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🔓 Friday’s AI Report:

1. 🚀 OpenAI’s o3-mini levels up

2. 💼 In partnership with Innovating with AI

3. 👀 Ex-OpenAI co-founder quits rival for another?

4. ❤️ Tinder turns to AI… in desperation?

5. 🏄‍♀️ In partnership with Surfshark

6. ⚙️ Trending AI Tools

7. 🏗️ Practical AI Applications

8. 📑 Recommended Resources

Read Time: 5 minutes

🎙️ Catch our exclusive interview with AI expert Isar Meitis—the go-to business transformation adviser for CEOs—as he shares his thoughts on the future of AI implementation, job displacement, ethics, and more…
➡️ Watch it here ⬅️

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LATEST IN AI

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🚀 OpenAI’s o3-mini levels up

🚨 Our Report — After releasing its first, smaller reasoning model—o3-mini—last week, OpenAI has announced it has just changed how the model responds to queries, meaning it will now show users its “thought” process, before giving its answer.

🔓 Key Points:

• All o3-mini users will now be able to see a clear “chain of thought” that shows how the model has arrived at its answer, to “make it easier to understand how the model thinks," giving users “confidence in its responses."

• In a preview, when a user asked, “Why isn’t it Friday?” it showed its logical train of thought, but also considered the sentiment of the question, concluding it was humorous, so responded with a mix of logic and fun.

• Plus, o3-mini will now also search and fetch data from the web, in real-time, providing links to sources, which will enhance the reliability of its answers, and give users greater transparency.

🔐 Relevance — There’s no doubt that this update will provide users with more transparency, reliability, and a smoother, interactive experience, but it does come (suspiciously?) soon after Chinese rival, DeepSeek, released its own reasoning model, R1, which shows a similar “chain of thought” experience, except R1 displays its full thought process—providing even greater transparency—whereas o3-mini just shows a brief, top-line summary of its thoughts, as OpenAI wants to “find a balance while protecting its competitive edge.”

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TOGETHER WITH INNOVATING WITH AI

💼 Want to become an AI Consultant?

The AI consulting market is about to grow by a factor of 8X – from $6.9B to $54.7B in 2032.

But how does an AI enthusiast become an AI consultant?

How well you answer that question makes the difference between just “having AI ideas” and being handsomely compensated for your contribution to an organization’s AI transformation.

Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone – our friends at Innovating with AI have welcomed 300 new students into The AI Consultancy Project, their new program that trains you to build a business as an AI consultant.

Some of the highlights current students are excited about:

• The tools and frameworks to find clients and deliver top-notch services

• A 6-month plan to build a 6-figure AI consulting business

• Students getting their first AI client in as little as 3 days

And, as a reader of The AI Report, you get early access to the next enrollment cycle.

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👀 Ex-OpenAI co-founder quits rival for another?

🚨 Our Report — One of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders and respected researcher, John Schulman, who quit OpenAI to join its rival, Anthropic, in August last year—has now left Anthropic (after just five months) to reportedly join OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, at her stealth startup.

🔓 Key Points:

• Although it’s unclear why Schulman left Anthropic so quickly, and what his role will be at Murati’s company, he did confirm that he wanted to go with something he “found extremely compelling.”  

• Co-founder Schulman—who originally led the team that developed ChatGPT—left OpenAI to focus on more “hands-on” technical work and joined a wave of senior figures who all quit around the same time (including Murati).

• Murati left OpenAI in September to start her own company alongside Ilya Sutskever, who founded ‘Safe Superintelligence’, Andrej Karpathy, who launched ‘Eureka Labs’, and Vicki Cheung, who co-founded ‘Gantry.’

🔐 Relevance — Although little is known about Murati’s start-up, reports say it could be an intelligent “thinking machines” lab, which has secured $100M in funding and has already made headlines for poaching other top-tier talent from OpenAI, aside from Schulman—including Jonathan Lachman, ex-head of special projects, Christian Gibson, part of the supercomputing team, and Mario Saltarelli, a longtime IT manager—which perhaps highlights Murati’s growing influence in the AI space.

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❤️ Tinder turns to AI… in desperation?

• Dating app Tinder is launching an AI feature to help users connect with “better quality matches” to stay competitive, attract more singletons, and reverse its declining user figures (active users are down 10%, YoY).

• The new feature is an AI-powered match recommendation tool, which will give users more “personalized and engaging” connections and will join the existing AI photo feature, which helps users pick their profile pictures.

• This comes as online dating apps, generally, are facing tough times as singles complain about safety and privacy concerns, bad behavior from other app users, and giving them nothing more than an illusion of choice.

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TOGETHER WITH SURFSHARK

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As a valued partner, we want you to experience the peace of mind that comes with Surfshark ONE. Safeguard your online presence for just 2.49$/month + 4 extra months (this deal will end soon).

TRENDING AI TOOLS

1. Concierge is an AI Assistant that talks to your favorite software tools, in real-time ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ / 5 (Product Hunt)

2. SEObot is an AI-driven SEO tool that revolutionizes SEO tasks

3. Anonysis is for customizable surveys and AI analysis

PRACTICAL AI

PRO COMMUNITY

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Our Pro Community is a community for our AI Report subscribers.

If you’re looking for ways to use AI to cut time and make more, come join our Pro Community: It’s a space filled with like-minded people, all sharing ideas, insights, and inspiration around AI.

Why join our exclusive Pro Community?

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📰 Each week, you’ll get a premium AI-focused newsletter with in-depth case studies, practical ways to utilize AI, and expert resources to further your knowledge.

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🕐 And, you’ll get early access to podcast episodes, live events, and accreditation modules worth over $500, for nothing.

Subscribe to our Pro Community for premium networking opportunities, tools, insights, and tactics.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

PODCASTS

How to Automate & Scale Your Business with AI (Step-by-Step Guide)

In this episode, Liam chats to Isar Meitis—CEO of Multiplai (which provides businesses with AI-first strategies that streamline operations) and go-to business transformation adviser for CEOs—about the future of AI implementation, job displacement, ethics, and more.

QUICK HITS

• Mistral’s AI assistant is on iOS and Android

• Google adds digital watermarks to images

• Amazon’s $100B AI plan for 2025

FRIDAY’S Q&A

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

“Are we on the verge of creating a CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) system that’s "self-aware?"

THIS WEEKS ANSWER:

In short, no, we don’t think so. While CGI has rapidly advanced over the last year and can leverage AI tools to—for example—automate processes and enhance imagery realism, these systems are not primarily designed for cognition or consciousness.

This is because they operate on statistical pattern recognition as opposed to self-awareness—which involves recognizing subjective experiences, emotions, and a sense of self. None of these ‘feelings’ can be found in a statistical pattern, hiding within a set of data.

Behaviorists and cognitive scientists have struggled for years—and are still struggling—to explain human self-awareness and consciousness, so we can’t imagine how difficult it must be to engineer it in AI systems.

What we are likely to see in the near future, though, is more interactive, hyper-realistic characters that can emulate more human-like emotions and responses, creating more immersive experiences. But this isn’t self-awareness, this is just sophisticated illusions of intelligence.

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