Search Gets Smarter with Sonar

Sonar makes waves, AI Agents get simple, and ChatGPT gets super personal…

In this edition we’ll be covering…

• Perplexity’s new Sonar APIs

• A showcase on Hugging Face’s new smolagents

• A tutorial on how to customize ChatGPT’s overall outputs

• 5 trending AI signals

• 3 more AI tools for you to try out

• And much more…

The Latest in AI

Sonar is the Search API That Actually Checks Its Sources

This week, Perplexity introduced Sonar, its generative AI search API empowering developers and enterprises to integrate advanced search capabilities into their own apps.

Unlike traditional generative AI features, Sonar taps into real-time web data from trusted sources.

It’s out here citing sources like a straight-A student…

Supercharged Web Crawling:

• The new APIs come in two flavors - Sonar and Sonar Pro. Sonar offers a cost-effective, lightweight solution, while Sonar Pro handles complex, multi-step queries with twice the number of citations for in-depth accuracy.

• Zoom is already using Sonar to power AI chatbots with real-time answers during video calls (no more awkward "let me Google that" moments in meetings).

• Starting at $5 per 1,000 searches, Sonar is one of the most cost-effective AI search APIs available.

So What?

Perplexity’s Sonar Pro leads the industry in factual accuracy, outperforming major models like OpenAI and Anthropic on the SimpleQA benchmark.

Whether you're building the next big app or just tired of fact-checking your AI, Sonar's making waves in the search pool. And at these prices, even your side project can afford to look smart…

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Get Your Hands Dirty!

Build AI Agents in Minutes with Smolagents

Building AI agents just got a lot simpler.

Hugging Face recently launched smolagents, a minimalist library designed to make building AI agents easy and intuitive.

It’s a lightweight framework with just ~1,000 lines of core logic, making it developer-friendly without the overhead of complex setups. It also works seamlessly with Hugging Face models, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more.

I built a small project to take in a URL and spit out a formatted blog post for me below (not being used here, don’t worry).

Here is my agent/tool setup so you can give it a go yourself (you’ll have to set up a .env file with your API keys):

agents.py

from smolagents import CodeAgent, HfApiModel
from tools import fetch_url_content, format_blog_post
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()

model_id = "Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct"

# Initialize the language model
model = HfApiModel(model_id=model_id)

# Create the agent with the custom tools, agent that writes actions in code
agent = CodeAgent(tools=[fetch_url_content, format_blog_post], model=model)

# Define the prompt
prompt = """
1. Fetch the content from the URL: 'https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/18/perplexity-ai-makes-a-bid-to-merge-with-tiktok-us.html'.
2. Summarize the content.
3. Format the summary into a blog post with a main headline, three main takeaways, and a conclusion.
"""

# Run the agent with the prompt
response = agent.run(prompt)

# Output the response
print(response)

tools.py

from smolagents import tool
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

@tool
def fetch_url_content(url: str) -> str:
    """
    Fetches and returns the main textual content from the specified URL.

    Args:
        url: The URL of the webpage to fetch.

    Returns:
        The main textual content of the webpage.
    """
    response = requests.get(url)
    response.raise_for_status()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
    paragraphs = soup.find_all('p')
    content = '\n'.join(para.get_text() for para in paragraphs)
    return content

@tool
def format_blog_post(title: str, content: str) -> str:
    """
    Formats the provided content into a blog post structure.

    Args:
        title: The title of the blog post.
        content: The main content of the blog post.

    Returns:
        A formatted blog post.
    """
    blog_post = f"# {title}\n\n{content}"
    return blog_post

Tool Spotlight

Customize ChatGPT To Your Liking

OpenAI recently rolled out new customization features for ChatGPT.

Users can now personalize how the chatbot responds to prompts (including an option to respond like a Gen Z’er)!

Here’s how you can customize it and get more personalized responses:

1. Navigate to ChatGPT, click on your profile icon on the top right.

2. Scroll down and hit Customize ChatGPT.

3. Edit your settings accordingly!

🔥 Pro Tip: You can jump down into the Advanced section and toggle on/off ChatGPT’s other capabilities like search, code generation, and canvas.

Quick Bites

Stay updated with our favorite highlights, dive in for a full flavor of the coverage!

Three top tech firms on Tuesday announced that they will create a new company, called Stargate, to grow artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.

Tencent has unveiled “Hunyuan3D 2.0,” an AI system that turns single images or text descriptions into detailed 3D models within seconds.

Goldman Sachs is rolling out a generative AI assistant to its bankers, traders and asset managers, the first stage in the evolution of a program that will eventually take on the traits of a seasoned Goldman employee, according to Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti.

Former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati has made the first hires for her own secretive AI startup.

Greg Isenberg and João Moura, CEO of Crew AI, dive deep into how to build AI agent systems ranging from simple lead enrichment to complex content generation workflows.

Trending Tools

🌌 Project Ambience - Get deep work done with AI-tailored ambience mixes.

🧠 Deja Vu - The ultimate AI-powered Chrome extension revolutionizing your bookmarking experience directly from any website.

👻 PitchGhost - Find, engage, and close leads on social media with AI, scary fast.

The Neural Network

Superintelligence is coming, but the girls are fighting again…

Peep the full beef on X. 👀 

Until we Type Again…

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