Hi Reader,

Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week:

Anthropic’s Claude expands with Max Plan, Research feature, and Google Workspace integration - announcement​

Anthropic just dropped a trifecta of updates that significantly expand Claude’s capabilities and target different user segments.

The new Research feature transforms Claude from a static model into an autonomous agent that conducts multiple searches building on previous findings, exploring different angles automatically. Initially available in early beta only to Max, Team, and Enterprise plans in the US, Japan, and Brazil, (meh, you can access with a VPN) - it's comparable to similar offerings from OpenAI and Google and feels about the same to me. It can also do regular web search as well as deep research.

Anthropic expanded it's Google Workspace integration, connecting Claude with Gmail, Calendar, as well as Google Docs. This creates context-aware AI that can scan emails, review documents, and see calendar commitments without manual uploads. Available in beta to all paid users (with admin approval for Team and Enterprise). I've played with it a my only complaint is that it only works on one google account and it's all read only.

Rounding out the updates, the new Max Plan targets heavy AI users bumping against Pro tier limits: $100/month for 5× the Pro limits or $200/month for a massive 20× increase. Unlike OpenAI’s approach where their top tier subscribers get access to more powerful models, Anthropic’s Max Plan is purely about increased usage and priority access to new features.

Like OpenAI they don't let you bump it up for only one user on a team plan though. Yeah, I asked - my team are lovely and all but I shed a tear when looking at how much I spend on AI. And no, I don't have a problem - it's legitimate research for my readers, customers and students...

OpenAI o3 takes the lead in coding benchmarks - announcement​

Earlier today, OpenAI introduced o3 and o4-mini, and their benchmark numbers are strong - o3-high beats Gemini 2.5 on the Aider Polyglot benchmark by as much as Gemini 2.5 pro beat Claude 3.7 Sonnet (~8%). Which is a weird sentence to read and write - essentially they crushed the model that was released in March which crushed the model that was released in February. o4-mini is coming in 3rd at only three times more the price of Gemini 2.5 pro which is second. You'll need to spend nearly 20x what you would with gemini, so probably only for really tough problems.

There are lots of jokes about OpenAI's poor naming conventions as o4 is not 4o and 4.1 was released after 4.5 and whatever.

Speaking of 4.1, a few days earlier OpenAI released a 4.1 and 4.1-mini (only in the API, not in ChatGPT) as an upgrade to 4o and 4o-mini. They don’t push any benchmarks but they are a big step up in bang for buck. 4.1 is significantly stronger and 20% cheaper than 4o so if you’re using 4o in any projects it’s probably a good upgrade. You definitely would want your own evals setup to test it first though. 4.1-mini is a lot stronger than 4o mini so they have doubled(ish) the price and then released a 4.1-nano that is weaker but 2/3 the price.

Try saying that ten times fast. The main take away is
a) use the new stuff, it's mostly smarter and cheaper
b) build up internal evaluations so you can cheaply test new models when they come out and see if they work for your use case.

OpenAI launches image library and expanded memory

This week is another one of those "OpenAI announces a new thing every day" launch that they like to do occasionally. Some other things to notice:

They added an Image Library feature to ChatGPT that gives users a centralized space to view, organize, and edit all their generated creations in one place. The feature is available to everyone on both web and mobile platforms. Yet more reason to send your unpublished photos to ChatGPT which will be incorporated into their training data unless you pay them money and press the right buttons.

They also released a major memory upgrade. Where ChatGPT previously could only remember a limited set of specific facts about users, it now can reference your entire chat history to personalize responses. The interface now features two separate toggles: the original “Reference saved memories” for those key facts, and a new “Reference chat history” option that lets ChatGPT draw from everything you’ve ever discussed. The full memory feature is rolling out first to Plus and Pro users, though notably not in the EU, UK, and associated regions—likely due to regulatory concerns.

Both features get even more interesting when you connect them to reports that OpenAI is developing an X-like social media platform - article. According to TechCrunch, there’s already an internal prototype focused specifically on ChatGPT’s image generation with a social feed. I guess they got a bit annoyed when Elon offered to purchase ChatGPT for 88 billion (or whatever).

OpenAI also released codex which is a command line tool, similar to Claude Code but without as many features and only using OpenAI models. It's proper open source and I hope someone makes a pull request to introduce MCP servers to it.

cheers,

JV

PS: Busy times across all the projects, highlight of the week was a Fundsorter team meeting where we locked in a launch for mid may.