Over the past month, we've seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's been making the AI community's head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday.

"How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out," wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed of AI-related conversation. "in the last <24 hours we got gemini flash 2.0 and chatGPT with screenshare, deep research, pika 2, sora, chatGPT projects, anthropic clio, wtf it never ends."

Rumors travel quickly in the AI world, and people in the AI industry had been expecting OpenAI to ship some major products in December. Once OpenAI announced "12 days of OpenAI" earlier this month, Google jumped into gear and seemingly decided to try to one-up its rival on several counts. So far, the strategy appears to be working, but it's coming at the cost of the rest of the world being able to absorb the implications of the new releases.

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Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year.  But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for […]

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On Wednesday, Google unveiled Gemini 2.0, the next generation of its AI-model family, starting with an experimental release called Gemini 2.0 Flash. The model family can generate text, images, and speech while processing multiple types of input including text, images, audio, and video. It's similar to multimodal AI models like GPT-4o, which powers OpenAI's ChatGPT.

"Gemini 2.0 Flash builds on the success of 1.5 Flash, our most popular model yet for developers, with enhanced performance at similarly fast response times," said Google in a statement. "Notably, 2.0 Flash even outperforms 1.5 Pro on key benchmarks, at twice the speed."

Gemini 2.0 Flash—which is the smallest model of the 2.0 family in terms of parameter count—launches today through Google's developer platforms like Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. However, its image generation and text-to-speech features remain limited to early access partners until January 2025. Google plans to integrate the tech into products like Android Studio, Chrome DevTools, and Firebase.

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A deep learning scientist whose last startup was acquired by Snap to build its My AI chatbot has raised seed funding for his latest venture: a platform for building and operating real-time, video-based conversational AI agents.  eSelf, as the startup is known, is today coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in its coffers to […]

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