Artificial Ignorance

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AI Roundup 114: One of those weeks

6 days ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

OpenAI has dominated the headlines this week, with not one but five new model releases, plus a new developer tool. What to watch:GPT-4.1 (in standard, mini, and nano sizes), the successor to GPT-4o with a million-token context window. Interestingly, this model is being made available via the API but not ChatGPT, and it breaks Sam Altman's previous statement that the next GPT-series model would include reasoning.
The MCP Revolution

1 week ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

When Claude gained the ability to search the web, many people (including me) thought: "finally." It was a capability that users had wanted since the chatbot's launch, and besides, competitors like ChatGPT and Gemini had had similar search tools for months. But what many didn't realize was that Claude already could search the web.
AI Roundup 113: Liberation Day

1 week ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

In the chaotic aftermath of President Trump's new tariff policies, Semianalysis has put together an excellent deep dive into what they mean for AI infrastructure. The big picture:The tariffs are currently set to 145% on Chinese imports and 10-50% on other countries, though semiconductors and Mexico/Canada trade have key exemptions.
Llama 4 is a technical triumph and a strategic stumble

2 weeks ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo |Nathan Lambert

Meta's Llama 4 launch should have been a triumphant moment for open-weight AI. Instead, it's become a showcase of how technical excellence can be undermined by rushed execution and communication missteps (and why taking shortcuts may be the natural response to increasing competitive pressures). In the days since Meta (unexpectedly) released its newest AI model family over the weekend, the company's narrative has been at odds with the community's reception.
AI Roundup 111: Gemini 2.5 Pro

3 weeks ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

Google dropped Gemini 2.5 Pro, its latest reasoning model with deeply impressive benchmark scores. What to watch:Going by the benchmarks, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a GPT-4.5 class model — yet it seems to be garnering far less attention than GPT-4.5 or even Claude 3.7 Sonnet (early reviews, however, are quite good). Google's ever-growing array of models, from Gemini Flash to Gemini Thinking Experimental to its Gemma series, likely contributes to that.
GPT-4o is the new face of AI image generation

4 weeks ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

What a week for AI image generation. The past 48 hours have seen two major image models released within barely a day of each other. Reve, a new Palo Alto-based startup, boldly claimed to have built "the best image model in the world." And for a moment, they seemed poised to dominate the AI news cycle. At least until OpenAI announced GPT-4o's native image generation. And while I’m tempted to dive into both, I actually think it’s worth focusing more on GPT-4o, for reasons I’ll get into below.
AI Roundup 110: Siri stumbles

1 month ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

Last year, Apple countered critics who saw it as unprepared for the generative AI era by announcing Apple Intelligence. Now, that same criticism is back as the company delays key Siri upgrades. The big picture:Several long-timetechnologybloggers have called out Apple for delaying key AI features and pulling an ad that prominently showcased those features. The growing narrative is that Apple's AI strategy has deep issues, including buggy features, missed deadlines, and "ugly" delays.
The Self-Made AI Engineer

1 month ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

Two years ago, I knew almost nothing about generative AI. Like millions (now billions) of others, I was stunned when ChatGPT first launched - but I did have both an engineering background and the stubbornness to go figure out what was happening beneath the hood. I've seen quite a few technology waves come and go in Silicon Valley.
AI Roundup 109: Manus

1 month ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

Late last week, a new Chinese AI debuted to massive buzz: Manus, a general-purpose AI agent. Between the lines:Boosters have been suggesting that this could be a second "DeepSeek moment," with another Chinese company surpassing American rivals. However, others are taking a different view: unlike DeepSeek, the creators of Manus are not a frontier AI lab - they're using existing models to create a better user experience.
AI Roundup 108: Vibecoding

1 month ago | ignorance.ai | Charlie Guo

The latest trend in AI is "vibecoding," and it's being covered from Substack to the New York Times. It's a practice of using LLMs to code that enables non-programmers to build their own software. Between the lines:AI coding tools are getting good enough that even those with a passing knowledge of software can go from an idea description to a working prototype in minutes to hours.