Alphabet drops Sora challenger

Read time: under 4 minutes

OpenAI is usually the master of surprise releases. But this time, Alphabet has turned the tables, unveiling a video model that could leave OpenAI’s newly-released Sora in the dust. And: Find out how one reader uses AI for idea generation.

Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: ChatGPT search, Zuckerberg’s beef, and surprising stats

• Tutorial: How to find academic sources with Grok

• Alphabet’s unexpected Sora rival

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

TODAY IN AI

1. OpenAI rolls out one of Advanced Voice mode’s most-requested features: OpenAI’s eighth day of ‘shipmas’ was all about web search. First up, anyone with a ChatGPT account can now use the platform’s search function (or set it as their default browser), ensuring their results include up-to-date information. Also, Advanced Voice mode can now browse the internet, helping with things like restaurant and event recommendations in real time.

2. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don’t always see eye-to-eye: But they’re united in their opposition to OpenAI’s planned shift to a for-profit company. In fact, Meta just sent a letter to California’s attorney general last week asking him to halt the transition. OpenAI’s not giving up without a fight. It recently dropped some old emails that show Musk once advocated for a for-profit model, even offering to lead the company himself.

3. Workers are adopting AI way faster than their employers: A new Goldman Sachs study found that only around 6% of American businesses use AI to produce goods or services. While that’s a hair higher than last quarter, it still pales in comparison to the 25% of workers who say they’ve started incorporating AI into their workflow — whether their bosses know it or not.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to find sources for information with Grok

• Go to Grok and log in with your Twitter account.

• Now write in your prompt to search or find any sources for information.

Sample prompt: Can you find academic sources about the latest advancements in quantum computing?

• Wait for it to process and you’ll get a list of sources (webpages and tweets) with relevant information.

• Click on the specific option to access it.

• You can ask directly, specifying keywords or types of sources (e.g., academic papers, news).

• Request recent updates, web searches, or source verification for balanced and reliable insights.

FROM THE FRONTIER

Alphabet takes on Sora with next-gen video model

The world now has not one, but two more state-of-the-art video models than it did just a week ago. Right when users were starting to get the swing of OpenAI’s long-awaited Sora, DeepMind just answered with its own upgraded VLM, Veo 2.

How does it perform? When Alphabet pitted the two models against each other, human testers said they preferred Veo’s outputs over Sora’s. Plus, the model stuck to their prompts closer than its rivals, according to the search giant. It’s especially good at capturing nuances like genre, film lenses, and cinematic effects — all in 4k.

What else is new? While Veo 2 is only available via a waitlist for right now, Alphabet is also beefing up its image generator, Imagen 3, “which now generates brighter, better composed images.” Plus, an experimental platform called Whisk lets you mix and match different scenes, subjects, and styles to come up with unexpected outputs.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

📈 Markets: It was green all around for the big tech companies Monday, with Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, and Tesla all soaring to record highs. Nvidia was the one exception, closing down 1.7%, although analysts said they’re still confident about the chipmaker’s prospects going into 2025. Bitcoin hit a record high, too, at one point reaching $107,000.

💰️ Funding: The EU is putting $11.1B behind an initiative to release 300 internet satellites into orbit by 2030. The bloc is trying to catch up to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which already controls some 6,000 satellites. Meanwhile, brain interface startup Precision Neuroscience, one of Neuralink’s biggest competitors, looks set to close a $102M funding round that would value the company at $500M.

👓 Futuristic Specs: Members of Meta Ray-Ban’s Early Access Program are getting access to live translations — which lets you convert speech into different languages in real-time — plus a dynamic voice bot.

🔨 Bot Builder: Marketing startup Jasper launched a new platform called Jasper Studio that lets clients design and build their own AI apps with built-in Slack integration.

🚙 Sobriety Sensor: A first-of-its-kind experiment in South West England will use AI-powered cameras to detect drivers who could be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

🏆 On a Roll: All those Super Bowl ads apparently paid off. Chinese e-commerce giant Temu is the Apple App Store’s most-downloaded no-cost app for the second year in a row, beating out Meta’s Threads for the top slot.

💰 Revenue Rethink: In a challenge to TikTok, Snapchat will start compensating creators for ads that appear in their Spotlight posts — although they’ll need to post at least 25 times a month to be eligible.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Summarize emails to clean up your inbox

Here are two good approaches to prioritize and reduce the overwhelm:

1. Use Copilot to Summarize Emails: Copilot in Outlook or Teams can help you quickly get the gist of lengthy emails by summarizing the content, making it easier to decide which ones to prioritize. You can use prompts like:

Prompt: “Summarize unread emails from this week.”

“Highlight emails with action items or deadlines in my inbox.”

2. Use ChatGPT to go through your inbox: In Gmail, begin by searching for the name of an important client, project, or long thread you want to parse through. Then, export and combine it all into a PDF. You can then upload that PDF into ChatGPT and use prompts like:

Prompt: "Create a brief and effective summary of the following emails. Capture the main points and key takeaways to ensure recipients grasp the essential information quickly.”

_{Source: OpenAI/Copilot/SendBoard}

💡 SUPER-READER SPOTLIGHT

How AI helps Sofie with idea generation

“I work as a writer [and] editor. I now use [AI] to help me do quick first-round research, summarize technical articles and ELI5 it for me, and rework drafts easily. I used AI to learn more about AI, its applications, LLMs, prompting, and more. This eventually landed me a role within an AI start-up.

It helped solve two pain points for me:

• 1) idea generation and building up content pillars: it is very hard to think of how to write about the same theme/topic in multiple ways.

• 2) just getting started on that first draft: any writer who's been around for a while understands the pain of writer's block.

I find that AI helped me overcome these easily, and by using these tools, I was able to create content faster and increase the amount of work I could take on.”

Tools used: “Addlly ai - great for end-to-end marketing and brand consistency. Perplexity and ChatGPT - great for research and writing, I often pit these two against each other to check their outputs.”

💡 Share your genius: Tell us how you’re using AI to level up your work or play, and you could be featured in our new Super-Reader Spotlight—submit your story today.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Double Exposure

Midjourney Prompt: A double exposure portrait of a majestic [insert animal here]'s side profile, set against a backdrop of trees and a sunset sky. The image has a black background, with a photorealistic, hyperrealistic, and cinematic lighting style, created using Octane Render. --ar 2:3

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Zain & the Superhuman AI team