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A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece. Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sothebys in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million. The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperors cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle. The colorful painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, leaving only the family portraits, which were considered too Jewish to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan. In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait. With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944. The portrait was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died this year at 92, leaving behind an impressive collection worth more than $400 million. Sothebys declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer. The sale topped a previous record for 20th-century art set by an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195 million in 2022. Five Klimt pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction for a total of $392 million, Sotheby’s said. Pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch were among other notable sales. Later in the evening, an 18-karat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall hit the auction block. Cattelan has said the 223-pound (101-kilogram) piece, titled America, satirizes superwealth. Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise, he once said. The toilet, owned by an unnamed collector, was one of two that Cattelan created in 2016. The other was displayed in 2016 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which pointedly offered to lend it to U.S. President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting. Then the piece was stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born. Two men were convicted in the toilet heist, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo. Investigators aren’t privy to its whereabouts but believe it was likely broken up and melted down. America was exhibited at Sothebys New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction. Sothebys called the commode an incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value. Hannah Schoenbaum, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Google announced its widely anticipated Gemini 3 model Tuesday. By many key metrics, it appears to be more capable than the other big generative AI models on the market. In a show of confidence in the performance (and safety) of the new model, Google is making one variant of GeminiGemini 3 Proavailable to everyone via the Gemini app starting now. Its also making the same model a part of its core search service for subscribers. The new model topped the scores of the much-cited LMArena benchmark, a crowdsourced preference of various top models based on head-to-head responses to identical prompts. In the super-difficult Humanitys Last Exam benchmark test, which measured reasoning and knowledge, the Gemini 3 Pro scored 37.4% compared to GPT-5 Pros 31.6%. Gemini 3 also topped a range of other benchmarks measuring everything from reasoning to academic knowledge to math to tool use and agent functions. Gemini has been a multimodal model from the start, meaning that it can understand and reason about not just language, but images, audio, video, and codeall at the same time. This capability has been steadily improving since the first Gemini, and Gemini 3 reached state-of-the-art performance on the MMMU-Pro benchmark, which measures how well a model handles college-level and professional-level reasoning across text and images. It also topped the Video-MMMU benchmark, which measures the ability to reason over details of video footage. For example, the Gemini model might ingest a number of YouTube videos, then create a set of flashcards based on what it learned. Gemini also scored high on its ability to create computer code. Thats why it was a good time for the company to launch a new Cursor-like coding agent called Antigravity. Software development has proven to be among the first business functions in which generative AI has had a measurably positive impact. Benchmarks are telling, but as the response to OpenAIs GPT-5.1 showed, the feel or personality of a model matters to users (many users thought GPT-5 was a dramatic personality downgrade from GPT-4o). Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis seemed to acknowledge this in a tweet Tuesday. [B]eyond the benchmarks its been by far my favorite model to use for its style and depth, and what it can do to help with everyday tasks. Of course users will have their own say about Gemini 3s communication style, and how well it adapts to user preferences and work habits. With the release of Googles third-generation generative AI model, its a good time to look at the wider context of the race to build the dominant AI models of the 21st century. The contest, remember, is only a few years old. So far, OpenAIs models have spent the most time atop the benchmark rankings, and, on the strength of ChatGPT, have garnered most of the attention of all the players in the emerging AI industry. History on its side? From the start, Google has enjoyed some distinct advantages. Its been investing in AI talent and research for decades, starting long before OpenAI became a company in 2015. It began developing machine learning techniques for understanding search intent, defining page rank, and for placing ads as far back as 2001. It bought London-based AI research lab DeepMind back in 2014, and DeepMind has been responsible for some of Googles biggest AI accomplishments (AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Gemini models). The big research breakthroughs that enabled the current wave of generative AI models took place at Google. In 2017, Google researchers invented the transformer language model architecture that allowed LLMs to learn much more from their training data than earlier language models. The following year Google used the transformer architecture to build its BERT language model, which led directly to the GPT models that power ChatGPT. In fact, the search giant developed an AI chatbot well before OpenAI did, but was conflicted about releasing it or infusing it into its other products because of legal and business model concerns. All the data Google has access to more and better-quality training data than any other AI company. Its been indexing most of the information on the web since 1998. It also owns huge amounts of information such as local business data, mapping data, and customer reviews, which can be used to train AI models or augment their output (within search results, for example). Generative models are just now gaining the ability to learn about the world from video footage in the same way that models learn from large amounts of text. With YouTube, Google has access to mountains of it, and its AI models could gain an increasing intelligence advantage by training on it. As AI begins to manage more and more of our personal and work tasks, Googles advantages in experience, talent, and data and other resources may help sustain Geminis state-of-the-art status and overall functionality in the years to come. High stakes This is more than about which company can sell the most API access to its models or subscriptions to a chatbot. As models like Gemini, Claude, and GPT-5 may eventually become smarter, perhaps far smarter, than humans at almost any task. The company with the models that reaches that level, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI) may dominate the marketplace for consumer and business AI in the same way Google has dominated search in the first decades of this century. With tech companies already spending hundreds of billions to build the infrastructure for their AI businesses, the pressure is mounting to push harder and faster on the development of new generations of AI models.
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E-Commerce
AI is bringing voice to the forefront of brand interactions. Smarter AI means we can talk to our technologyLLMs, software, phones, cars, fridges, and even banking apps. The novel part is this: Our technology is now talking back, and convincingly so. Brands are catching on, and the smart ones know that voice isnt just functional, it will form a core part of the brand identity itself. Voice will be the next frontier of branding. And not metaphorically. A brands literal voicethe voice(s) used for advertising, on their website, and now, in interactive AI-based conversations with customersis becoming just as ownable as elements of a visual identity. But standing out wont come from just using voice tech alone. To cut through the noise, brands will need a voice thats authentic, distinct, and is uniquely associated with their brand. The biggest brands already understand this. Theres a reason the most memorable brands choose to use the same voice actor across marketing campaigns, sometimes even across years: Consistency builds memorability, recognition, and trust. With voice AI, the opportunity for consistency and impact is even greater, and brands that embrace it will set themselves apart from the rest. TURN CUSTOMER TOUCHPOINTS INTO BRANDED EXPERIENCES The real gold in voice AI is its ability to provide both one-to-one and one-to-many communication at scale. AI is empowering brands to automate interactions across more customer touchpoints than ever before, including sales support, call center automations, and personalized ads, to name a few. As these channels incorporate voice AI, the need for consistency grows, making a singular, distinct voice more critical than ever. With voice AI, brands can hold a million individual conversations at once while maintaining both continuity and a personal touch. In customer support, an AI-powered agent can provide instant answers and even act via voice. That same voice can guide them through a product tutorial, help pay a phone bill, or introduce your brand to customers in an ad. Thats the beauty of voice AI as a brand asset: One voice can now efficiently scale, enabling a whole new level of brand cohesion across multiple interactions. Customers value predictability, and a consistent, trusted, and recognizable voice can really drive home that brand memorability and distinction. SECURE A MEMORABLE VOICE THATS EXCLUSIVELY YOURS With technology moving so fast, theres no shortage of ready-to-go AI voices. But the convenience of these voices doesnt guarantee exclusivity, and in branding, distinction is everything. The problem with 100% synthetic AI voicesvoices entirely created with AI, with no real human in the loopis threefold: They may become unavailable. They are often forgettable. They are rarely exclusive to the user. As vendors update their library or licenses expire, the voice youve been using to represent your brand could change, or even completely disappear. Even if it doesnt, chances are: Other brands and creators are using that same off-the-shelf voice, erasing any sense of individuality. As a brand, youll want at least some exclusivity for your AI voice, so you dont end up sharing it with a competitor. The reality is, the best AI voice clones come from real humans with the best voices: voice actors. You can hear a tangible difference between a synthetic AI voice and an AI voice cloned from a skilled voice talent. Done right, the one-to-one voice clone is higher quality than any synthetic voicenot only in its realism, but in its emotional nuance, uniqueness, and overall human quality. Licensing a professional voice also gives you greater control over creative direction to ensure the pronunciation of brand names and technical terms is correct. Licensed voices also offer customizable licensing suited to your specific needs, securing long-term consistency, exclusivity, and greater legal protections. Its the difference between borrowing something generic and curating a voice experience that is yours. The best, most successful branded voices in the market today are distinct and emotive. Customers wont remember an AI chatbot with a friendly middle-aged female voice, but they will remember a voice with personalityone that feels alive, intentional, and unmistakably part of the brand. Thats the future: Voice as a distinguishable brand asset, just like a logo. And by working with real humans to create a unique AI voice, youll secure something competitors cant copy: A voice that is exclusively, recognizably, and enduringly yours. Jay OConnor is CEO of Voices.com.
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E-Commerce
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