Chrome gets a Gemini-fueled upgrade!

Today, you’re getting a trifecta of major updates from three of the biggest players in the space: Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Forward thinkers, welcome to another packed issue of the Neural Frontier. 

Eager to dive into these headlines? So are we!

In a rush? Here's your quick byte: 

🤖 Chrome gets a Gemini-fueled upgrade!

🥼 OpenAI launches Prism, a workspace for scientists.

🫷 Anthropic rolls out interactive Claude apps!

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.  

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week.

🤖 Chrome gets a Gemini-fueled upgrade! 

With a new wave of updates powered by Gemini 3, Gemini in Chrome is designed to help you understand pages faster, juggle multiple tasks at once, and even take action on your behalf. Rolling out to macOS, Windows, and Chromebook Plus, this marks Google’s clearest signal yet that browsing is becoming agentic, not just interactive.

Think less tab-hopping and copy-pasting — and more getting things done without breaking your flow.

🧠 A browsing assistant that lives beside your work

The biggest shift is structural. Gemini now lives in a persistent side panel, giving you help without pulling you away from what you’re doing.

Instead of switching tabs or losing context, you can keep your main task open while Gemini handles the adjacent work: 

• Comparing options across multiple sites 

• Summarizing long reviews 

• Untangling scheduling conflicts from a messy calendar

Early testers describe it as having a second brain open next to their browser — always available, never disruptive.

🎨 Image intelligence, without leaving the page

Gemini in Chrome also brings Nano Banana directly into the browser, letting you transform images on the fly.

You no longer need to download, re-upload, or jump between tools. From the side panel, you can ask Gemini to rework visuals, generate design inspiration, or turn raw data into polished infographics — all using images already on the page you’re viewing. It’s a subtle change, but one that collapses several steps into one fluid interaction.

🔗 Chrome that works across your Google apps

Where Gemini in Chrome really starts to shine is in how it connects the dots across Google’s ecosystem.

With Connected Apps, Gemini can pull context from Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Flights, Shopping, YouTube, and more. 

Planning a conference trip, for example, might involve finding an old confirmation email, checking flight options, and drafting a note to teammates — tasks that normally live in separate tabs and tools. In Chrome, Gemini can stitch those steps together into a single, coherent flow.

🤖 Auto browse: when Chrome does the work for you

The most ambitious update is auto browse, Chrome’s new agentic capability for handling multi-step tasks.

Building on ideas like autofill, auto browse can research options, fill out forms, compare prices, and manage repetitive workflows — all while checking in with you at key decision points. 

Testers have used it to plan trips, collect tax documents, file expense reports, get contractor quotes, manage subscriptions, and even renew licenses.

Importantly, control stays with the user. Auto browse pauses for confirmation before sensitive actions like purchases or posts, and Gemini in Chrome is built with new security defenses designed specifically for an agent-driven web.

🥼 OpenAI launches Prism, a workspace for scientists.

OpenAI is pushing AI deeper into scientific workflows with Prism, a new research-focused workspace available for free to anyone with a ChatGPT account.

Think of Prism as an AI-native research editor. It blends a scientific word processor, literature assistant, and reasoning partner into one web-based environment, tightly integrated with GPT-5.2. Researchers can assess claims, refine technical prose, search prior work, and reason through complex ideas — all inside a single workspace.

📈 Why Prism, and why now? 

The launch reflects a sharp rise in scientific use of consumer AI tools. OpenAI says ChatGPT now receives 8.4 million messages per week on advanced hard-science topics — though it’s unclear how many come from professional researchers.

At the same time, AI-assisted research is beginning to show concrete results. Recent examples include:

• AI models contributing to proofs of long-standing Erdős problems in mathematics

• A December statistics paper where GPT-5.2 Pro helped derive new proofs for a core axiom, with humans guiding and verifying the work

OpenAI has pointed to these efforts as early evidence that frontier models can meaningfully assist in domains with strong theoretical foundations — not by replacing researchers, but by expanding what they can explore.

🧠 What Prism actually does

Much of Prism’s power comes from context awareness, not novelty features.

When researchers open ChatGPT inside Prism, the model has access to the full project context — drafts, equations, figures, and revisions. That allows it to give feedback that’s grounded in the actual paper, rather than generic suggestions pulled from a blank prompt.

Key capabilities include:

• Deep LaTeX integration, smoothing over one of the most painful parts of scientific writing

• Visual reasoning tools, letting researchers turn whiteboard-style sketches into clean, publication-ready diagrams

• Claim checking and prose refinement, using GPT-5.2 to improve clarity and rigor

None of this is impossible with raw GPT-5.2, but Prism packages it into a workflow scientists can adopt quickly.

🫷 Anthropic rolls out interactive Claude apps!

With a new update announced this week, users can now open and use interactive apps directly inside Claude, bringing workplace tools into the conversation itself.

The first wave of apps is clearly enterprise-focused. Claude can now connect to tools like Slack, Canva, Figma, Box, and Clay, with Salesforce integration expected next. Once enabled, Claude can interact with logged-in versions of these services — sending Slack messages, generating designs, accessing files, or pulling data — all without leaving the chat interface.

🧠 How it works (and who gets access)

These apps act as live, permissioned extensions of existing tools. Users choose which apps Claude can access, and Claude works within those boundaries to help execute tasks.

A few key details:

• Available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users (not free)

• Apps can be enabled via claude.ai/directory

• Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Anthropic’s open standard for AI tool integration

This puts Anthropic squarely alongside OpenAI, whose own Apps system launched last October. Notably, both companies are now building on MCP — a sign that shared standards for agentic tools may actually stick.

🤖 Claude apps + Cowork = real agent workflows

The bigger story is how this fits into Anthropic’s broader agent strategy.

Last week, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, a general-purpose agent that can take on multistep tasks using large datasets — without requiring command-line tools. While apps don’t yet work inside Cowork, Anthropic says that integration is coming soon.

Once connected, the combination could be powerful:

• Cowork pulling data from Box

• Updating marketing assets in Figma

• Posting results or summaries directly to Slack

Anthropic is also careful to stress caution. Agentic systems can be unpredictable, and its own safety guidance urges users to limit permissions and monitor behavior closely.

The company recommends avoiding broad access to sensitive data and, where possible, using dedicated folders or scoped environments for Claude to work in.

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.

🤝 SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla are in play for a potential merger.

💰 Amazon reportedly plans to invest $50B in OpenAI.

🍎 Apple acquires Q.ai, an Israeli imaging and machine learning startup.

🤑 ServiceNow announces a deal with Anthropic.

🤖 Airtable throws its hat into the ring with Superagent.

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week. 

1. 🎤 KikiVoice is an AI voice cloning platform that replicates any voice in under 3 minutes with support for 75+ languages, emotion control, and accent transformation across three specialized models — no registration or credit card required.

2. 🧠 Dessix is a visual AI workspace that captures web pages and snippets, auto-organizes information through cognitive clustering, and builds dynamic contextual environments around your cursor to enhance AI-powered writing and thinking with personalized workflows.

3. 📱 TheTabber is a social media management platform that publishes content across 9+ platforms with one click, featuring AI-powered UGC video creation, auto-captions, smart scheduling, and automatic format optimization to save creators 5+ hours weekly.

Wrapping up…

Far be it from us to claim that this was a perfect week in the AI space. But even we have to admit that we were pretty much spoilt for choice, update-wise. 

And to that we say: AI giants, keep it coming!

As always, we’ll catch you next week on the Neural Frontier 👋!

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