12 Bullets on OpenAI's Latest Updates: The 12 Days of Shipmas

Leading to the Christmas holidays, OpenAI made a 2-week event: 12 Days of Shipmas.

Ship-mas is a pun coming from 'shipping product features'.

'Ship' is a verb meaning, 'send' (your order has shipped). In the context of software development it means 'put into production'.

Being successful in tech is all about shipping fast and OpenAI knows it.

The dust has kind of settled, so here's the brief:

DAY 1 - o1 out of preview, ChatGPT Pro launches

On the first day, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pro at $200/month.

This was not unexpected, in fact many in the industry experts expect that a license could cost $2,000/month in the future, given the more powerful models and AI agents.

The pricing reflects the substantial computing costs behind advanced AI models, particularly GPT-4, o1 and above.

DAY 2 - Open AI’s Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Research Program (alpha)

They opened up their fine-tuning capabilities to researchers.

While the market is rather small for this, it's where true deep tech innovation happens, so it's very strategically aligned.

DAY 3 - Sora and Storyboard

Sora and Storyboard are practically the next version of DALL-E (the image generation).

It's created by the same team and allows you to create 10 second clips.

It's really, really cool, yet super computationally expensive to be done well.

I still can't get an account there- the demand is very high, while not enough servers are available.

DAY 4 - Canvas

Canvas was introduced as text editing solution. It looks somewhat like Notion but has pretty neat features for coding. It's a take on Claude's artefacts, while having a character of its own.

This validated what we at Team-GPT built 1 year ago (Pages).

Great minds think alike (or more probably - follow similar user data...).

DAY 5 - ChatGPT Siri Integration on iPhone/iPad (Apple Intelligence)

Siri finally makes sense.

Kind of.

Apple's ecosystem is probably the most powerful distribution network for ChatGPT.

Now you can have ChatGPT on every iPhone in the world... except those in Europe of course, where regulation is still stiffling innovation! ??

DAY 6 - Video to advanced voice mode

They enhanced their voice capabilities with advanced WebRTC integration, paving the way for cool AI in real-time video communication.

When building my previous startup (3veta), we we creating a WebRTC project from scratch. This was some pretty complex programming, which tooks us 11 months to go to market.

Now we can have AI stuff inside the video. How fast these things evolve!

Expect advanced AI in Google Meet and Zoom very soon!!

(maybe I can finally stop attending all these meetings...)

DAY 7 - Projects for ChatGPT

Projects for ChatGPT launched, though several companies including ours had already shipped similar features. Great validation for the industry's direction - I think the right one- good organization and logical data sources.

DAY 8 - ChatGPT Search

Head to head with Google.

Finally.

The whole world has been waiting for someone to contest Google its supremacy. This is ChatGPT's Search functionality.

Problem is that it is built on Bing's infrastructure (and we all know that we all prefer to 'just Google it', rather than 'just Bing it').

OpenAI is after the biggest players on the market and it's not shy about it!

DAY 9 - o1 reasoning model into API

While it seems that OpenAI wants full supremacy over the users, in fact it wants full supremacy over the models.

They are trying to have the most capable and powerful models- and they are selling them through the API!

Last month our bill was $10K - paid to OpenAI, so they know how to monetize their models.

With o1 into the API, this is just showing how OpenAI depends on the developer community and AI startups to fill in the holes in its budget.

DAY 10 - ChatGPT calls and WhatsApp

OpenAI launched WhatsApp integration and voice calls, potentially reaching 2.5B users in regions with limited internet.

15-mins of talking are free per month.

I'm surprised OpenAI beat Meta to their own platform (WhatsApp).

DAY 11 - ChatGPT desktop apps

Desktop apps arrived, showing OpenAI's multi-platform ambitions.

These were out before but my team is sceptical - it's the closest to 'spyware' that exists. A software, listening to you mic, recording your screen, sending requests without you asking it.

Crazy!

The security concerns are out of this world...

But hey- who cares...

DAY 12 - o3 announced

The final day brought the announcement of o3.

o2 won't exist because of potential copyright issues with the mobile carrier o2.

Apparently OpenAI's o3 is still not available but it is bigger and better than anything we've seen.

Here's GPT-4o vs o1 (the best model so far).

Now here's o1 vs o3.

It's too new to have better comparisons and you don't need to understand these graphs at all to know that the newer models are much better.

The rate of improvement is incredible!

Conclusion

People often asks us: 'How is Team-GPT doing when things are changing so fast'.

The reality is that with each improvement, the industry is showing that this is not just hype.

AI is the real deal and it will enter every part of our lives in the next 5-15 years!

I'm beyond excited to be building in the Era of AI.