Tech Insights 2025 Week 14
Last week OpenAI updated their GPT-4o model with image creation capabilities. If you had previously used ChatGPT to create images using their model "DALL-E 3" you know it was quite a poor performer, so maybe you skipped this news due to low expectations. But the image generation capabilities of GPT-4o is completely unlike anything you have seen before. First, like with Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT-4o now processes text and images through a unified system, not as separate tasks. This means that the model uses the same neural pathways for understanding both language and visual content, and can access its entire knowledge base and conversation context when creating images. It understands what you want it to create, and it understands how it should create it. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. You will still get artifacts and probably need to re-render each image a few times for best results. But is it good enough for most use cases? Absolutely! I am quite sure we will see an explosion in AI-art unlike anything we have seen so far, similarly to how ubiquitous large language models have become for text and source code generation.
Anthropic published results from an "AI Microscope" they developed to peek inside the inner workings of a large language model. The research revealed that Claude plans ahead when generating content, particularly when writing poetry, by first selecting appropriate rhyming words and then building lines to lead toward those targets. Anthropic says "The many examples in our paper only makes sense in a world where the models really are thinking in their own way about what they say". Very interesting research and if you have 3 minutes go watch their video about it.
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THIS WEEK'S NEWS:
OpenAI's GPT-4o Image Generator Transforms AI Image Generation
The News:
What you might have missed: The things you can do with this new feature is just outstanding. Here are a few examples:
My take: Two weeks ago I wrote about the amazing Google Native Image Generation with Gemini 2.0 Flash, which was the first multimodal model that could both understand and create images. This week OpenAI took it to a whole different level. When GPT-3 was released in June 2020 it was a monumental improvement, going from 1.5 billion parameters (GPT2) up to a staggering 175 billion parameters. But it wasn't until GPT-4 was released in 2023 where it was "good enough" for most text writing that usage started to grow for real. I feel that the image generator in GPT-4o is similar in importance to the launch of GPT-4 in 2023. It's good enough for most use cases, and it will have a profound effect to how we create and use images going forward.
Anthropic's AI Microscope Reveals How LLMs Think Like Human Brains
The News:
My take: It is common knowledge that Large Language Models generate one token at a time, where it constantly feeds the input question + generated response into itself to generate the next word. A few years ago many people downplayed LLMs as dumb "next token predictors" but this paper shows that LLMs do indeed plan quite far ahead even when replying with just one token at a time. "The many examples in our paper only makes sense in a world where the models really are thinking in their own way about what they say" (from the Anthropic YouTube video). It seems LLMs are inherently much "smarter" than most people initially thought. If you have 3 minutes I really recommend the video they posted.
Read more:
Users Abandoning Cursor Due To Context Limitations
The News:
My take: I have created thousands of lines of code with Cursor + Claude the past two weeks when I created a Python program to generate an MP4 video from all my newsletters, and for me Cursor works just as well as it did 6 months ago. I think the main difference between me and most people who post about all their recent issues is that I know my code base inside and out, and the way I use Cursor is that I tell it exactly what code I want it to write and where it should put it.
I have been very clear in all my seminars that 2025 is not the year when everyone without coding skills will be able to start a programming career thanks to AI. The simple reason for this is that AI models cannot hold your entire code base in their context window, which means that you still need to know exactly what your code does and how it is structured. This also means that you need to steer Cursor to keep your code structured so it grows in a technically sound way.
The reason why people are getting these issues now is that Anthropic recently started to introduce heavy rate limits into their API which means Cursor had to add a limit where only 250 lines at the time are sent to the language model. For users that were used to vibe coding and asked the LLM to do changes based on functional requirements instead of the code base structure the results were catastrophic, since Claude no longer had the full context available for analysis.
If we want to reach a future where non-programmers can use LLMs to develop advanced software applications we need much higher context windows and much higher API limits (Claude as an example allows only up to 20k tokens per minute, if you send it a full 200k token window you have to wait 10 minutes to send next request). Google Gemini 2.5 Pro mentioned below has a massive 1 million token context window and a rate limit of 2 million tokens per minute, 100 times more than Claude 3.7. This is what we need for people not used to programming to develop complex software applications, and I already see lots of non-programmers actively switching from Cursor + Claude into something like Roo Code + Gemini. Myself I like programming and I like designing software architectures, so I will stick with Cursor + Claude for now since it works very well with how I work.
If you are using Cursor + Claude, here is a quick guidebook with 10 tips from someone who shipped over 17 products with it.
Read more:
Google Launches Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claims Top Spot on LMArena
The News:
What you might have missed (1): Thanks to it's huge context window, Gemini 2.5 Pro is able to create complete and complex applications all by itself from the ground up! Here are some examples:
What you might have missed (2): Here's how a user built a complete fighter-jet game using just one chat session with Gemini 2.5 Pro: "Vibe Jet is a game I vibe-coded using Gemini 2.5 Pro. Today, I'm open-sourcing everything." "Vibe Jet" is pictured above.
My take: It's hard to overstate just how big of a launch Gemini 2.5 Pro is. It seems just as good as Claude in writing code, and it also has a context window that's 5 times larger, and you can send 100 times more tokens per minute over the API to it compared to Claude (up to 2 million tokens per minute). And if you compare it with ChatGPT with it's measly 32k context window you can clearly see why there is such a big difference between GitHub Copilot, Claude and Gemini when it comes to programming capacity.
My recommendation going forward is still that you need to be pretty good at programming to get maximum effect of AI tools, and that you should use several tools together for maximum efficiency. For example I use Cursor for most of my development, o1 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude 3.7 for refactoring, and local MCP servers for productivity improvements. If you are not familiar with software development and want to go "vibe coding", stick to the model with the largest context window available, and that model is right now Gemini 2.5 Pro.
AI Model "ECgMLP" Achieves Near-Perfect Accuracy in Cancer Detection
Recommended by LinkedIn
The News:
My take: Endometrial cancer affects over 600,000 Americans today, and thanks to this research there is a much better chance that the cancer can be detected in it's very early stages. The method is also computational efficient, meaning it will be available for clinics with limited resources. I have no doubt that we will use AI for most clinical investigations within just a few years, and then in the long term also use AI for individual treatment.
Alibaba Cloud Launches Three New AI Models in One Week
The News:
My take: I really like the Qwen models, and having them released under the Apache 2.0 license is just amazingly good. We are getting so many good models now that can run on a single GPU (A100/H100) with really good performance, that if your company have not yet begun looking into things like NVIDIA NIM to integrate with custom models then now is the time to start.
Ideogram Launches Ideogram 3.0 with Enhanced Photorealism and Style Controls
The News:
My take: I was never a fan of Ideogram before version 3, the image quality was quite poor compared to something like FLUX, and the only thing I used it for was the decent text rendering. Version 3 looks much better, and I will probably switch between this one, FLUX and GPT-4o as my main image generators going forward. They are each trained on different source material, so if you like me have a prompt that you know gives you that special "vibe" (like I have with my "Tech Insights" banners) you know the importance of having multiple generators for different tasks.
Reve Image 1.0 Tops Global AI Image Generation Rankings
The News:
My take: Here's another "best image generator of the week" to checkout if you needed one more. Do any of you who read my newsletter checkout these new image generators, or do you have a few proven favorites which you switch between based on the situation? That's what I do. I would love to hear your feedback on this, in the mean time if your current image generator fails on a specific task then you might send your prompt into Reve, it might just be what you are looking for.
Read more:
DeepSeek V3-0324: Powerful Open-Source AI Model That Runs on Consumer Hardware
The News:
My take: Seriously, just look at the figures above! And then consider that you can run this model for free on a single Mac Studio! Maybe it's a stretch calling a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512GB RAM "consumer grade hardware" when it costs over $12 000. But still, in NVIDIA land that price won't even get you an H100 with 80GB VRAM. The full version of DeepSeek V3-0324 is 671 billion parameters and requires 715GB of storage, where the 4.5-bit quantized version (Q4_K_XL) offers the best accuracy among all quantized versions and only takes 406GB.
DeepSeek is the model I am most enthusiastic about right now. Being able to run this beast of a model FOR FREE, on a small Mac Studio, with performance up to 20 tokens per second is incredibly good! There are so many possibilities, just plug this one into one of your agentic workflows and it can do virtually anything you can imagine.
Tencent Launches Hunyuan-T1 Reasoning Model to Compete in China's AI Race
The News:
My take: China has really increased the pace of their AI development a lot in the past months. DeepSeek with their amazing models V3 and R1, Alibaba Cloud with Qwen, and now Tencent with Hunyuan-T1. It's now two years since the main discussion about AI was if we should pause it or not since it might be too risky, and I think those discussions made us in Europe take a more passive stance towards AI development, and instead made us focus on regulation instead of innovation. Today two things are clear: (1) It's impossible to pause AI development since nearly everyone on the planet will soon depend on it in everything they do, and (2) if we really try to pause it then the Chinese companies will continue in this super-speed ahead and rule the entire world within 3-5 years.
Kyutai Launches MoshiVis: First Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Vision Model
The News:
My take: This model is actually quite a big deal. It's now possible to describe images in real-time with minimal latency, which opens up quite a lot of practical applications for assistive technology that weren't possible before. And the model's efficiency on consumer hardware means we could soon see these capabilities in everyday applications such as mobile apps.
Anthropic Launches "Think" Tool for Claude to Improve Complex Problem-Solving
The News:
My take: Most "thinking models" available today reason with themselves before they answer. This new "think" tool means that Claude begins to answer, then pauses for a while to think through what it said, and then continues generating tokens. You can compare this to humans that "think out loud" when solving difficult tasks.
If you are using Claude through the web site or apps, the Think tool is already active to help Claude provide better answers, especially for complex questions that require multiple steps of reasoning. For developers using Claude through its API, they can specifically activate the Think tool with a small amount of code. This allows Claude to pause during its response to think through new information or complex reasoning steps before continuing. The key benefit is that Claude becomes more reliable at following instructions, making consistent decisions, and solving problems that require multiple steps - all without you having to change how you interact with it.
Founder & CEO, Ascipir | Passionate about educating others on the promise of AI.
1moVery insightful. Can't wait to read more of your newsletters!
🤗 Lead Software Engineer | Independent LLM Researcher, Fast.AI Alumni | Backend Dev | Product | Code: GitHub.com/cedrickchee | Not an AI expert
1moJohan Sanneblad I made Vibe Jet. Thank you for featuring my project and Tweet/X post in your newsletter.