Yo, this week in AI was straight chaos. 

Unofficially dubbed by dorks like me as “AI Week,” Google and OpenAI went toe-to-toe in creating release-packed week of AI goodies. 

OpenAI's doing their "12 Days of" thing, dropping presents like a caffeinated Santa. Then Google woke up and chose violence, unleashing more updates in three days than we've seen in three years. 

Zero marketing strategy, seemingly.

Just pure, unfiltered AI mayhem.

And that's not even the wildest part. Servers melted, Siri got humbled, and somebody's building an AI to watch other AIs. For real.

There’s legit too much to cover this week, so our written recaps are gonna be a little shorter. 

(You hate the long stuff anywho, right?) 

Let's get into it, shorties.

OpenAI's new video generation tool Sora just dropped, and their servers literally couldn't handle the heat. Available on both $20 and $200 plans, but only the ballers on Pro can make human videos. 

While Runway, Kling, and Luma Labs got more experience, Sora's ceiling is hitting different. Run ten generations and you might get some duds, but the best ones? Straight fire.

What it means:

This is the worst Sora will ever be. Think about that. Even with melted servers and first-day jitters, it's already making other video tools look like flip phones at an iPhone party.

At least when the generations come out on point. 

ChatGPT's Canvas went free-for-all, with bonus Python powers built right in. Drop a spreadsheet, ask for pretty graphs, boom - done. No coding degree required.

What it means:

OpenAI's taking shots at Anthropic's artifacts feature. Making it free? That's not just generous - that's strategic warfare. 

And yeah, they definitely took a page outta Anthropic’s book for this one. More on that in a sec. 

Remember that Advanced Voice Mode from September? Now it's got video superpowers. Point your camera at math problems, whiteboards, whatever - your AI assistant's watching and learning.

What it means:

The tech's solid but we're all still figuring out the killer use case. Right now it's like having a really smart friend who's not sure how to help.

We gave it a spin, and weren’t super impressed. 

However, we’ve gotten better results in the past few days. Guessing the whole melting of servers just gave AVM some short-term problems. 

After what felt like forever, ChatGPT got folders. But nah - these aren't your boring old folders. Projects lets you share docs across chats, making custom GPTs look like they're still in training wheels.

What it means:

OpenAI fixed their biggest UI headache and snuck in a document handling system that's lowkey better (in some ways) than their custom GPTs.

Apple and OpenAI got official with the joint release of Apple Intelligence, pretty much powered by ChatGPT. 

Here's the tea: Siri got exposed. When it can't handle your questions (which is most of the time), it straight up asks ChatGPT for help now with the latest official partnership between OpenAI and Apple. You'll need iOS 18.2 or Mac 15.2 for this humbling experience.

What it means:

Most of these features?

Nothing burger with extra mayo. The real story is Siri finally admitting it needs help.

Never thought a smart assistant would need an AI assistant. Lolz. 

Apple's cooking up an iPhone SE 4 with all the AI goodies for half the pro price. We're talking $499-599 instead of dropping a rack and a half on the 15 Pro.

What it means:

The AI revolution won't be Pro Max exclusive. Apple's finally reading the room and realizing that the majority of the world might not wanna drop a used 2012 Honda Civic on a new phone every other year. 

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we might need an AI kill switch in 2-4 years because it might be self-improving. You know… like AI building the next version of AI. 

His solution? Build another AI to babysit the first one. Peak tech logic.

What it means:

When the guy who ran Google says AI self-improvement is 2 years away instead of 50, it's time to pay attention.

Klarna shrunk from 4,500 to 3,500 humans this year. Their vibe? When people leave, AI fills the seat. Still got 50 engineering roles open though - turns out robots need handlers?

What it means:

The AI takeover isn't coming with warning sirens. It's the quiet replacement of "Currently Hiring" with "Currently Training."

Cognition dropped Devin at $500 per month. Think junior dev who never sleeps, never complains, just builds. No constant prompting needed - give instructions, go grab coffee, come back to finished code.

Hopefully. 

What it means:

The dev world's about to get real interesting. This isn't just another coding assistant - it's the first real "fire and forget" development AI.

Phi-4 just proved size ain't everything. With only 14 billion parameters, Microsoft’s new small model is kinda embarrassing GPT-4's 1.8 trillion on math problems. David's out here dropping Goliath like pew pew pew. 

Who’s the shorty now!?

What it means:

The future of working with LLMs isn't one massive model. Our hot take? It's hundreds or thousands of specialized, domain-specific Small Language Models that do one thing perfectly.

Google saw all of OpenAI’s holiday announcements and said "hold my eggnog” then dropped Gemini 2.0 Flash. Their small model's outperforming the premium competition. The disrespect is real.

Could 2.0 Flash become a mainstream model while we wait for Google to bring us the Pro/Ultra variations of Gemini 2.0? Maybe. 

What it means:

Google finally found their rhythm and is shipping ships like they had governorship over a shipyard that ships ships. (That’s AI talk for they’re releasing a TON of new AI products and features.) 

And when your mini model's smoking the competition's best stuff, you're doing something right. Google seemingly took off like the first 11 months of 2024 but is coming in like a straight behemoth in the 11th hour. 

Google Cloud launched AgentSpace, letting businesses create their own branded search agents. Works with Google Drive, Confluence, even Microsoft's SharePoint. 

The catch? Good luck getting access. 

What it means:

Google's enterprise game is leveling up, but their waitlist game is still stuck in 2020. Whomp whomp. 

Google's pushing some new updates to the still-not-available Project Astra after debuting it months ago at their I/O conference. Think Gemini in your field of view, helping you navigate reality in real-time. In the short-term, we’ll see Project Astra available in Google-powered smartphones, but the end goal may be glasses/headsets. 

Think — this is Google’s ultimate competitor to OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode with Video. Everyone’s racing to put a friendly, know-it-all AI assistant in your pocket. 

What it means:

Cool tech, but are we really ready to wear computers on our faces all day? The Meta Ray-Bans are fire, but these chunky AR glasses? We'll see.

We would love to see Astra come to the Google iOS app, but we doubt that would ever happen. Guessing it needs some edge AI to work, hence the whole Google/Samsung phone thang.

Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm just announced Android XR - their answer to Apple's Vision Pro flop. Except this will be cheaper, lighter, and maybe actually useful, baked in with Gemini’s AI from front to back. 

What it means:

Mixed reality might work if you don't have to mortgage your house to try it. (Ahem. Looking at you $4,000 Apple headset that only like 5 dudes in Silicon Valley actually wanted.)

Looks like the Meta Quest might have a competitor finally. 

NotebookLM Plus is here and Google is slooooooooowly rolling out with paid team features and 5x the limits. But the real MVP? The call-in feature letting you interrupt AI podcasts with questions.

Yeah. We want that.

What it means:

Google's RAG model just became a must-have for teams doing serious research.

Do you have access yet? We’re still waiting. 

Haven’t used NotebookLM yet? Go check out our latest review. 

Google's web automation AI is finally here (for "trusted users”…. Which we think is like 13 people cuz like no one has access.).

If Mariner sounds familiar, we’ve covered the Chrome agentic rumors when the project was previously codenamed ‘Jarvis.’ And yeah…. We called the name change on that one. 

One Chrome extension to rule them all - if you can get access.

What it means:

When this drops for real, your browser's basically got an intern that never sleeps if you have an extra window or computer for it to work. (It only works on an active Chrome tab, so you may not be able to multitask when Mariner is out Marinering.) 

Perplexity may be on watch. For real. 

Google's new Deep Research tool can literally visit/summarize hundreds of websites in a few minutes and save you like 1,432 pop up ads.

Perplexity's been pushing shopping ads while this Google’s new ‘Deep Research’ is going dang hard in the paint.

This is probably gonna end up being one of our top 10 AI tools/features of 2024. 

What it means:

Research game changed forever. While others are pushing products, Google built a research machine that actually listens.

Go watch our video review of Deep Research. 

Real-time voice and vision features finally dropped in AI Studio.

No waitlist, no drama.

Luckily on this one, Google just shipped it. Again, don’t go looking in the front-end of Gemini chat for this one. It’s an AI Studio exclusive. 

With this, you can talk to Gemini live, share your screen and chat, and also show it your video feed. Pretty cool. Just remember, AI Studio is free. And so is whatever data that you upload in there for Google to use. Lolz. 

What it means:

Google's proving they can sometimes ship features without a waitlist. Sometimes.