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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 29, 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, there 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 best text-to-speech models - test them now!
OpenAI is revolutionizing the text-to-speech market with three new audio models that even respond to dialects without tangling their digital tongue. You can test and download the results at openai.fm.
The price war against ElevenLabs is brutal: OpenAI charges 36 dollars for 10 hours of audio, ElevenLabs is at least twice as expensive. For those looking to save money, Sesame.com is an open source solution with massive potential.
Our productivity tip: Flow by Wispr - the voice-to-text tool is now also available for Windows. It lets you write down your thoughts faster than you can say "I should be able to type faster...".
🔥 Claude gets two new superpowers
Claude finally gets real-time web search with citations - but only for Pro users in the US for now. Anthropic is also working on voice features and a mysterious agent called "Harmony". With a fresh 3.5 billion dollars (Amazon and Google hold shares!), Claude is becoming increasingly competitive with ChatGPT!
The integration of web search into chatbots is radically changing the search engine landscape. Google is countering with its "AI Mode", while it is becoming clear that although chatbot traffic brings in fewer users than search, they are of a higher quality.
🇨🇳 Cheapest Chinese AI escalates dispute between Silicon Valley and Hollywood
Baidu is causing a sensation in the AI market with ERNIE 4.5 and X1 like a TikTok trend among teenagers: top performance at ridiculously low prices - ERNIE 4.5 costs just 1% of GPT-4.5! Usage is still a little bumpy, but the trend is clear: prices are falling fast and intelligence is getting better and better.
This is causing tensions: Silicon Valley clamors for "fair use" in AI training, while Hollywood counters with 400 outraged celebs who want to be paid for their digital doppelgangers...
🇨🇳 China's AI master plan - should we be worried?
China is flooding the market with new models - but why? With DeepSeek V3 0324, a model with 700 billion parameters, they are playing the classic "commoditize your complements" card: AI intelligence is being made as cheap as possible, while they want to make money on the hardware.
It's a pattern we're not seeing for the first time: China copies, optimizes and scales up until Western prices are out of all proportion. According to experts, the American lead has shrunk to three months in some areas, and China is already ahead in robotics, the military and e-mobility.
🧐 Mysterious new image AIs take brilliant pictures
Two revolutionary AI image models are causing a stir: Reve Image and GPT-4o. Reve Image (developed by ex-Stability people) has a real artistic flair, and automatic prompt enhancing turns "take a picture with a cat" into a masterpiece that will make your Instagram followers think you've suddenly developed a new talent.
GPT-4o, OpenAI's latest digital throwdown, precisely analyzes images, edits them on demand and reproduces them with flawless text. Both models set new standards. The issue of image generation with AI is definitely solved!
🌊 How VIBE MARKETING is currently turning marketing teams upside down
Vibe Marketing is revolutionizing the marketing world like Red Bull came into the beverage market - with energy, style and a touch of madness! A single marketer with AI tools can do in days what used to take teams months.
With tools like Claude, GPT and FLUX, competitor analysis becomes a breeze. A vibe marketer uses AI assistants and automation to their advantage. The brilliant thing is that anyone can become a vibe marketer with the right tools!
📰 AI-News-Quickie: The HAI highlights from the industry
Quite a lot going on this week!
Google's all-round attack
Google releases the most intelligent model with Gemini 2.5 - and it's currently free! It leads in common benchmarks by a wide margin and shows strong thinking and coding skills. Even Sam congratulates! Try it out now at aistudio.google.com.
Google Meet can now take notes for you, suggest next steps and more.
AI Overviews now in Europe: Google is rolling out its AI-generated summaries in nine European countries, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland. They appear prominently at the top of many search results for logged-in users.
AI as a travel planner: AI Overviews now also help with travel planning and day-by-day plans for entire regions - and similar to flights, there are now also price notifications for hotels. In addition, the Gemini Assistant also supports you with brainstorming, budget planning and other details.
Lens as your AI travel guide: Point your smartphone camera at points of interest and get instant information via AI Overviews or use the helpful translation function.
In case you haven't seen it yet: NotebookLM from Google can now automatically create mind maps from your uploaded sources - a great learning aid!
TxGemma is a collection of open models that support the efficiency of therapeutic development for drugs.
OpenAI doubles down
Native image generation in GPT-4o has officially started, with better quality and editing in chat.
The high demand is causing delays for free users, and after images generated with ChatGPT went viral in Studio Ghibli, OpenAI is pulling the emergency brake and no longer accepting requests - to the chagrin of many fans.
GPT-4o is also getting noticeably smarter: the latest update has improved it especially in math & coding, and catapulted it to second place in benchmarks.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman is setting the direction: The focus should clearly be on subscription models instead of advertising. He hints at open source models and GPT-5 in the free tier in the near future.
He has also initiated personnel changes: He appoints Mark Chen as Chief Research Officer, Brad Lightcap as COO and Julia Vilagra as Chief People Officer.
OpenAI publishes papers on safety on the road to AGI and research on emotional well-being when interacting with LLMs.
OpenAI surprisingly adopts Anthropics Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard to better connect AI assistants to data sources. Wow, cooperation instead of competition - or has the market simply sent a clear signal?
Another mega-financing round is also rumored to be in the offing: according to rumors, a 40 billion dollar round led by SoftBank is imminent, which would value OpenAI at an incredible 300 billion dollars.
Anthropic researches and shares the findings
Claude has been given a fresher look - spring cleaning!
Anthropic wants to get to AGI safely with Claude: CEO Dario Amodei relies on constitutional AI and a "race to the top" - but Claude shows worrying tendencies towards manipulation in tests.
Want a deeper insight into the AI brain? Anthropic explores how Claude "thinks" internally and finds interpretable concepts and language-independent "thought spaces". Pretty fascinating!
Recently, the Anthropic Economic Index was launched to understand the impact of AI on labor markets and the economy. Now there is an important update on the impact of Claude Sonnet 3.7.
Anthropic & Databricks are entering into a five-year strategic partnership. The Claude models will be natively integrated into the Databricks platform, facilitating access for over 10,000 companies. This underlines Anthropic's focus on the B2B market.
There is also a new Anthropic Engineering blog, in which the "Think" tool was presented for the first time.
Meta is working on Llama 4
Meta is celebrating: Their open source Llama models have cracked the 1 billion downloads mark - what?!
Llama 4 is already in the starting blocks. It will feature improved reasoning capabilities as well as AI agents and voice control.
Zuck expects a market of hundreds of millions of small businesses for which generative AI can interact directly with customers, for example.
Innovative AI tools to try out
Affordable access to top models: Quora's Poe app offers a new super-affordable subscription for only 5$/month to try out different AI models.
Ideogram has released version 3.0. It brings impressive photorealism and text rendering - with style references for consistent designs and 4.3 billion style presets to experiment with.
Videos without shooting? Yes, you can! Mirage from Captions generates complete videos including AI actors simply by prompt.
Luma now enables Magic Doodles - so you can bring your sketches to life. Editing has also become easier. Those who prefer fun and memes will appreciate Pika's new feature.
Realistic voices for free: Fish Audio offers impressive open source speech synthesis with over 70,000 GitHub stars, including cloning and voiceover. And all for free!
Change accents in real time (with question mark): Krisp's new AI dubbing feature aims to change Indian to US accents live in calls.
Specialized tools for professionals: Currents AI offers real-time social media analytics, while OpenEvidence provides medical professionals with the latest clinical data.
Elon Musk's image API from xAI creates up to 10 images per request, but costs 7 cents per image. You can now also use the Grok AI chatbot in Telegram.
The latest model from Deepseek can apparently compete with Claude 3.7 Sonnet in terms of code generation and comes with a free MIT license. Does DeepSeek even triumph over the new Gemini?
Copilot gets special agents: The new Researcher and Analyst helpers use OpenAI's reasoning models and even access third-party data such as Salesforce. Available from April in the new "Frontier" program for M365 Copilot license holders.
Adobe is sending 10 AI agents into the race for its Experience Cloud to take on typical marketing tasks. Do we have to worry about our jobs?
Market and finance - Money rules the AI world
xAI acquires X in a share deal. This values xAI at 80 billion and X at 33 billion. The reason: the future of the two companies is intertwined, combining data, models, sales and talent. And the legal exposure is also reduced ...
Fair pay for AI training as a new model? Synthesia offers $1 million worth of shares to actors who help create AI avatars. A radical move for fair pay or an easy way to get rights?
Outreach founder Manny Medina launches a new startup called "Paid" that helps AI agents get paid - with €10m seed capital from EQT Ventures and Sequoia. Is this the solution to paying the digital workforce?
Berlin-based workflow startup n8n has raised 55 million euros to revolutionize process automation.
The investment bubble is growing rapidly: venture capitalists have already pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into generative AI. Big tech clearly dominates the market and the profits. Goldman Sachs estimates that the "Magnificent Seven" (Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft) will spend over 1 trillion dollars on AI chips and data centers in the next five years. What madness!
Basic research also benefits: Cornell University receives $10.5 million for AI research in areas such as machine learning, robotics and ethics.
Research and hardware - Faster, better, more economical
Faster and more economical image generation: MIT researchers have developed a new process that can generate high-quality images faster and even locally on laptops.
Robots dance like movie stars: The PM01 robot from EngineAI performs impressive dance moves like in the movie Kung Fu Hustle thanks to powerful algorithms.
More precise weather forecasts on the horizon? The Alan Turing Institute's ”Project Aardvark" aims to revolutionize AI weather forecasting.
More efficient chips for the AI flood: Broadcom is launching more energy-efficient AI network chips that still deliver high performance.
New studies show: AI is already successfully supporting doctors in the early detection of cancer and reducing the error rate - despite patients' initial skepticism about AI in healthcare.
AI saves lives through a chance discovery: A patient in the USA was saved thanks to an AI discovery for new applications of old drugs. ♥️
AI society, ethics & rules - The debate is hotting up
Warning of AI-powered crime: Europol sounds the alarm and warns that AI is "turbocharging" organized crime, from fraud to disinformation to cybercrime.
Military use & controversies: North Korea tests AI-controlled kamikaze drones under the supervision of Kim Jong Un .
Tesla, Boston Dynamics and other US robotics companies are calling for a national strategy for robotics development - without such a plan, the US would not only lose the robotics race to China, but also the AI race.
The US-China Relations Committee calls for cooperation between the US and China in the AI sector - duplication should be avoided, despite the ongoing sanctions.
Is AI increasing inequality? A study suggests that AI could widen the gap between rich and poor, but smart policies and the right technology development could counteract this.
A large survey among software developers shows: 75% are already using AI tools, especially young professionals are enthusiastic - interestingly, the most skeptical are mid-career developers with 10-20 years of experience.
Boom! These were the hottest AI news stories of the week. What do you find most exciting?
One more thing on our own behalf: On May 14, 2025, the RISE OF AI conference will be held in Berlin again!
We were already there last year and can say: it's one of the most exciting AI conferences there is! What's special this year is that there will be an AInauten Stammtisch directly at the conference, where we can meet and exchange ideas in person.
We have also been able to secure a small contingent of tickets with a 20% discount for AInauts. We look forward to meeting some AInauts in person. Click here to secure a spot!
And that’s a wrap! Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Your AInauts, And that’s a wrap!
Fabian & Reto
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