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- How to use Google AI Mode's new Canvas feature to bring your ideas to life 💡
How to use Google AI Mode's new Canvas feature to bring your ideas to life 💡
OpenAI Is Making Its Own GitHub 🤯
Gina Acosta
March 05, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
Canvas in AI Mode is now available for everyone in the U.S., and it comes with some new capabilities. In today's issue, we share how you can use this new feature that aims to turn Search into a place where ideas can take shape and projects can unfold.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
OpenAI Is Building Its Own Version of GitHub
Alibaba's Qwen AI Chief Steps Down
AI Tutorial: How to use Canvas in AI Mode to plan, write and code
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
OPENAI
OpenAI Is Building Its Own Version of GitHub
OpenAI is reportedly developing its own code-hosting platform to rival Microsoft-owned GitHub, marking a significant strategic shift in their high-stakes partnership.
Details:
Frequent GitHub outages and service disruptions have reportedly hindered OpenAI's internal engineering workflows, leading the team to seek a more stable, in-house alternative.
By building its own repository, OpenAI aims to regain full control over its critical code assets rather than remaining subject to external platform risks.
While initially thought of as an internal tool, the company has discussed the possibility of offering the platform as a paid service to its enterprise customers, which would place it in direct competition with Microsoft.
The project is reportedly in its early stages and could take several months to reach completion, but it would help the company generate profit beyond its AI ventures. However, it would also test its relationship with Microsoft, one of OpenAI's biggest backers.
TOGETHER WITH ADD WISPR FLOW
Speak naturally. Send without fixing.
Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text you can send the moment you stop talking. Not rough transcription you have to clean up. Actual polished text - ready for email, Slack, or any app.
Reid Hoffman sends 89% of his messages with zero edits using Flow. Millions of people worldwide have made it part of how they work, including teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay.
Speak the way you think. Go on tangents. Change your mind mid-sentence. Flow strips the filler, fixes the grammar, and gives you text that reads like you spent five minutes writing it.
Works on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and now Android - free and unlimited on Android during launch.
ALIBABA
Alibaba's Qwen AI Chief Steps Down
Alibaba's Qwen AI unit is facing a major leadership shakeup following the abrupt resignation of its technical lead, Junyang "Justin" Lin, on Tuesday.
Details:
Junyang Lin, the core architect behind Alibaba’s Qwen model series, announced his departure on X with a brief message: "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen".
Several core team members also resigned, including Binyuan Hui (Qwen coder), Bowen Yu (post-training), and Kaixin Li (Qwen 3.5/VL), with a number of younger researchers reportedly following suit on the same day.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu accepted Lin's resignation and announced a new "Foundation Model Task Force," which he will lead alongside CTO Zeming Wu and Jingren Zhou.
The circumstances surrounding his departure remain unclear, but many of his former colleagues took to social media to thank him for his contributions, among them Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team who described Lin's departure as "the end of an era."
The exits came just one day after the successful release of the Qwen 3.5 small model series, which even drew praise from Elon Musk. Despite the shakeup, the company says it plans to deepen its commitment to open source and scale up investment to recruit new top-tier talent.
AI Tutorial
How to use Canvas in AI Mode to plan, write and code
Canvas is an AI-powered collaboration tool in AI Mode that helps you work through plans, projects, and things you want to get done
The feature was previously limited to a Search Labs experiment and was mainly used to refine results for things like studying or planning trips, but it's now rolling out more broadly along with enhanced capabilities. It can now handle creative writing tasks and coding projects, letting you draft documents or create custom dashboards and interactive tools right within Search.
Go to google.com/ai on desktop.
Select the new Canvas option from the tool menu (+) and describe what you want to create.
Google will generate a working prototype in a side panel that pulls information from the web and Google's Knowledge Graph.
From there, you can test the functionality, refine the results with follow-up prompts, or switch to a code view to see and edit the underlying code.
Example shared by Google: building a dashboard to visualize and track information on academic scholarships.
AI Tools to check out
TOGETHER WITH OPDECK WEB COMMAND CENTER
🛠️ OpDeck: Audit any website for performance, SEO, security, AI content quality, and more in seconds. No DevTools. Free to try.
🚀 Glaze: Create any desktop app in minutes by chatting with AI.
📽 Temvideo: Turn images & raw footage into viral UGC video ads.
📈 ZeroRank: Track and improve your visibility across AI platforms.
🎨 Crano AI: Create stunning AI-generated videos and images in minutes.
TOGETHER WITH ADD WISPR FLOW
Stop typing prompts. Start talking.
You think 4x faster than you type. So why are you typing prompts?
Wispr Flow turns your voice into ready-to-paste text inside any AI tool. Speak naturally - include "um"s, tangents, half-finished thoughts - and Flow cleans everything up. You get polished, detailed prompts without touching a keyboard.
Developers use Flow to give coding agents the context they actually need. Researchers use it to describe experiments in full detail. Everyone uses it to stop bottlenecking their AI workflows.
89% of messages sent with zero edits. Millions of users worldwide. Available on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and now Android (free and unlimited on Android during launch).
AI Findings/Resources
✨ Nano Banana smart prompt: Modular typographic brand poster design
💼 How AI damages work relationships—and where it can actually help
👀 A researcher who studies whether AIs can be conscious receives an email from one saying his work is relevant to questions it personally faces
📐 Cursor CEO says the company's AI agent may have discovered a novel solution to Problem Six of the First Proof challenge, a set of math problems modeled after academic research.
The latest in AI and Tech
Voice mode is designed to streamline the coding experience by allowing users to interact with Claude Code through voice commands. To enable it, type /voice to toggle it on, then speak your command and Claude Code will take it from there.
The Windows app arrives a few weeks after the Mac version, which was downloaded over a million times in its first week, according to OpenAI.
The new feature uses a combination of Google's AI models, "including Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro and Veo 3," to generate animated visuals based on the content of users' notes.
It is currently only available to users with a Google AI Ultra subscription.
Apple Music is rolling out Transparency Tags, a new metadata system that indicates when AI has been used in the creation of music on the platform.
The company said the tags are "the first step in giving the music industry the data and tools needed to develop thoughtful policies around AI."
OpenAI's VP of Research announced he is leaving the company to join Anthropic, saying he wants to "return to IC research work" and focus on reinforcement learning research.
The departure comes soon after the controversy surrounding both companies' Pentagon deals, with Anthropic's CEO calling OpenAI's messaging around its military deal "straight up lies" in a leaked memo.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻