Welcome, humans.
There are years when nothing happens, and weeks when years happen. This is definitely one of those weeks.
See, there's an unwritten rule in the AI industry: when one company announces a major AI update, everyone else follows. Wednesday proved this, with Google and Apple launching massive AI upgrades within hours of each other (more on that below).
And if that wasn't enough, Meta launched Llama 3.3 just days ago, while OpenAI packed so many releases into five days that it actually crashed their own system, sending their status page viral. Now that ChatGPT has 300M weekly users, any downtime is a big deal. Especially for students cramming for finalsā¦
We'll see what Day 6 brings soonācheck here at 10am PST. In a week where every day feels like a year in AI progress, let's hope whatever gets launched doesn't sink OpenAIās Shipmas...
Hereās what you need to know about AI today:
- Google announced Gemini 2.0 and Apple launched iOS 18.2 with ChatGPT.
- SORA recreated near-replica game footage.
- VCs flocked to a space AI datacenter startup.
- Harvard shared 1M book dataset for AI training
Google, Apple, and Meta Just Released Their Biggest AI Updates of 2024
We already gave ya the preamble in the blurb, so letās get right to it.
First up, Google introduced Gemini 2.0, a series of experimental new projects:
Introducing Gemini 2.0 | Our most capable AI model yet
The TL;DR of this launch is that Google's going all-in on AI agents that can actually do things, not just chat.
Example: the experimental Flash 2.0 version available today, and it comes with some serious multimodal upgrades: native image generation, voice output, and built-in tool use for things like Google Search and coding.
Apparently, Flash is shockingly better and cheaper than Claude 3.5 for coding AND it has a native 128k context window. Hereās a roundup of how ppl are already using it.
What else Google announced:
- Deep Research: New feature that can explore topics and compile reports.
- Project Astra: AI agent that can use Google Search, Lens, and Maps, understands multiple languages, and has 10-minute conversation memory.
- Project Mariner: A browser control agent that can complete web tasks (83.5% success rate on WebVoyager benchmark). Read more about Mariner here.
- Agents to help you play (or test) video games.
Apple Intelligence also launched in full yesterday with iOS 18.2, bringing AI features to iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you have an iPhone 15 Pro/16 or newer, iPad with A17 Pro/M1+, or Mac with M1+, you can use it. If youāre in the EU, rolloutās in April 2025.
Hereās what we get:
- Image Playground: Built-in DALL-E style image generator (works in Messages, Notes, everywhere).
- Genmoji: Custom AI emoji generation from text descriptions or photos.
- Image Wand: Turns sketches into polished art, generates images from note context.
- Visual Intelligence: Point camera at anything for instant analysis (for iPhone 16 only).
- Writing Tools: New āDescribe Your Changeā feature for text editing.
The big news of this launch is the ChatGPT integration. Hereās the official announcement video from ChatGPT where they demonstrates how this all works:
- Say āAsk ChatGPTā or double-tap Command key.
- No account needed + complete privacy (hidden IPs, no data storage).
- Camera integration for visual questions.
- Full document/image understanding.
- One-tap continue in ChatGPT app.
OpenAI and Apple demoād the integration to:
- Analyze a 49-page system card doc instantly.
- Generate a pie chart from technical analysis.
- Use the camera for live object analysis.
- And how to continue every interaction in the ChatGPT app.
Last thing: do NOT sleep on Meta Llama 3.3 70B.
Meta's Llama 3.3 70B just launched too, and it's basically GPT-4 that runs on your laptop. Currently #19 on LiveBench, beating Claude 3 Opus.
Simon Willison got it working on his 64GB MacBook Pro M2, though he advises against using less RAM.
The model takes up about 42GB of storage space, but the results are impressiveāit can write complete web apps, generate SVG graphics, and handle complex reasoning tasks right on your machine
Here's how to run it:
- Download LM Studio from LM Studio.
- Follow the onboarding, then go to Discover, and search for āLlama 3.3 70Bā in models.
- Click download (heads up, itās 42GB).
- Hit "Chatā to start using.
If youāve never used Llama before, this intro + prompt template will probably be helpful.
Whew! That was indeed a lot. What a week for AIā¦ can you believe itās not even over?!
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Around the Horn.
At least someoneās able to use it!
- SORA can apparently recreate gameplay footage pretty faithfully (with promtps that workaround filters, like āitalian plumber gameā, indicating it was definitely trained on game footage (probably because thereās a lot of that on Youtube).
- 200 VCs wanted in on the seed round a startup called Lumen Orbit, who plans to build data centers in space to power AI (The math? $140M in electricity on Earth vs $10M to launch a satellite).
- Harvard announced it will release a dataset of 1M public domain books for anyone to train their language models onāthatās 5x the size of the book dataset used to train Llama.
- Humans getting replaced by AI in action: OnlyFans models are now using AI to chat with the humans in their DMsāa job that used to be done by other humans called āChattersā the models would previously hire to chat for them.
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Under the Hood
- Check out Geminiās Multimodal Live API: real-time audio/video streaming with tool integration (official docs here).
- Rememberall helps you maintain continuous conversations with your GPTs by storing and recalling context from past chats when you mention @rememberall.
Thursday Trivia
One is a real, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)
A.
B.
Which is AI?
The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess compares to everyone else (no cheating now!)
A.
B.
Here are the results from last weekās trivia (A was AI):
Thatās 4 - human, 2 - robots. Easy win for the humans this time.
Hereās what you said:
- Q.S: āJust looks too clean, too good.ā
- C.H: āthe girl w a pearl earring only has one pearl - the three pearls is a computer mistake.
- S.H: āB looks more like an earnest attempt at matching the original painting.ā