Claude is Officially Better Than ChatGPT & More AI News You Can Use

Welcome to arguably the most turbulent week of this year when it comes to AI releases. We got an application that is probably the closest thing to AGI we've seen yet. But also Claude is releasing a new level of connectors. Google with their Gemini apps are pushing the boundaries in different areas. And so much more in this week's episode of AI News You Can Use, the show that pulls together all the AI releases, filter for the ones that matter, try them, and then I get to report back to you from this beautiful new studio, which has now finally come to life. And for all the haters in the comments asking Hey, is that background even real? Well, if it wasn't, could you do this? The wood we got is still a little wet, but that's okay. Let's get to it. Okay, so our journey for this week has to start by talking about ClaudeBot, which was now renamed to MaltBot. If you're not familiar, here's the one sentence summary, and then I'm creating a separate video talking all about it. It's basically ChatGPT on crystal with a computer at its disposal. How's that for a summary? Seriously, the thing just goes out and does things. It connects to your Telegram, to your messages app. It has access to your entire computer, it has access to a browser, and also it has this ability to schedule certain actions. So all of that was brought together by a developer that open-sourced this thing, called it ClaudeBot, then got a cease and desist from Anthropic that the name is too similar, and now he renamed it to MaltBot. And the internet was going crazy over this. Again, I created a separate video to summarize the entire situation and also give you more of my opinion on if you should really bother with this. Spoiler alert, probably not, but you should keep an eye on it. And it is really interesting. But yeah, basically it's just an AI that runs your computer and is extremely rough around the edges. It stops and breaks and asks for things and gets you banned on Gmail and X very quickly. But it does a lot of things that these big companies have not had the courage to do yet. Good reasons, security reasons, and also capabilities reasons. The Claude bot maker kind of just said, I don't care, I'll put it out there anyway. And then people can deal with the problems that result from it on their own. And then the interface for all this AGI stuff might evolve. It might not look like this chatbot or Claude Cowork right now. It might look something like this that we found. It's called Pencil. And it's basically an interactive canvas that runs Claude code in the background, where you get a nice drag and drop interface instead of just a preview of the app that it built. Maybe eventually it's something different. But this is kind of a nice evolution that I can totally see Claude Cowork and Claude Code growing into over the next weeks actually, why not? It is very interesting. We'll keep an eye on it. And by the way, if you're enjoying these videos, consider subscribing to the channel. It really helps us out. It's a great measurement of how many people we reach and how large this community of AI enthusiasts is. And I would love to see you again in another video where we discuss these developments because this stuff does move fast. And here on the channel, we do our best to stay on top of all of this together with you. But beyond that, I want to move on to the stories that you can actually really easily and reasonably use, starting with an Anthropic release, which I personally really like because it's basically like ChatGPT apps if you've seen those before, where the external application kind of appears inside of chat. Now Claude did the same thing by upgrading their connectors. It's really easy to access. If you're inside of Claude, you just go to settings, then you navigate to connectors. And up here you just click browse connectors. And all of these got a major upgrade now. They basically bring the interface from the external app into here. What I want to do is show you an application that I actually use regularly, which is Gamma. It's a dedicated application that creates presentations with AI. And when you connect this thing up, Well, I already did that, but basically you would just click plus and then log in with your account. Let me maybe show you Canva as a demo example. Yeah, it just opens it and you connect. Yeah. Once you connect it in here and it's accessible, then you can go to a new chat and you can say something like, create a presentation with Gamma about an army of AI agents dressed up as penguins with hats taking over the world. Perfect. So this is just a little example. And on previous episodes, I showed you that Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all got pretty good at creating presentations now. But none of it goes as far as a dedicated app that is made for creating presentations like Gamma over here. And if you've never used it before, that's fine. But most likely, if you go to these connectors, you'll find an application that you have used before. And then I think now for the first time, it becomes worth it to actually link it up because you can start your workflow flow inside of Claude to maybe some of the thinking, brainstorming, the preparation, the content creation in here. And then you can move to Gamma seamlessly from within here. That's what this really does. It's here to start the workflow. That's at least been my experience with all these connectors so far. And then if I look into the chat, you'll see that this is directly engaging the Gamma connector or app, whatever you want to call this. It'll be called an app in ChatGPT. And there it is. There we have a presentation that is visible in here with some details. Now here's the interesting thing. You can actually edit it through the chat, just like in ChatGPT. But that little edit does take a long amount of time. So again, as I mentioned, it's really good to start your workflow here. It's kind of just more convenient to continue in the app itself. Okay, now we got it. The end is near. Operation Waddle. A nice complete presentation with visuals and text. If I want to make changes, what about this slide? The new world order. Life under penguin rule. A global cooling initiative. There's a universal dress code. So everybody has to dress formally for all humans. Tuxedos become standard work uniform. Kind of like that. Anyway, I think you see the point. This is Gamma. It always did well at making these presentations and now it can link really easily. Now here's my point to round it out. All these various connectors don't work in the same way. Obviously, these apps are different. So most of these start your workflow. But if you connect something like Slack, it will probably end a conversation. If you want to just sum it up and send it through Slack, you can do that. So this is really a big step to Claude, which is already leading on these agentic and developer applications. Connecting to the outside world really seamlessly. Not through some custom MCP connector where you have to set it up, figure it out, it's technical, sometimes it breaks. It's just kind of a built-in application, which is nice. And in the same vein, there's another release from Claude this week, which is Claude for Excel. They had research previews of this available in the past. But now this thing is available on the Pro plan for $20 a month. And you can just add it as extension in Excel. Now there's this one comment on the post that I thought sums it up really well. All those years of refusing to learn Excel is about to pay off. It's exactly that. It does all the visual basic magic that Excel pros were doing up until now. Well, you can really easily just talk your way towards. And also every spreadsheet warrior on Monday morning. Cooked I am. It's a Yoda image. But I think more than this concrete application, what matters is this direction. I mean, think about this. Two weeks ago, we got Claude Cowork where it just autonomously makes plans and takes actions, but it didn't connect too much. Now we have all of these apps in Claude. We have a dedicated Excel remote control thingy. And then there's obviously Claude inside of your Chrome browser that is out for a few months. That is the best one out of all these browser connectors, in my experience. And then the first story this week, right? ClaudeBot, MultBot, whatever you want to call it, is basically bringing together all of these capabilities in a very reckless manner. But obviously Claude is on the same path. but in a more controlled and reliable and even more user-friendly manner. It's just a question of time until they tie together this package of browser remote control, Excel remote control, connector to every app imaginable, and a fantastic basic assistant and interface that they already have in Claude. Or should I say this falls more under the category of Claude Cowork that also connects to the world, your digital world. That's basically what ClaudeBot, now Multibot, does. And it's just a question of time when Claude and their competitors with Gemini and ChatGPT do that too. One more quick mention on Claude is that they made some of their more advanced features now available to free users too. I just quickly want to mention that. So if you're on the free plan and just trying out Claude, you can now also create files like Excel sheets, PowerPoints that you can just download, Markdown files, Word documents, whatever. You can do that on the free plan now too. And also they added the ability to use skills, which again is just sort of a way to package a certain procedure. I would say a certain prompt into what they call a skill, which you can then reuse every time. So if you do something successfully once, you can just tell Claude to package it as a skill, and then it can reuse it. All of these are just different tools for it to accomplish what you want to do. And we're rapidly advancing towards one system that just does it all at the quality level of a human being doing it. And I think at that level, we're reaching what would be referred to as AGI. From everything we're seeing here, getting closer and closer every week. And all the other stories, I just want to brush over a little bit. So we cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. I don't think you necessarily have to use all of these. That's why we call them quick hits. But I do think it's valuable to know about them. Starting with Google's Agentic Vision inside of Gemini Free Flash. What does that mean? It's for Google a new way to look at images and to really analyze it in depth with the use of code. They actually prepared a bunch of demos here that we can look at. And one that I think will really click for you is if we look at this one. Here's an image of a hand with 6 fingers. Classic AI problem, right? If this new Agentic Vision looks at it, it doesn't just look at the picture. It actually uses code to draw a bunch of boxes over for each finger, and then it counts the boxes. And then concludes based on the image, there are 6 fingers in total. And these boxes help it. Now, there's a bunch more demos if you want to try it out. We'll include a link in the description. But basically, you could take water and gas installations and analyze them. And it can zoom in on the image and really analyze the different details. It can do some of this sci-fi stuff that you see in movies where the AI kind of like zooms in on the person and then upscales the face and then fills it in and then looks through a database and kind of tracks down the person, right? All these spy movies, you see that. But I also want to note, this is not the first time we see this. First, when OpenAI's O3 came out inside of ChatGPT, it did the exact same thing. It was really good at pinpointing a location from my image. And it did this, it kind of cut out certain pieces, zoomed in, then did searches and compared that. They kind of stepped away from that. I don't know if it was compute intensive or whatever. But now we see it again from Google. And they're obviously looking to integrate this capability into their core Gemini product. Eventually, all of this will just become one system. So yeah, check out these demos if you want to see it in action. Then we have OpenAI releasing something they call Prism. And this is kind of interesting for people who are actively doing research or work in the sciences. They basically bought an application that allows you to work with papers and they customized it to use ChatGPT. And now they turned it basically into a workspace they give you for free for scientific writing and collaboration. Just a custom version of ChatGPT for research and writing papers. It's available for free. So if you're in that space, check this out. Similarly, Google built an app that is for one specific purpose only, and that is preparing for the SATs in the US. Which for anybody international is a standardized test in the US. Around the age of 18, high school students take this and there's a lot of preparation and textbooks people buy. Well, now there's an AI app that quizzes you on the exact questions and helps you practice inside of Gemini with quizzes and stuff. And I think this is what we'll see over time, more specialized apps for a single purpose. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you just have this universal assistant that can just do all this stuff for you. Once we get there, it might take years. But right now we see a lot of these specialized apps that help with something specific. Specific. There's also this new feature inside of LTX Studio that I just quickly wanted to mention. We tested it a bunch. It's very unreliable, but when it works, it's really amazing. It's an audio to video feature. So you start with the audio. Here's a little voice clip we generated inside of ElevenLabs. Welcome all to this week's AI news you can use. And then we brought that clip into LTX Studio audio to video and one of 3 generations was really good. It was this one. Welcome all to this week's AI news you can use. And I think that's actually pretty amazing. Again, remember, we just started with the audio there and it did the video creation and the lip syncing there perfectly. All of the other lip syncing features in my experience don't work this well. From ElevenLabs, they released an Eleven album where they collaborated with a bunch of different artists and they put together an album of songs. I listened to the whole thing. And do you want my honest opinion? Of course you do. That's why you're here. It was kind of bad. No, it wasn't bad. That's an overstatement. It was super average. Every song was just the most vanilla thing you can imagine. Just a typical pop song, a typical rap song. Nothing special, nothing with soul, nothing riveting. And I think that's a story with a lot of AI creation. A lot of times it's just okay. And okay is great if your baseline is not even being able to do it at all. But excellence? Hard to achieve with AI for now. But hey, we're here to show you the upsides. And it's not all bad because there's also creative use cases that do it well. And I really like this story from Google where they showed a director who used creative AI tools to actually mix them with her real-world skills. And her idea was to create this animated short where everything was sort of hand-drawn, but it would have been way too expensive to have every frame hand-drawn. Something like the League of Legends show on Netflix. What was it called? Arcane. Exactly. Have you seen that? Absolutely incredible. And not just because I used to to play League of Legends back in the day. I thought that show was so good. Even my girlfriend back in the day that I watched that with was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like, I don't like animated stuff. I don't like games. But like, this show is so good because it was so beautiful. And she wanted the same style. And now she used Gemini to turn the hand drawings into something animated. I thought this turned out really good. It looks fantastic. It's a unique look. And this is really the way to use AI. So don't forget, you have to actually become good at something so AI can help you become even better at it. It's not going to replace you. At least for now, it's just enhancing you. And this show is here to help you find out how it can enhance you. So I hope I did that in some way, shape, or form. Welcome to my new home and studio. And that's pretty much everything we have for this week. My name is Igor Pogany, and I'll see you very soon.