A New Foe Has Arrived...

Alibaba would like a word…

In this edition we’ll be covering…

• The emergence of Alibaba’s new model that might be better than DeepSeek’s 👀 

• A tutorial on how to magically enhance your prompts

• Our guide on using reasoning models in Perplexity

• 5 trending AI signals

• 3 amazing AI tools

• And much more…

The Latest in AI

Alibaba Releases Qwen2.5-Max

Just when you thought this DeepSeek stuff was getting crazy, Alibaba drops Qwen 2.5-Max like it's been secretly training in the Rocky mountains.

And it’s no pushover, Alibaba means serious business…

The Report Card:

• Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek V3, and Meta’s Llama 3.1-405B across key benchmarks.

• Unlike closed models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Qwen 2.5-Max remains open-source, offering developers more flexibility in integration and fine-tuning.

So What?

The AI race is going global at breakneck speed.

With Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and DeepSeek flexing their AI muscles, we're watching the landscape shift from a Silicon Valley sprint to a worldwide marathon.

Want to see if it lives up to the hype? Qwen Chat is open for testing, and the API is ready on Alibaba Cloud. Time to put those 20 trillion tokens to work!

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Tool Spotlight

Turn Meh Prompts into Magic with Claude

Ever write a prompt that feels like asking for directions in a foreign language? You know what you want, but somehow the AI keeps giving you recipes when you asked about rocket science?

Well, we found a hack: let Claude be your prompt whisperer.

Anthropic’s Prompt Improver totally streamlines this process by automatically refining your prompts, thereby improving the quality of AI interactions.

Here’s how you can craft amazing prompts with AI, for AI:

1. Navigate to the Anthropic Console. Log in if you have an account or create one.

2. Jump over to Workbench, and then down to User.

3. Hit Generate Prompt and type in a prompt you want to enhance.

4. There you go! Once that’s ready, you can test it directly with Anthropic’s Claude or use the prompt with another model.

Industry Intel

Perplexity Gets Smarter with Reasoning Models

Perplexity just leveled up by adding reasoning models to their arsenal. You can now search with OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1.

Instead of just matching keywords like it's playing word bingo, it actually thinks about your questions. (Yes, we're living in a world where search engines think. What a time to be alive!)

To do this yourself:

1. Log on to Perplexity.

2. On the bottom right of the chat window, toggle on Pro search (free users get 5 per day).

3. Choose your favorite reasoning model and start searching!

I tested some searches out myself… I must say the live chain-of-thought has been impressive to see.

Quick Bites

Stay updated with our favorite highlights, dive in for a full flavor of the coverage!

An OpenAI employee reposted the X post above, could we be seeing OpenAI release o3-mini today?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei gives his take on US export controls. amongst DeepSeek fiasco.

DeepSeek R1 is now available in the model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, joining a diverse portfolio of over 1,800 models, including frontier, open-source, industry-specific, and task-based AI models.

Pika’s next text-to-image model, Pika 2.1, is out to the general public. Apparently it looks like a legitimate Sora competitor.

ElevenLabs has closed a Series C raise of $250 million at a valuation between $3 billion and $3.3 billion, just a year after a sizable Series B.

Trending Tools

🤖 Reflect Webchat - A free Chrome extension that provides an AI-powered chat interface for web pages.

🗒️ Ping - AI-powered task list.

👖 Outfit.fm - Make amazing photos for your clothing brand with AI.

The Neural Network

Us coming off the DeepSeek craziness to see another Chinese model crush them all…

Until we Type Again…

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