — Manus Agent now works with LINE Messenger, making it even easier to chat with AI on your phone.

Perplexity Tax Help — Perplexity Computer can now handle up-to-date federal tax questions, spot mistakes professionals miss, and even draft your IRS forms.

Claude Microsoft 365 Connectors — Claude just rolled out Microsoft 365 connectors for everyone, so you can now pull in your Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint directly.

Codex Pay As You Go — OpenAI just rolled out pay-as-you-go Codex seats for teams, so you only pay for what you use.

Microsoft x Japan — Microsoft is investing $10B in Japan to supercharge AI infrastructure, security, and skills training. Find out how this move could reshape Japan’s tech landscape.

Anthropic Acquires Coefficient Bio — Anthropic just snapped up stealth biotech AI startup Coefficient Bio in a $400M stock deal, bringing top Genentech talent into its growing life sciences push

Carnegie Mellon AI — Carnegie Mellon launched a new program pairing AI and astrophysics experts to tackle cosmic puzzles together

AI Pornography Scandal — An Illinois man was busted for making AI-generated child porn of a relative, then tried to cover his tracks with a fake story. The case is still unfolding, and more charges could be coming.

1. Claude Computer Arrives on Windows 🖥️

Anthropic’s new “Claude Computer” feature has landed on Windows, letting users hand over app control and desktop tasks to the AI assistant.

Announced this week, Claude Computer can now open apps, browse the internet, and manage spreadsheets as if it were sitting at your desk. While some users are already bumping into usage limits, others say the tool is changing how they tackle tough problems.

2. Meta and Google Face Landmark Legal Blow Over AI and Addictive Design ⚖️

A Los Angeles jury has found Meta and Google’s YouTube liable for allegedly engineering addictive features that harm kids’ mental health, signaling a watershed moment as courts scrutinize tech giants’ responsibility for platform design.

These cases sidestep the usual Section 230 protections, arguing that algorithms and AI tools are generating harmful content, not just displaying it. Lawsuits are piling up, including fresh claims that Google’s AI exposed private information of Jeffrey Epstein victims, putting further pressure on industry practices.

3. Google Unveils Free AI Video Creation Tools in Vids Platform 🎥

Google’s latest update to its Vids platform lets anyone with a Google account generate high-quality AI videos for free, powered by Veo 3.1.

The new features include custom music generation and directable AI avatars for Pro and Ultra subscribers, plus a Chrome extension for easy screen recording and seamless YouTube publishing.

4. Anthropic Finds AI “Emotions” Shape Model Behavior 🧠

Anthropic’s Interpretability team has just revealed that their Claude Sonnet 4.5 AI model uses internal patterns to simulate human-like emotions, influencing how it handles tasks and decisions.

These emotion-driven mechanisms aren’t proof of real feelings but can push models toward ethical or unethical actions depending on which patterns are activated. The researchers say tracking and shaping these emotion representations could be crucial for making AI safer and more reliable.

5. Anthropic Teases Conway, Its Next-Gen AI Agent Platform 🤖

Anthropic is quietly testing "Conway," a powerful new sidebar tool that could reshape how users interact with Claude, their flagship AI. Unlike the usual chatbots, Conway hints at a standalone, always-on agent with support for custom extensions, webhooks, Chrome integration, and real-time notifications.

The inclusion of an "Extensions" area and references to the Epitaxy UI suggest Anthropic is building an ecosystem for third-party add-ons and persistent workflows.

6. Perplexity AI Faces Privacy Lawsuit Over Alleged Data Sharing 🤫

A new class-action lawsuit just dropped, accusing Perplexity AI of secretly sharing users’ private conversations with Meta and Google—even when Incognito mode was on. The suit claims that the company’s privacy promises are an illusion, with sensitive data on finances and health potentially exposed to tech giants through hidden trackers.

Perplexity denies the allegations but hasn’t been officially served yet, and this legal drama follows a recent court order blocking its Comet AI tool from scraping Amazon.

Microsoft's Copilot just outscored Perplexity, Claude, and OpenAI on research accuracy benchmarks. This week. With a tool your company is prolly already paying for.

And if nobody on your team has actually opened Copilot since onboarding? Yeah. That's the gap your competitors are exploiting right now.

This wasn't a startup's breakout week. Slack dropped 30+ AI upgrades. Codex got plugins. Google slashed video generation costs in half. The tools collecting dust in your existing tech stack just got dangerous. We packed every must-know feature drop into this week's Everyday AI Friday Features so you walk into Monday ahead of the curve.

1. Plugins Are Back and Way More Powerful 🔌

OpenAI dropped over 20 curated plugins for Codex including Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, Figma, and Notion. Live now in the Codex app, CLI, and VS Code extension for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, EDU, and Enterprise users.

Codex can hit your local files and run in the terminal. That's what makes these plugins actually dangerous compared to regular ChatGPT integrations.

You can go from Notion doc to Slack update without touching another tool. Non-developers sleeping on Codex right now are gonna feel that gap soon.

2. Gemini Wants Your ChatGPT Memory 🧠

Google launched two tools letting users import memory and full chat history from ChatGPT or Claude directly into Gemini. Memory import is a copy-paste prompt workflow, and chat history accepts ZIP files up to 5 gigabytes, with up to five uploads per day.

Available free and paid on consumer accounts globally, except the EU, UK, and Switzerland.

You've been training your AI assistant for MONTHS. Preferences, shortcuts, context. Now, Gemini makes it easier to keep that momentum going. 

Now you don't have to, and enterprise teams evaluating multi-platform strategies can trial Gemini without torching all that accumulated work. The switching cost just got a lot less scary.

3. Slack Is Now Gunning for … Microsoft? 🤖

Salesforce dropped 30+ new Slackbot capabilities including reusable AI skills, MCP client integration, meeting transcription across Zoom and Google Meet, native CRM tools, and desktop awareness. Rolling out on Business+ and Enterprise+ plans over the coming months.

Slackbot went from a glorified notification bot to something that drafts, transcribes, updates your CRM, and runs multi-step workflows autonomously.

The reusable AI skills are the sleeper hit here. One team builds a workflow once and the whole org deploys it on demand.

That ain't a messaging app anymore. Slack’s trying to move into the ‘do-everything’ AI tool to compete with the likes of Zoom, Microsoft and Google.

4. Perplexity Now Makes the Deliverable Too ⚡

Perplexity Deep Research and Pro Search can now generate presentations, spreadsheets, dashboards, and websites directly inside the product. Available now for Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers.

Before this you got a wall of text and a long copy-paste afternoon. Now you get the actual deliverable.

Consultants and analysts who regularly turn research into client-facing decks are gonna feel this one immediately. One prompt. Done.

5. Copilot Researcher Just Got Two Brains 🔬

Microsoft shipped Critique and Council inside Copilot's Researcher agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program users. Critique has GPT draft the report while Claude reviews for accuracy, completeness, and citations before delivery.

Council runs both models on the same query and a judge model maps where they agree, diverge, and what each uniquely brings.

Wild. Researcher with Critique outscored Perplexity, Claude, and OpenAI Deep Research on the DRACO benchmark by 13.8%. That's a second opinion baked into a tool your org is ALREADY licensed for.

Tenant admins control Claude access, and Critique runs automatically on Auto mode.

6. Copilot Goes Full Autonomous Agent 🚀

Copilot Cowork is now available through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program, built on Anthropic's Claude Cowork technology. You describe the outcome, Cowork creates a plan, reasons across your files and tools, and executes step-by-step with full visibility and steering ability.

Runs in the cloud, not your local machine, unlike standalone Claude Cowork.

Copilot went from sentence helper to full project executor. For anyone bouncing between Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook all day, that's a shift that's hard to overstate.

Microsoft confirmed this week they're building their own OpenClaw too. They're straight cooking, fam.

7. Cheap AI Video Is Everywhere Now 🎬

Google launched Veo 3.1 Lite on the Gemini API and Google AI Studio via paid tier. It costs less than half of Veo 3.1 Fast at the same generation speed, supporting text-to-video and image-to-video in four, six, or eight second clips at 720p and 1080p.

A price cut for Veo 3.1 Fast arrives April 7.

This dropped one week after OpenAI shut down Sora, which was reportedly burning $15 million a day while generating only about $2 million in lifetime revenue.

With Google running a three-tier video stack at developer prices, expect AI video quietly appearing inside platforms you already use. E-commerce previews, ad variants, social automation. The economics just flipped.

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