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  • 🤖 OpenAI Bets Big on GPT-4.5's Emotional Intelligence

🤖 OpenAI Bets Big on GPT-4.5's Emotional Intelligence

Plus: Anthropic Secures Funding and Amazon Reinvents Alexa

March 06, 2025

Hello AI Enthusiast,

In the last seven days OpenAI has released GPT-4.5, its largest and most expensive model to date, meanwhile, Anthropic continues its impressive growth trajectory with a massive funding round, and Amazon has joined the AI assistant race with Alexa+. Let's dive into what these developments mean.

Before we dive into this week's news, have you ever wondered what your current AI skill level is? Our free AI Level Assessment helps you understand where you stand and what you need to learn next. This test evaluates both your knowledge and practical habits with AI technology. In just 5 minutes, you'll receive a personalized report with insights on your strengths and areas for improvement.

The Big Picture 🔊

OpenAI Debuts GPT-4.5

OpenAI has released GPT-4.5, its largest AI model to date. Available first to Pro subscribers, it shows improved accuracy, reduced hallucinations, and "emotional intelligence" but delivers mixed performance compared to specialized reasoning models. With API costs of $75/million input tokens and $150/million output tokens, far higher than GPT-4o, OpenAI admits uncertainty about its long-term API availability.

Gianluca Belloni
Gianluca BelloniCMO and Marketing Nomad

GPT-4.5's improved emotional intelligence comes at a steep price. 30x more expensive than GPT-4o. Most businesses could achieve similar results through clever prompting of cheaper models.

This suggests OpenAI is hitting diminishing returns with traditional scaling, especially compared to competitors achieving comparable results with less investment. Is better AI "EQ" worth the massive computing costs, or just an expensive stepping stone toward GPT-5?

What's your take on AI assistants with more "emotional intelligence"?

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Anthropic Raises $3.5B at $61.5B Valuation

Anthropic has secured $3.5 billion in Series E funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, reaching a $61.5 billion valuation. Following the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code, the investment will advance AI development, expand compute capacity, enhance alignment research, and accelerate international growth.

Helin Yontar
Helin YontarCPO and Polyglot

Anthropic is achieving comparable or superior results with significantly less investment than OpenAI. Their B2B focus and excellence in coding applications is proving valuable, while owning their technology stack lets them create specialized products rather than just wrapping others' models.

Their Amazon partnership for Alexa+ shows they're strongly positioned despite being the "second" player in the market.

Amazon Introduces Alexa+

Amazon has unveiled Alexa+, a next-generation assistant powered by generative AI. The upgraded system offers more natural conversations, personalization, and can complete tasks across thousands of services through new "expert" systems and agentic capabilities. Priced at $19.99 monthly but free for Prime members, Alexa+ will begin rolling out in the US within weeks.

Gianluca Mauro
Gianluca MauroFounder and AI Rockstar

Amazon's vision of Alexa+ autonomously completing complex tasks like booking repairs sounds impressive but likely unrealistic. How would it handle your availability or service providers without perfect online systems?

The real story is Amazon's strategy. Partnering with Anthropic instead of building in-house capabilities (similar to Microsoft with OpenAI) and offering the service free with Prime while competitors charge $20/month. This pricing approach, rather than technical capabilities, may be their true competitive advantage.

Bits and Bobs 🗞️

  • Microsoft has launched Dragon Copilot, an AI tool designed to alleviate clinician burnout by enhancing patient care through voice and ambient AI technologies.

  • OpenAI is investing $50 million in funding and tools to support researchers, educators, and students through the NextGenAI initiative.

  • Amazon hinted at developing a new generation of AI devices, including possibly Alexa-enabled smart glasses, to compete with hardware like Meta's Ray-Bans.

  • Opera is testing a new feature called Browser Operator, an AI agent integrated directly into the browser to perform web tasks, enhance user privacy, and run locally on the device.

  • AI is disrupting SEO-based business models by delivering instant answers, causing traffic declines for websites that relied on search engine visibility while community-driven platforms continue to grow.

  • AI coding tools are boosting developer efficiency by 10-20%, enabling leaner teams and shifting hiring priorities from coding skills to problem-solving and AI prompting abilities.

Tribal News🫂

Last week, we hosted the Demo Day for the 10th edition of our GenAI Project Bootcamp. We’re always amazed by what our students build and the passion they put into their projects. Congrats, folks!

From Our Founder’s Channels 🤳

Want to learn more about what’s new in GPT-4.5? Check out Gianluca’s TikTok.

@gianluca.mauro

Everything you need to know about GPT 4.5 #Ai #learnontiktok #artificialintelligence #business #machinelearning #product #ux #entrepreneur... See more

LOLgorithms 😂

Not sure if this will make her happily ever after.

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