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- 👀 Weekly AI news: Did you miss it?!
👀 Weekly AI news: Did you miss it?!
👨🚀 The most important AI updates at a glance
Die AInauten
March 08, 2025
👀 Weekly AI news: Did you miss it?!
👨🚀 The most important AI updates at a glance
AIHOY and happy weekend, dear AInauts!
Maybe you didn't catch all the exciting news, tools and hacks about AI last week, or maybe you've just joined us. No need to worry!
We have summarized our highlights of the past week for you:
Finally, here is the most important quick news for you - so you can keep an eye on all relevant developments with just one click! Ready? Let’s go!
The current voice chatbot landscape offers exciting options:
ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode sets the standard with natural voices, but offers limited talking time.
Microsoft Copilot surprises with unlimited free access in 40 languages.
Google Gemini scores with free use on mobile devices and a new memory function.
The uncensored Grok 3 offers wild personality modes, but only speaks English.
Newcomer Sesame impresses with human-like interaction, unfortunately only in English.
Conclusion: For Copilot and Gemini are the best free options, while ChatGPT offers the highest voice quality.
OpenAI's GPT-4.5 ("Orion") presents itself as a massive upgrade with ten times more training effort than its predecessor. The focus is on emotional intelligence and natural conversations, not on logical thinking. The hallucination rate has been reduced to 37.1% - progress, but still problematic. The exorbitant API prices are striking: 30 times more expensive than GPT-4!
Investing? Hodling? No, forget Bitcoin - with GPT 4.5, the only thing that counts is how many tokens you can afford.
After a record year with profits of 11.2 billion, Deutsche Telekom is venturing into the smartphone market. In cooperation with Perplexity, it is developing an AI cell phone for less than 1,000 dollars, which is due to be released in 2025. The integrated Perplexity AI assistant can be used directly from the lock screen and can perform everyday tasks such as restaurant bookings or shopping. Other partners such as Google Cloud AI, ElevenLabs and Picsart are already on board. The highlight: the device follows the "AI First" principle and could therefore overtake Apple's sluggish Siri development.
Google's new Data Science Agent shakes up the often tedious data analysis! The free tool makes it possible to analyze large amounts of data quickly and precisely - much more reliably than previous AI language models. Upload, ask questions and explore visualizations and insights.
Open WebUI enables companies to create their own privacy-compliant ChatGPT-like system in less than 10 minutes. It's open source, and you can host it yourself (e.g. via elest.io) and run it with local Ollama models - without any external APIs or internet access. Employees can create their own accounts, while admins manage granular access rights. Teams benefit from shared Prompt databases, can create assistants and store company knowledge centrally.
📰 AI news quickie: HAI highlights from the industry
Ready for the updates? There was a lot going on again!
Updates from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI & Amazon
Researchers identified linguistic peculiarities of AI chatbots, such as GPT-4o's preference for "utilize" and DeepSeek's "certainly", with 97% accuracy. These digital fingerprints are telltale!
When you trust ChatGPT with your deepest secrets and ask it to remember who you are, you'll stop getting rejections.
ChatGPT for macOS can now edit code directly in IDEs, for Plus, Pro and Team users. Save time on routine tasks!
Google upgrades with Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews and introduces an experimental AI mode that can answer even more complex questions in search! Ciaooo, classic search results? Not yet!
Despite the growing popularity of ChatGPT with 400 million active users per week, Google continues to see strong growth in search queries, with an increase of over 20% since the launch of ChatGPT.
And Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants to go full throttle in the AI race: 60-hour weeks and more presence in the office for maximum AI power.
Meta is planning a standalone AI chatbot app that will arrive in 2025 to compete with ChatGPT and Google Gemini . Even Sam Altman is already joking about it, saying he might have to launch a social network too.
With AI power and new features for Google Shopping, you can try on clothes and make-up virtually, and even test complete looks!
Grok's Voice Mode is now available for free for all iOS users, no subscription required! Chatting instead of typing.
Prime Video tests AI-supported dubbing for selected films and series, for more linguistic diversity.
Tools & tech to try out
Use Reach to test how many reactions your post will get before posting on LinkedIn with AI. There is something similar for X with crowdtest.ai - for $1000 a month...
Is Windsurf Wave 4 the best coding assistant? It seems so, with AI features like previews, tab-to-import and more, you can now code even faster.
DuckDuckGo is now balling with free, anonymous AI chatbots and improved AI search answers - and it's all super-private and optional. Privacy first!
Comigo supports you with ADHD: therapy, productivity and personal development in an app that fits into your life!
Tavus is building an "operating system" for human-AI interaction designed to make conversations with AI as natural as with friends - including facial expressions, gestures and emotion.
With Flourish, you can create impressive, interactive diagrams, maps and presentations without any programming knowledge.
Opera's new AI Browser Operator does tasks for you, directly in the browser, without sending data to third parties. Available soon, stay tuned.
Alibaba's Qwen QwQ-32B achieves a performance comparable to a 20x larger model thanks to reinforcement learning. Agent capabilities included!
With Mistral OCR, Mistral AI has introduced an API that understands documents - including images, tables and formulas - in an insane number of languages. It's faster than the competition!
Cohere's new Aya Vision AI can create image descriptions, answer questions about photos and translate texts into 23 languages - and supposedly better than the competition. Respect!
Apple's new M3 Ultra chip is here - the most powerful Mac ever for AI development. The new iPad Air also has an M3 chip, Apple Intelligence and a new Magic Keyboard - up to 3.5x faster! In addition, the Mac Studio was introduced, as well as the new MacBook Air with M4 chip with up to 18 hours of battery life and a 12MP center stage camera - starting at 999 dollars.
Ethics, politics and society
Turing Award winners Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton warn: AI companies prioritize profit over safety and test untested AI models on the public. Risky!
Google's"Career Dreamer" uses AI to help you explore new career paths. Your skills and interests? Check! And there's even support for formulating cover letters.
Coracle is working with the University of Hertfordshire to develop an AI assistant that provides prisoners with tailored courses to prepare them for the job market.
Estonia shows what the future of education could look like: AI skills for all high school students, in collaboration with OpenAI and Anthropic.
US workers are more concerned than hopeful about the future use of AI in the workplace. The impact will also vary greatly by region - unlike previous technologies.
According to a US study, people with less education are more likely to use AI language models.
China discourages its AI executives from traveling to the US for fear they could end up as bargaining chips or reveal secrets. Oh well...
The Pentagon lets AI agents get involved in planning and operations. Scale AI, Anduril and Microsoft are modernizing warfare with Thunderforge, including "war-gaming" simulations.
According to a study, Russian disinformation is influencing the responses of AI chatbots by flooding the web with fake news. Beware of Kremlin propaganda in your AI chats!
Google Messages uses AI to protect you from scam messages, as The Verge reports. The function recognizes suspicious patterns and warns you.
Researchers say: Current AI systems and neural networks alone will not achieve human-like intelligence.
Australian researchers are fusing human brain cells with silicon hardware to create the first "biological computer". More dynamic, sustainable and energy-efficient than any previous AI!
AI in research, medicine and science
Researchers have developed an AI tool that can diagnose infections and more with a single blood test. The medical tricorder from Star Trek!
The "1,000 Scientist AI Jam Session" aims to accelerate scientific research through AI - OpenAI and Anthropic are involved. Research booster ahead!
With the Microsoft Dragon Copilot, doctors can optimize and retrieve clinical documentation and automate tasks thanks to the AI voice assistant. Bye-bye, tedious paperwork.
According to a study, chatbots pass the Turing test as therapists. However, whether AI can replace humans in psychotherapy remains questionable.
With Avat3r, Meta AI researchers create a photorealistic, animated avatar head from four selfies in minutes.
AI in business and investments
OpenAI plans to charge a whopping 20,000 dollars per month for PhD-level AI agents. Will anyone want to afford that?
Nobel Prize winner Daron Acemoglu puts the brakes on AI euphoria: instead of doubling GDP growth, he expects only a small boost and warns against too much automation.
Codie's ChadGPT Blueprint shows how a YouTuber made AI work for her to rake in the cash. The proof of concept was definitely a success.
TSMC wants to invest over 100 billion dollars in US chip factories to boost AI chip production. Trump threatens tariffs on imported chips, but experts warn of risks.
Anthropic, known for its chatbot Claude, has received new funding at a valuation of 61.5 billion dollars - a fifth of OpenAI's valuation.
Billionaires Mark Walter (Guggenheim) and Thomas Tull (Legendary) join forces in a $40 billion holding company to invest big in AI.
Chase Coleman, also a wealthy investor, believes in the potential of AI and has 43% of his portfolio in these five AI stocks: Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia.
Publishers are turning to decentralized platforms as AI is a growing threat.
Cherrie, a new AI ads manager, can serve ads on Meta, TikTok and Google, with AI taking the wheel based on over $200 million in ad spend.
Andrej Karpathy shows you how to make the most of LLMs . One comment sums it up: "Just canceled my wedding this weekend to make time to watch this!"
McDonald's is upgrading 43,000 restaurants worldwide with AI: Internet kitchen appliances, AI drive-throughs and smart management tools - stress for the crew?
And that’s a wrap! Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Your AInauts,
Fabian & Reto
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