Sunday Rundown #53: ChatGPT Freebies & Burger Blues
Sunday Showdown #13: DALL-E 3 vs. Ideogram 1.0: Who's best at marketing collateral?
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:
Sunday Rundown + AI Fail (free): I share this week’s AI news and a fail for your entertainment.
Sunday Showdown + AI Tip (paid): I pit AI tools against each other and share a hands-on tip for working with AI.
On today’s Sunday Showdown, text-to-image models will be creating marketing collateral.
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
Here are this week’s AI developments.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
OpenAI made many previously paid features available to free ChatGPT users, including web browsing, vision, data analysis, file uploads, and the ability to use custom GPTs. (Jog your memory with this article about custom GPTs.)
Microsoft made its GPT-4-powered Copilot available on Telegram.
Leonardo AI released a new Gen V2 version of its text-to-image platform and made its “Character Reference” feature available to all users.
Hugging Face now allows its HuggingChat to use AI applications built by the community.
Suno is rolling out v3.5, which can generate songs of up to 4 minutes with better structure. For now, it’s available in early access to Pro and Premier users.
Udio isn’t far behind and just announced new features and a 2-minute song generation for paid users. (Suno and Udio faced off in my Sunday Showdown #6)
Google added AI features to its Chromebook Plus line, including Help Me Write, Magic Editor, and more.
Mistral AI released its first-ever code model called Codestral, which knows 80+ programming languages and outperforms competitors on coding benchmarks.
Perplexity is in the process of rolling out Perplexity Pages, letting users turn research into full-fledged, shareable articles with rich media.
Eleven Labs finally made its “Sound Effects” generator widely available. (I pitted the early access beta version of “Sound Effects” against Meta’s Audiobox back in March.)
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
Google DeepMind released more preview clips of its upcoming text-to-video model VEO. (Sign up for the waitlist.)
National University of Singapore and ByteDance researchers previewed InstaDrag, a framework that lets you edit images by dragging points around. (Similar to DragGAN but much faster.)
Canva announced lots of upcoming AI features at Canva Create.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT made especially for educational institutions, offering enterprise-grade security and more. (Here’s a skeptical take by
.)OpenAI also announced OpenAI for Nonprofits to make its tools more affordable and accessible for nonprofit organizations.
Apple will overhaul its Siri assistant with AI features to let it control individual app functions and more. Coming to iOS 18 in 2025.
📖 AI resources
Helpful stuff that teaches you about AI:
“What Does the Public in Six Countries Think of Generative AI in News?” - a survey by Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford. (PDF version here.)
🔀 AI random
Other notable AI stories of the week:
Scale introduced a new independent SEAL Leaderboard, which ranks LLMs using “curated private datasets that can’t be gamed.” (Unlike some other LLM benchmarks.)
OpenAI is continuing its news partnerships streak and has signed agreements with The Atlantic, Vox Media, and WAN-IFRA.
🤦♂️ 10. AI fail of the week
This tarot card got a bit too real:
Anything to share?
Sadly, Substack doesn’t allow free subscribers to comment on posts with paid sections, but I am always open to your feedback. You can message me here:
⚔️ Sunday Showdown #13 - DALL-E 3 vs. Ideogram 1.0: Who makes the best promotional materials?
Today’s contest was quite fun and visual.
I’ve written about Ideogram several times before—here, here, and here—but it hasn’t made it into any prior Sunday Showdown.
To rectify this, I challenged Ideogram 1.0 to a duel against DALL-E 3.
I wanted to see how the two would handle making three different types of marketing collateral: movie posters, festival flyers, and banner ads.
Let’s see how they fared: