AI News – April 17
OpenAI release o3 and o4-mini plus a new image library feature and they look to acquire Windsurf for a cool $3 billion. Meanwhile, xAI unleashes Grok Studio and the Unitree G1 goes running. Here’s today’s AI news today OpenAI released two new models, o3 and o4-Mini, which are now their flagship reasoning models.
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The real highlight is the fact that these models now incorporate tools that like web search, Python coding, image analysis and file interpretation all into a single work stream, enabling them to handle complex tasks with multimodal inputs and outputs.
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The image interpretation is particularly impressive as it not only deciphers the image, but is capable of using the information contained within the image as part of its reasoning. As expected, o4-mini will bring slightly reduced capabilities, but but with greater speed and cost effectiveness.
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These models will of course deliver some great incremental gains on the various benchmarks, but it’s their capacity to be more general across their inputs and outputs that will make this a step change in AI models. OpenAI also launched a new feature for ChatGPT called the Image Library, enabling users to manage all their AI generated images in one place.
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This feature is now available to Free plus and Pro users on both mobile and desktop. As models get more serious at producing assets like images and video, these kinds of organisation and filing tools will become more and more critical. In more OpenAI news, reports have emerged that they are currently negotiating to acquire Windsurf, the AI coding tool that has become a fan favourite and the major competitor to cursor.
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It said that OpenAI is looking to acquire windsurf for approximately $3 billion. If this goes through, then it will be an incredibly powerful combination. Earlier in the day XAI announced Grok Studio, a rival to the Canvas style tools that we see available in other models like Gemini and Claude.
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The Studio option allows real time collaboration on documents, code reports and of course any games that you Vibe coded. Grok Studio is able to execute code in Python, C++ and JavaScript and it can integrate with Google Drive for file management.
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Gemini’s Canvas has been very well received since launch. Let’s see if Grok can win some of those users over. And finally, the Unitree G1 mini version went for a little run today and showed everyone just how much progress has been made with its fluid locomotion capabilities.
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I guess that one day it will be completely commonplace to see a robot going for a run like this, but right now these sites continue to fill us with awe and a little dread.