Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• 🤔 Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking reasoning model

• 🤖 ChatGPT works more Apple apps

• 🧞‍♂️ DHSChat: Homeland Security has a new AI chatbot

• 🐱 GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

Let’s get right into it!

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BIG TECH

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking reasoning model

Google has unveiled Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, a new AI model focused on advanced reasoning and multimodal understanding, currently available on its AI prototyping platform, AI Studio. Designed for complex tasks in fields like programming and physics, the model pauses to analyze prompts and explains its reasoning before providing answers. Built on the Gemini 2.0 Flash model, it mirrors similar efforts by rivals like OpenAI and Alibaba in exploring reasoning models as a way to refine AI capabilities.

STARTUPS

ChatGPT works more Apple apps

OpenAI is advancing its efforts to make ChatGPT more agentic, enabling it to autonomously solve complex, multistep problems and integrate with desktop apps. Announced during its "12 Days of OpenAI" event, ChatGPT now supports Apple Notes, Notion, and Quip, with Advanced Voice Mode added to its feature set. Demonstrations showcased ChatGPT generating graphs in the Warp app and assisting with coding in Xcode.

Currently available on Mac, these features will roll out to Windows soon. This development aligns with OpenAI's goal of automating more desktop tasks and follows other recent innovations, such as ChatGPT Search, AI-powered video generation, and integration with Apple's latest OS update.

GOVERNMENT

DHSChat: Homeland Security has a new AI chatbot

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has launched DHSChat, an internally developed AI-powered chatbot for agency use, created by the DHS AI Corps under director Michael Boyce. Designed to operate in a secure environment, DHSChat uses external large language models via an API without sharing data externally. The tool aims to help over 19,000 DHS headquarters employees and 10 pilot agencies with tasks like summarizing reports, drafting documents, coding, and streamlining administrative tasks.

BIG TECH

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

Microsoft-owned GitHub has announced a free version of its AI-powered Copilot tool, now included by default with Microsoft’s VS Code editor. Previously available only through paid plans starting at $10/month or for verified students, teachers, and open-source maintainers, the free version offers up to 2,000 code completions per month and access to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. Targeting occasional users, it includes all Copilot Extensions and skills, but limits chat messages to 50.