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AI Daily Brief — 08 March 2025

International Women’s Day Saturday delivered the year’s first major Western-built generalist agent and Manus’s invite-code frenzy peaked. UK startup Convergence AI debuted Proxy 1.0 — an AI assistant that operates websites like a human (clicks, scrolls, fills forms) without APIs, powered by “Large Meta Learning Models” — claiming 88% on the WebVoyager benchmark, ahead of OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Claude on the same test. (Salesforce would later acquire Convergence in May 2025.) Manus’s Discord crossed 138,000 members and invite codes reselling on Xianyu hit ¥50,000-¥100,000 ($7,000-$13,800). Reports surfaced that Microsoft was developing in-house frontier reasoning models to compete with OpenAI’s o-series — signalling further hedging of the OpenAI partnership. OpenAI was reportedly considering a $20,000/month “PhD-level” agent tier for enterprise R&D and software-engineering use cases. Microsoft and Spanish ed-tech Founderz launched “AI Skills 4 Women” — a free global course plus 150 scholarships — framed against data that women are only ~22% of AI professionals and ~12% of AI researchers.

Top stories

  • Convergence AI debuts Proxy 1.0 — web-navigating generalist agent. UK startup ships an assistant that operates websites like a human without APIs. Powered by “Large Meta Learning Models.” 88% on WebVoyager — ahead of OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Claude on the same test. Salesforce would acquire Convergence in May. via SuperbCrew
  • Manus invite-code frenzy peaks over the weekend. Discord swells past 138K members; launch demo passes 1M views; invitation codes resell on Xianyu for ¥50K-100K ($7,000-$13,800). Media outlets call it the “second DeepSeek moment.” via Wikipedia
  • Microsoft reportedly building its own frontier reasoning models. Further hedging of the OpenAI partnership. via Daily AI Briefing (LinkedIn)
  • OpenAI floats $20K/month “PhD-level” agent tier. Reports circulating over the weekend say OpenAI is considering charging up to $20,000/month for advanced agents aimed at enterprise R&D and software engineering. via Everyday AI
  • Microsoft + Founderz launch “AI Skills 4 Women” on IWD. Free AI skills course for women globally plus 150 scholarships to a three-month AI & Innovation program. Framed against data showing women are ~22% of AI professionals and ~12% of AI researchers. via Women in Tech Global

Who shipped

Convergence AI shipped Proxy 1.0. Microsoft‘s in-house reasoning play and OpenAI‘s $20K/mo tier were rumors, not product. Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, and Mistral made no dated launches.

Open-source pulse

Mistral’s OCR API (Mar 6) continued rolling out as the default document-understanding model on Le Chat, exposed via the mistral-ocr-latest API at ~1,000 pages per $1, distributed through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Vertex with an on-prem option. via Mistral

Quiet corners

arXiv announcement system paused for the weekend. NVIDIA GTC 2025 sat ten days away; Alibaba’s prior-week 380-billion-yuan (~$52.4B) three-year AI/cloud pledge continued anchoring infra commentary.

By the numbers

  • 88% — Convergence Proxy 1.0 WebVoyager score
  • 138K+ Manus Discord members
  • $20K/mo — OpenAI rumoured agent tier
  • 22% / 12% — women in AI profession / research
  • Most-mentioned company: Manus / Convergence

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 8 March 2025.