MC.60: OpenAI, Anthropic, Recraft, the show goes on

Hello!

Lots of releases this week, so let's get straight to the point.

OpenAI lets the dogs loose by opening their Search feature. It’s not a second thought feature; they are targeting market share and want to seize it quickly:

• Available on their mobile and desktop apps.

• Launched an extension to replace the default search engine in your browser.

• Accessible to Plus and Team users. People on the Free plan can expect it in the coming month.

It’s faster than Perplexity, but has the same issue as all the online-search powered LLMs, it’s prone to hallucinations. So make sure to double check the citations.

On Anthropic’s side, smaller steps, with the release of their desktop apps for Windows and macOS. Like I wrote last week, we know where this is going: AI-controlled computers.

They also released a new feature called Dictation where you can send kind of voice messages up to 10 minutes to be transcribed and used as input in your conversation.

Not a big deal, but they’re currently raising billions at a $40B valuation, so they need to appear as strong as possible. In fact, I believe they are on a winning streak:

1. Latest Claude 3.5 Sonnet is remarkable and broke the 50% barrier on the SWE-verified bench

2. Desktops apps + Computer Use: they’re preparing agentic systems.

3. OpenRouter rankings shows a lot more usage on Anthropic as a provider with 163.24 B tokens generated last month versus 114.84 B tokens

OpenAI is still the leader with their ChatGPT product, and Search makes their position stronger. However, OpenAI as an organization has been unstable, and we could be surprised in the years to come. If I had the opportunity to invest, my bet would be on Anthropic.

While we're waiting for a new image model from OpenAI, competitors are very active. Recraft has become the new state-of-the-art with an impressive model:

• It's better at composition than others

• Able to generate images with long texts

• Supports many different styles, including vector style

• Super realistic

I wonder, is OpenAI stuck with DALL-E? Are they trying to build the best model but finding the competition so fierce on this front that they can't release? Sam Altman stated in a Reddit AMA that a new version of DALL-E is coming and it's worth the wait. What can we expect?

When you think about the pace at which these companies are shipping, you can imagine how happy their PR teams must be. No need to come up with half-baked news and content; each week brings a premium announcement to make 🤯.

Sam

P.S. Other notable news:

• ElevenLabs X to Voice - Create a voice from your X account

• Google Learn - A conversational learning companion

• Gemini API with Google Search - Grounding replies with sources

• Oasis - The first playable AI-generated game

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Until next Thursday 🎉