AI News – April 4
Midjourney releases version 7 OpenAI changes its model release schedule Microsoft celebrates its 50th birthday with some Copilot updates and Kubi will make you coffee and tell you bad jokes. Here’s today’s AI news. Today, the once undisputed king of AI image generation, Midjourney, launched its latest model V7 into an alpha test phase.
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However, there are so many incredible AI image models available these days that it’s getting harder and harder to get a competitive advantage. Midjourney is famous for its ability to create ultra realistic images, and this is still the area where the new model seems to excel. We’ve seen some stunning early examples, however, it seems that the creative process might actually be the thing that does help Midjourney stand out from the crowd.
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The new creative experience allows the user to make rapid iterative edits to the images created, and with voice inputs, this can be a literal creative conversation. Will it be enough to keep Midjourney being perceived as the premium AI image creation tool? We shall see. OpenAI has announced some changes to its model release schedule.
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They’re now going to release an o3 model that previously they had suggested would be skipped, and also an o4-mini version. The OpenAI naming convention still confuses most people, but the O series models are designed to be reasoning models for complex tasks rather than general purpose multimodal models like the GPT series.
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Sam Altman explained on X that, “we are going to be able to make GPT5 much better than we originally thought. We also found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything” So this decision seems like a way to keep shipping updates while they plan the big GPT5 release.
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As part of the 50 year celebrations at Microsoft, Copilot is getting a bunch of updates. These include a new multimodal canvas called Pages, a deep research option like we see in so many other models, extended memory and Copilot actions that allow you to perform agentic style tasks.
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This really feels like a round of updates that is just preventing Copilot from getting too far behind rather than getting ahead. And finally meet Kubi, the conversational robot, barista and receptionist at SecondSpace with a voice and personality courtesy of Elevenlabs.
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Just tell Kubi your drink of choice and it will make you a perfect coffee, but it will also attempt to have a conversation with you and add some bad jokes for free. Can we just have one that makes the coffee and keeps the jokes to itself?