March 17 AI News.
Google’s new Gemini model gets into legal hot water Baidu kicks off the new round of AI price wars ReCamMaster gives old movies a fresh perspective and Perplexity creates the best AI advertisement so far. Here’s today’s AI news. The new Gemini Flash Experimental model has been seriously impressing us with its capabilities.
There have been numerous examples of how the image generation output is capable of taking on advanced image editing tasks that would typically take hours to achieve in a tool like Photoshop. Most controversial is its ability to remove watermarks from images. This is likely to bring all kinds of attention to the platform, both positive and negative, but it seems like Google might attempt to prevent this type of usage.
Get it while you can. The Chinese search company Baidu released two new AI models at the weekend. Ernie X1 is a reasoning model that is said to be on par with DeepSeek, but at only half of the price. The foundational model Ernie 4.5 is said to be on par with GPT 4.5, but at an astonishing 1% of the cost.
The Chinese AI companies have fully kicked off the AI price wars and the winners are going to be the users. Another model out of China is also causing a stir. ReCamMaster is a new video model that will take an input video and then regenerate it from a completely different camera angle or motion.
The results are really breathtaking. This opens up the possibility of watching old videos and films from completely different perspectives. It’s quite remarkable. Finally, Perplexity released the second half of their teaser video. That was a promotion encouraging people to “Ask Perplexity”, rather than checking Google for a question.
The video starred Squid Game’s Lee Jung-Jae and it’s received praise and applause from everyone. This is in Contrast to the OpenAI Super bowl ad that left everyone feeling underwhelmed. It’s certainly true that more and more users are turning to their favourite LLM to answer questions that they would have previously Googled.
Can Perplexity accelerate this change in behaviour with clever marketing like this?