Year-End Wrap-Up

As we say goodbye to December, I’m amazed at how many important announcements and updates emerged just before the year closed. What stood out to you? In this edition, I’ll recap some key highlights to keep you informed and excited for the new year ahead.

ChatGPT Search

ChatGPT Search is now out for all logged-in users. I have been using it for a little while, and they have made some tweaks to make it faster and some layout changes. It is hard to break the habit of a Google Search, but I find myself using it more and more.

ChatGPT Gets Vision

On the mobile apps, ChatGPT can now use your camera so you can show it your surroundings. The video mode is an interesting little trick at first. But then, slowly, some use cases started to show up. For example, I had it help me debug a problem I had around the house and explain to me how to potentially fix something, and it worked. It is definitely a wow moment when you use it for the first time.

Sora Released

Sora is OpenAI's text-to-video model that has been demoed many months ago, and we have seen a slow drip of videos being made with the tool. Now, it is available to all ChatGPT paid users.

Gemini 2.0

Gemini 2.0 is now available to try, and it's the first time I feel like Google is back in the game. In early tests, it feels significantly improved compared to previous versions. It’s set to be the foundation for some exciting new projects launching next year.

Project Astra, which allows Gemini to see either your screen or through your camera and interact with the world in some new, interesting ways. You can read a little bit more about Astra here.

Project Mariner is simply going to be a Google Chrome extension that can do some tasks on your behalf. The demos were clearly in the early stages, but being able to interact with your browser tab and do stuff on your machine could open up some use cases that are just so interesting to me. I can't wait to try this one out. You can get some more details about Mariner here.

Gemini Deep Research

This release is officially called Gemini 1.5 Pro with Deep Research. Between Google and OpenAI, they show how hard it can be to name a product. But we will just call it Deep Research throughout this post. So, I decided to see if Deep Research can explain itself for this post.

"Deep Research allows it to analyze information from numerous sources and generate detailed reports."

That doesn't do it justice. Deep Research will take the topic you are looking to learn more about, score the web for resources, consume those resources, and then write you a research paper and cite all the sources. My tests showed some really great and compelling results. The research paper can be rather long and verbose, but it cites everything in a nicely formatted Google doc. This feels like one of those releases that is a little bit of a slow burn, and then we start to find out all the neat little things that this can do.

As we step into the new year, the pace of innovation in AI continues to impress. From the enhancements in ChatGPT to the promising developments of Gemini, it’s clear that the future holds exciting possibilities. I encourage you to explore these new features and share your experiences. Stay tuned for more updates as we navigate this ever-evolving landscape together. Wishing you a wonderful start to 2024!