Sunday Rundown #82: New LLMs & Barking Boxer
Sunday Bonus #42: My interview for Adapta's AI community.
Happy 2025, friends!
I hope you’ve had a nice holiday season with family, friends, and maybe even that one person from accounting you can’t quite remember the name of.
New year, newly new AI news.
I’m back with the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:
Sunday Rundown (free): this week’s AI news + a fun AI fail.
Sunday Bonus (paid): a goodie for my paid subscribers.
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
Here are this week’s AI developments.
Compared to the mad dash before Xmas, we’re having a pretty slow start to the year so far. But that’s likely to change with next week’s CES event.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
Backflip AI is a new company that can turn a reference image or text prompt into a 3D model and then a printable 3D item.
DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3, a fully open-sourced model that’s highly capable, fast, and is currently the #1 open-source LLM on Chatbot Arena.
Hugging Face introduced smolagents - a framework for developers to easily build AI agents using open-source models.
Sonus AI launched a Sonus-1 family of LLMs, including a reasoning model competitive with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o on many benchmarks. (Try them for free.)
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
Google is reportedly working on an “AI Mode” for its search products, which will offer a Gemini-like experience directly from Google results.
📖 AI resources
Helpful AI tools and stuff that teaches you about AI:
“60 of our biggest AI announcements in 2024” [ARTICLE] - an overview from Google of its major 2024 AI launches.
“Building effective agents” [ARTICLE] - practical advice from Anthropic.
“Predictions For AI In 2025: Entrepreneurs Look Ahead” [ARTICLE] - a look ahead by Forbes.
🔀 AI random
Other notable AI stories of the week:
OpenAI published a statement about transitioning to a new corporate structure.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
“Hey, Midjourney! If I ask for a ‘boxer,’ will you draw a fighter or the dog breed?”
”Yes!”
💰 Sunday Bonus #42: My interview for the Adapta AI community
I might’ve mentioned that I now work part-time as a community ambassador for Adapta, a leading Brazilian startup in the AI space.
In early December, I shared a recording of the “Text in AI images” workshop I gave exclusively to the Adapta community.
A week ago, I gave a written interview to Adapta to add to their growing Case Study Library, which is normally only available to members of Adapta’s community.
I share insights about how I use AI, a few tips, and general thoughts on AI.
My paid subscribers can read it here: