AI NEWS: Self-learning AI, Crazy AI Ads, and More ChatGPT Updates

It's been another really interesting week in the world of AI. We got new models that train themselves AI infiltrating every part of advertising, including what AI will look like in the apocalypse, plus some new ChatGPT features and probably the best dance moves you'll ever see coming from a humanoid robot. So don't want to waste your time, let's get right into it. Starting with Alpha Evolve out of Google DeepMind. This is a self improving AI that doesn't just write code, it actually is evolves the code. So Alpha Evolve actually uses two of Google's models. It uses Gemini Flash and Gemini Pro. So it uses Gemini Flash to maximize the breadth of ideas explored, while using Gemini Pro to provide critical depth with insightful suggestions. So imagine it like this. When you're trying to think of like a novel solution for a problem you're trying to overcome, you might brainstorm a whole bunch of ideas and just sort of dump them all out. Some of the ideas will be good, some of them will be really bad, and most of them will probably be somewhere in the middle. Well, that's what Gemini Flash is doing. It's trying to just brain dump a whole bunch of potential ideas to solve this problem. And then Gemini Pro steps in to better evaluate the ideas and figure out which ones are actually potential solutions to the problem they're trying to solve. Alpha Evolve verifies, runs and scores the proposed programs using automated evaluation metrics. These metrics provide an objective, quantifiable assessment of each solution's accuracy and quality. Google DeepMind has actually been using Alpha Evolve internally to help optimize things like their data center, their TPU circuit design, and even to train the Gemini models. Alpha Evolve is also able to propose new approaches to complex mathematical problems. It was actually able to discover multiple new algorithms for matrix multiplication. It found an algorithm to multiply four by four complex valued matrices. And the previous, best known algorithm for this specific mathematical problem was created back in 1969. So it found a better way to solve a math problem where no better way has been found in 56 years. So what makes this Alpha Evolve so particularly special is that it's actually inventing new methods of solving problems as opposed to just using methods that were already known and sort of scraped from the Internet. This to me feels like a pretty big breakthrough. And they actually announced this the week before Google IO. And if something this big was announced before Google IO, it's really got my wheels turning on what they're actually going to announce at Google IO next week. Along similar lines A new research paper came out this week from Tsinghua University, Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence and Penn State called Absolute Zero Reinforced Self Play Reasoning with Zero Data. This is actually a new method of training AI models without needing to give it data. If we read the abstract here, in a hypothetical future where AI surpasses human intelligence, tasks provided by humans may offer limited learning potential for super intelligent systems. So they're basically saying once the AI is super intelligent, humans are going to be too dumb to further train it. And what do we do then? To address these concerns, we propose a new RL VR paradigm called Absolute Zero in which a single model learns to propose tasks that maximize its own learning progress and improves reasoning by solving them without relying on any external data. Under this paradigm we introduce the Absolute Zero reasoner, a system that self evolves its training curriculum as and reasoning ability by using a code executor to both validate proposed code reasoning tasks and verify answers, serving as a unified source of verifiable reward to guide open ended yet grounded learning. So basically what it's doing is it's creating its own problems to solve, like coding and math problems. It then attempts to solve those problems and then using a code executor double checks to see whether or not the solution that it came up with was correct or not. And then it continues to loop on this process. So despite being trained entirely without external data, AZR achieves overall state of the art performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks, outperforming existing zero setting models that rely on tens of thousands of in domain human curated examples. One thing to keep in mind, this is really going to only be good at math and code. So anybody out there going oh, this is how we get to AGI? Well, not really. For something to be an AGI it would have to have sort of world knowledge and be able to solve any types of problems, not just math and coding. For example, a model like this, you're not going to be able to go and ask it for business advice and have it explained to you like chat GPT would on the best next steps to take. You're not going to be able to ask it about world history or current events or things like that. This specializes in creating math and coding problems, solving the problems that it creates, and then using a code executor to double check to see if the way it solved the problem actually worked. Pretty much anything outside of that domain it's not going to work for. But what's interesting about this is that there is a lot of Controversy out there about AI writing code, but then people being frustrated because the only reason that AI knows how to write code is because it sort of learned on everybody else's code that was trained into the original model. Well, with research like this, this is no longer going to be the case. This is able to figure out and write new code that wasn't trained in by humans. It's actually creating the new code and then testing what it created. All right, let's talk about AI in advertising, because AI is about to infiltrate every aspect of advertising. Companies that are trying to get in front of you are going to use AI to figure out the best ways to get in front of you. And services that rely on ads, like Netflix and YouTube are going to leverage AI to try to put the best ads in front of you at the exact right time. Now, earlier this week, the president of Stripe interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, and he broke down his vision for how advertising will work in the future for the advertisers who use platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

You know, it used to basically be if you wanted to run ads, you had to, like, come up with your own creative, and you had to come up with who you wanted to reach. You had to kind of have a sense of who your customers were and do a lot of your own measurement. And over time, we've just, like, automated more and more of this stuff. So the basic end goal here is any business can come to us, say what their objective is. I want to get new customers, customers to do this thing. I want to sell these things, tell us how much they're willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account, and then we just deliver as many results as we can. In a way. I mean, it's kind of like the ultimate business results machine. But it will be possible in the future that if you're running a small business, or maybe even a larger one, you won't even need to have to start off with a creative. Maybe you can, maybe. Maybe you'll get better results. You could just come with a goal and how much that's worth to you, and we'll just kind of deliver results across our platform.

Now, I did cut out a few things from that clip just to kind of speed up the pace of it. But I promise I didn't take away any of the context of the clip. But basically, the idea here is if you have a business that's trying to generate sales, you'll be able to go to Facebook and say, this is what my business is. Go get me more sales, it will likely go and create the ad for you, figure out the targeting for you, and just continually optimize your ad for you to get you that result. Maybe you're trying to grow an email list. You can tell it I need more emails and it will go and do all of the process of creating the ads for you. You just give it the result you're going for, give it some money and it will go out and exchange that money for that result. Using AI to continually optimize for you as somebody who's constantly trying to grow a newsletter, future Tools newsletter, that's actually something I'm fairly excited to try. Now, when it comes to the platforms that we consume content on, we're about to see sort of an overhaul in what that advertising looks like to us as well, thanks to AI. According to this article on the Verge, apparently Netflix is trying to use AI to make ad breaks look less like ad breaks. Now, I'm not 100% certain what this is actually going to look like. The details are a little bit fuzzy still, but you can see the sub headline here. The new format will let advertisers make spots that blend in with its shows and movies. Netflix had an event this week called Upfront and they demonstrated an example that placed the image of a product over a background inspired by of its shows like Stranger Things. I guess you're going to be able to have like various Netflix IP in the background of your ads to make it look a little bit more native to the show that you're watching. If you're on Netflix's ad supported plan, that means you might see an ad that blends in with the show you're watching, whether it's Bridgerton or Wednesday. Netflix says advertisers can insert this new ad format in the middle of what you're watching or put them on the screen when you hit pause. When we check out the actual press release on the Netflix website here we can see this section called Creative Formats. Netflix debuted a new modular framework for ad formats that leverages generative AI to instantly marry advertisers ads with the worlds of our shows. I'm guessing this is one of the examples here of what it could look like. We can see it's for the show Wednesday, but we also see Wendy's booking.com and Cheetahs on the actual ad. So if you're on one of the Netflix plans with ads, you've got that to look forward to. YouTube is also changing things up using AI in their advertising. YouTube's trying to optimize the placement of the various ads using AI. They had an event this week called Brandcast where they made a few announcements. And one of the announcements was Peak Points, a new product built with Gemini that identifies the most meaningful or peak moments within YouTube's popular content to place your brand new where audiences are the most engaged. So essentially what this is telling me is that right when your YouTube video is getting really good, right at that moment where people are sort of leaning in, excited to hear what you're going to say next, they know you're not going to click away at that point because you're into it, you're invested. And right at that point, boom, that's where the ad's going to show up. I don't know if that's exactly what's going to happen, but that kind of seems like what they're going to do is they're going to wait till you're very, very invested in the show and then put those ads in those moments. Once they know, all right, they're not leaving because they need to see what happens next. And since we're talking about ads, I need to share this. Pika this week put out an ad promoting their platform. And, well, just check this out. I'm not going to play with audio because I'm sure the music's copyrighted, but you'll still get the idea. So the ad shows this person basically Pika find everything. They're putting a claw for a hand, they're playing with their cat, and then glitter ifying their cat and then blowing their cat up and making it float away. And it seems like a pretty fun video of them just having fun playing with Pika, turning their dirty laundry into butterflies and their plants into balloons. And then it takes a bit of a turn. We see from outside the window, it zooms out and it turns out they're in a post apocalyptic wasteland and everything's on fire and falling apart. And then it jumps back inside and she's having fun turning her cat poop into a little mini tree, dancing around the house and pretty much peekifying everything, while again, we're reminded that the world outside is burning down around them. A crazy person comes to the door and offers some cooked rats. And of course she peekifies that person and turns the rats into cotton candy. She then proceeds to peekify everything in her life while eating the cotton candy. And then at the end, we are reminded that she's actually sitting there eating rats. And the cat we've been seeing the whole time is a dead taxidermied cat. I guess with the tagline at the end, everything is terrible. No, it's not. So I'm really curious, what do you think of Pika's new ad? Let me know in the comments. I think this one is really interesting and I think some people are going to have some hot takes on this one. We got some fun new toys to play with. This week, 11 Labs released their SB1 Infinite soundboard. It's a soundboard, drum machine and endless ambient noise generator all in one. Describe the sound effects you want to hear. Then SB1 will generate them using our text to sound effects model. And then it turns it into a little pad that you can play with. So if you head over to 11 Labs I.O. sound effects soundboard and there's a whole bunch of preset sound effects in here, like thunder, crickets, waves. There's a drum machine in here with like various kick drums and snares. You can even map them to your keyboard. Movie sound effects, animal sounds. But you can create your own soundboards as well. So if I come down to one of these empty slots down here and click on it, it opens up this sidebar here where I can generate anything like a burp. It gives me four options and if I like one, I click add. And now it's part of my soundboard. There you go. So just a fun little AI enabled toy to play around with and it's seemingly free to use to stability. AI and ARM collaborated to release Stable Audio Small. This Stable Audio Open Small is an audio generator that can do, you know, sound effects and, you know, short song sort of sound bites, but it's so small that you can actually run it on a mobile phone. And they also open sourced it, put all the weights up on Hugging Face, put all the code up on GitHub so anybody can use it, play with it, build off it, iterate, do whatever they want with it. And I actually did find a hugging face space that shows off what it's capable of. I don't know who named it and I don't know who picked these examples, but I tested the prompt sad Trombone and here's what that sounds like. I don't know what happened at the end there. It only creates 12 seconds of audio, so I'm not sure exactly what the use case is for this on a mobile phone, but it could be run on a mobile phone. Also, if you ever wanted to know what a ghost peeing in a server room sounds like, here you go. I'm thinking maybe that end was a zipper. I Don't know. We got a couple of Updates with Chat GPT this week. The GPT 4.1 model, which previously was only available in the API, so you're able to build software and leverage it with your software and you were able to use it in the various coding apps like Cursor and Windsurf and things like that. But now that model is available directly inside of ChatGPT if you're on one of their paid plans. Now 4.1 excels at code, so if you want to have it write code directly inside of ChatGPT for you, that's really going to be the main selling point of 4.1. Now if we head over to Chat GPT in order to Access this new 4.1 again on the paid plans, you'd come up to the top left and under more models you can actually see GPT 4.1 great for quick coding and analysis and 4.1 mini faster for everyday tasks. My main go Toks are still 4.0 and 03, but if I wanted to mess around and write some code directly inside of ChatGPT, I would use 4.1. Although if I am writing code I'm usually using something like windsurf or cursor. OpenAI also rolled out a feature instead of chatgpt where you can export documents as PDFs after doing deep research and the formatting is all dialed in and it's really nice. So for example, here's some deep research that I did on a timeline of major AI advancements. If I click on this little share button at the top of my response here, you can see it pops up this window where I can either share the link or download a PDF. And of course it gives us a nice, well formatted PDF directly from ChatGPT. Now, if you're a fan of using Windsurf for the most part, you would typically use an existing model from one of the major providers. Cursor 3.7 Gemini 2.5 Pro, ChatGPT 4.1, something like that. Well, now Windsurf is actually rolling out their own model called SW E1. It's their first family of models optimized for the entire software engineering process. SWE1 is short for Software Engineer 1, and it's got three models, SUI1, which is approximately Claude 3.5 sonnet level, SUI1 Lite and SUI1 Mini. Now I'm imagining at the moment something like Claude 3.7 or Gemini 2.5 Pro are still going to be a little bit better than this model. But right now if you do use Windsurf, this model is available to all paid users and it uses 0 credits per prompt. So there's really no limit to how much you can use this model right now if this model is good enough for what you want to use it for. I also came across this little diagram here over on X from aid it called this is literally how Microsoft is winning the AI race. And I just really liked this image because as we know Microsoft has a 49% profit share in OpenAI and Microsoft. Microsoft also owns VS Code. Well, both Windsurf and Cursor, the two biggest AI coding platforms out there, were both forked from VS Code. OpenAI now owns Windsurf, they recently acquired them for $3 billion. And OpenAI was an early investor in Cursor. So they fully own Windsurf, they own a percentage of Cursor, and Microsoft essentially makes money when people use Windsurf or Cursor due to this sort of pass through from OpenAI here. Now VS code is free and open source, so I don't know if Microsoft really makes money off of VS code other than maybe some of the like paid plugins for VS code, if there even are paid plugins. But I don't really think Microsoft makes much off of VS code. But it sounds like they're going to make something off of these various forks through their relationship with OpenAI. I just found that fascinating. All right, a few last rapid fire things here. If you're a fan of the Android ecosystem, pretty much everything in that ecosystem is about to get AI. There was an Android event this week where they made a bunch of different announcements about Android ahead of Google IE next week and they announced that Gemini is coming to the Wear OS smartwatches later this year. So you'll be able to have AI conversations directly with your smartwatch. It's coming to Android Auto, allowing for hands free conversational assistance in the car. It'll be able to do things like summarize and translate your text messages for you. And if you're just bored on the drive, you could just chat about current events or get a personalized news digest, or get an answer to any burning question on your mind while you're driving. It's Also coming to TV's Gemini will also be available on your Google TV later this year. It'll be able to help with TV recommendations such as finding the best content to watch. And I assume you'll probably be able to just have conversations with your TV like you will with your car and your watch and your phone and pretty soon we'll just be talking to every inanimate object in our house. I, for one, am excited about when Gemini comes to my toaster oven, because I really need someone talk to when I'm making my toast. There's a new AI model for text to Lego. You give it a text prompt and it will actually figure out how to make that thing with Legos. Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LEGO GPT this week. And some of the examples they showed are like a sofa, a bed, a mug, a chair, a camera. Now, this was actually trained on a pretty small data set, so there's definitely a lot of things it won't create. And most of what they show in their examples are pretty basic things. But they were also able to feed the information to a robot and the robots were actually able to assemble the things for them that came out of LEGO GPT. So if we sort of fast forward through this video here, we could see at the end the two robots essentially made a very basic LEGO guitar, I'm assuming from the text prompt guitar. Now, this is available on hugging face. And I gave it the prompt wolf howling of the moon. Imagine that. And, well, this is what it generated right here. So. But we can see here the model is restricted to creating structures made of one unit, tall cuboid bricks on a 20 by 20 by 20 grid. It was trained on a data set of 21 object categories. Basket, bed, bench, birdhouse, bookshelf, bottle, bowl, bus, camera, car, chair, guitar, jar, mug, piano, pot, sofa, table, tower, train, vessel. So no like animals or really any sort of living objects. And we can see here performance on prompts from outside of these categories may be limited. Now, if you do want to use this again, you can find it by searching out LEGO GPT on hugging face. But I will warn you now, it is extremely slow. I gave it this wolf howling at the moon prompt and it probably took a good 10 minutes before it gave me back this thing. But hey, it's the worst it's ever going to be. I mean, it's pretty bad right now, but it's the worst it's ever going to be. And finally, I promised you robots, we got robots. This week, Elon on Twitter posted this video of a dancing robot. And we can see it's actually a pretty good dancer. I don't know if that is like tele operated and somebody else is doing the dance motions and it's following along or what we can see in this video is actually tethered to like this rail up here. And I came across this other video on Reddit here of the same optimus robot, but this time no tether and the video's a little bit longer and we can see that this is actually 1x speed. So this isn't like a sped up video. This is actually how fast this robot moves in real time and it's able to do all of these like really cool dance moves and the motion that these robots can do is really, really quite impressive and it doesn't actually need that tether that we were seeing in a previous screen. So pretty cool. I mean, I don't really know what the use case of dancing robots are, but it's really cool to see that robots are able to do that kind of motion now. They're just getting more and more human like every single day it seems like. But that's what I got for you this week. I think this week is sort of a calm before the storm week. Next week I think is going to be absolutely insane. We have Microsoft build up in Seattle followed immediately by Google I O. They overlapped those events in the same exact week. So we're going to be getting announcements out of Google Next week. We're going to be getting announcements out of Microsoft next week. OpenAI has a tendency to try to overshadow the announcements of some of the bigger companies, so don't be shocked if you see some OpenAI announcements next week. We're also hearing rumors that Anthropic is about to release, like Opus 4. There's also rumors about Deep Seek R2 coming out soon. Elon Musk promised that Grok 2.5 would be out like a week and a half ago and we still haven't seen it yet. But all of this is kind of bubbling up, which means there's probably going to be a really big week next week and well, really the rest of this month is probably going to be a ton of announcements. I'm going to be up in Seattle for Microsoft Build and then down in Mountain View for Google IO. And if you want to stay looped in on all of the latest AI news that's coming out, really keep your finger on the pulse. Make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure that you stay looped in and more videos like this show up in your YouTube feed. Thank you once again for tuning in. I really, really appreciate you. If you want to find some really cool AI tools, check out Future Tools IO. This is where I share all the cool AI tools I come across. Also, there is so much AI news every single week I've started to really filter it down and only share the stuff that I think is really impactful or really quite interesting. But for all of the rest of the AI news, maybe the smaller little tidbits, you can check out the AI News page where I share it all. And it's updated every single day so you'll still continue to be looped in on all the latest AI news. Again, that's FutureTools IO. And of course there's a free newsletter so if you don't want to check into the website every day, just twice a week, I'll send you an email with just the coolest tools I come across and the most important AI news that you need to know. It's totally free. You can get on board over at FutureTools IE and click this Join the free newsletter button. And thanks again for hanging out with me and nerding out with me today. It's been really really fun sharing all this cool stuff. I really really appreciate you and hopefully I will see you in the next one. Bye Bye.