AI Models & Chatbots on TechSifted

3 Things in AI You Should Know: Claude Can Now Read Your Bank Account

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: TechSifted has no affiliate relationship with Anthropic, Thinking Machines, or Perplexity. This is editorial news coverage.

Three AI stories from last week. Anthropic gave Claude read-only access to bank and card accounts. Thinking Machines put out Inkling 2 Small, its first second-generation model, with open weights coming. And Perplexity launched Teammates, personal agents built for long-running work.

Claude Gets Read-Only Access to Your Bank Accounts

Image: Anthropic

Character AI Pricing 2026: Is Character AI+ Worth $9.99/Month?

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Character AI is one of the more nuanced AI platforms to evaluate from a pricing standpoint, because the question “is it worth paying?” depends heavily on how you’re using it. The free tier is genuinely usable. The paid tier addresses specific frustrations. Let me break down exactly what each offers.

DeepSeek Is Taking Its First Outside Money — at a $45–50B Valuation

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For nearly two years, DeepSeek was the rare AI lab that genuinely didn’t need your money.

Not “we haven’t gotten around to fundraising” no-funding. Not “we’re profitable on day one” startup theater. Actual, principled self-funding — founder Liang Wenfeng built the lab entirely on capital from High-Flyer, his quantitative hedge fund, without a single outside investor. In an industry where $100 million seed rounds have become a punchline for how normal they are, that stance was either reckless or remarkable.

DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash: What Just Launched and How It Compares

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DeepSeek just dropped preview versions of V4-Pro and V4-Flash, and I’ve been digging through the docs, benchmarks, and API pricing since the announcement hit this morning. Short version: it’s real, it’s good, and the price-to-performance story is — again — the most interesting thing about it.

But let me be clear upfront: this isn’t an R1 moment. Not even close.

What Is DeepSeek, and Why Does It Keep Showing Up?

If you missed the original disruption: DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based AI lab that shocked the industry in early 2025 by releasing R1, an open-weight reasoning model that matched or beat GPT-4o on several benchmarks — at a fraction of the development cost. The release triggered a literal stock selloff among U.S. semiconductor companies, because it suggested the AI arms race might be cheaper to fight than everyone assumed.

Grok 4.3 Review: What's New in xAI's Latest Model (April 2026)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TechSifted has no affiliate relationship with xAI.

xAI didn’t send a press release. No blog post, no fanfare. Grok 4.3 Beta just appeared in the model selector on grok.com on April 17 — flagged as “Early Access” — and early testers started posting about it while the broader AI internet was distracted by other things.

That’s a pattern xAI has leaned into. Quiet drop, let users find it, let Elon tweet about it later.

Meta Llama 4 Scout Review 2026: Local AI, Multimodal & How It Compares to Gemma 4

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meta dropped Llama 4 Scout on April 5, 2026, and the benchmark reaction was – honestly, a little mixed. It doesn’t top every leaderboard. Gemma 4 31B beats it on reasoning.

But if you’ve actually read the spec sheet, you know why the story’s more interesting than a single GPQA number. A 10 million token context window. Multimodal baked into training from day one, not stapled on later. And an architecture so efficient it runs on the same GPU card you might already have sitting under your desk.