166 | Grok-3 is No. 1 on the AI Leaderboard, ChatGPT 4.5 and 5 and Claude 4 are around the corner, AI impact on the workforce and other important AI news for the week ending on February 21, 2025

0:00Hello, and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, grow your business, improve your business, improve your business, improve your business, very long list of rapid fire items that we need to cover. So let's get this started.

0:41The biggest news of this week is the release of Grok 3. So those of you who don't know, Grok is the large language models coming from X.ai, which is Elon Musk's AI company. The first two models, Grok 1 and Grok 2, were mainly toys that potentially provided some information if you're a HeavyX.com user, previously Twitter. But if you're not, they really didn't provide any significant value, and I don't think they deserved any real attention. But Grok 3 is a whole different kind of animal. First of all, Grok 3 was trained on Colossus, which is the largest supercomputer ever built. It has more than 100 ,000 GPUs, going up to 200 ,000 right now as we speak.

1:24So they've trained it on a huge computer with a huge amount of data, and the model immediately achieves very powerful capabilities. First of all, they released several different models. There is Grok 3, Grok 3 Mini, like many of the other models, just a smaller, faster, less expensive variation of the same model. They also released Grok 3 Reasoning, Grok 3 Mini reasoning, again, aligning with the new trend of reasoning models. And they've also released a deep research capability, just like all the other recent tools. We're going to talk about that as well. So immediately at the release, Grok shared that they basically beat all the other models on the major benchmarks that are out there today, both the AIM for math and GPQA for PhD level science problems, as well as some other benchmarks.

2:10Now, as I mentioned, they also released deep research and they released what they called think and big brain models that are coming with some more advanced thinking capabilities. And they're also about to release live voice mode in the next couple of weeks. And an enterprise API access level is also coming up in the next few weeks. Now, in addition, they're planning to open source Grok 2. So the previous model, as soon as they finalized the deployment of Grok 3, We heard a similar approach from Sam Altman a few weeks ago saying that they were on the wrong side of history of not releasing their models as open source.

2:45So OpenAI is going to do the same thing. They're going to start releasing older models, not their latest frontier models as open source. I think this doesn't make a big difference because the most advanced open source models are more advanced than their previous models. But the open source world will gain access to some additional models. Now, as you heard me say in the past, I think these benchmarks are highly overrated because they're very specific and you can train the models on them. And they actually don't mean anything for real life. But what does mean a lot for real life is the LMSys chatbot arena, which we talked about many times in the past.

3:18For those of you who don't know what it is, the chatbot arena basically is a blind test. It gives a user, any user, you can go there tomorrow and do it as well. You put in a prompt and you get two results. And without knowing which result is which model, you can pick the one you like better. Just less than 24 hours after releasing Grok, Grok claimed the number one spot at the Chaput Arena. So more people across multiple use cases around the world find Grok3 to be a better model than any other model out there right now. Now, Andres Karpathy, who is a former leading OpenAI engineer and a highly appreciated AI scientist, said Grok3 plus thinking feels somewhere around the state-of-the-art territory of OpenAI's strongest models and slightly better than DeepSeek R1 and Gemini 2 flash thinking.

4:04So somebody who is a serious person in the AI field also thinks that this is a serious contender and not just the masses using it on the day-to-day. By the way, I think the masses using it on the day-to-day are more important than any expert because they're actually using it for real use cases. Now, in parallel to this, XAI has dramatically changed their pricing model in a very confusing way, I must say. First of all, they've increased their premium plus level subscription, which gives you access to basically everything from a$40 to$50 instead of$22 that it was before with an annual subscription going to$350 to$395.

4:41And that's also up from the previous annual subscription. Now, when I say a range of pricing, it's really confusing because in different places, X actually has different pricing. So their support page says$50 a month, The signup page says$48 a month and the actual checkout showing$40 a month. So I don't know if this is just a mistake because they were worried about other stuff in the release or they're just testing different price points. But the reality is they dramatically increase their subscription level. If you remember, the highest subscription level right now on OpenAI is$200 a month. So they're still not there and they're providing highly comparable capabilities in Grok 3 right now.

5:18Now, in parallel to all of this, in addition to releasing, again, right now, maybe the best model on the planet, XAI is seeking a massive funding round of another$10 billion with a proposed valuation of$75 billion. If they raise that, which I don't have a doubt that they will, A, because it's Elon and B, because they now have the leading frontier model in the world, it would bring their total funding to$22.4 billion. dollars. Now, what's amazing about this achievement is that XAI started the development game of new frontier models very, very late, and they were able to accelerate their process to delivering a model that is top of the line in the shortest amount of time compared to any other model out there.

6:01That's following the development of the Colossus model in a few months, which usually takes normal companies a year and a half to develop. So they definitely found ways to A, build faster and better hardware, as well as develop the software side of things and the AI models right now faster than anybody else. I already tested Grok on several different use cases, including deep research, and I was seriously impressed. It's a real model that provides real results. And the deep research model of it is actually really, really cool because it lets you see how it's thinking and doing its research process, similar to how O3 and DeepSeek is showing you how they're thinking, but combined with the actual search results themselves.

6:38So a very cool approach that allows you to actually see what the model is doing and allows you to provide better inputs on how to make the search better because you know what's happening behind the scenes. I highly recommend to go and test it out. Right now it's available for free, but it probably won't be for long, at least not at a high volume. So if you want to check it out, just go to Grok, sign up and check it out right now. Now, as I mentioned, there are a lot of rumors on new releases and capabilities that are coming out from other companies in the next few weeks. So Claude has shared that they're about to release Claude 4 that has a lot of the capabilities that it was lacking, like reasoning capabilities similar to 01 and 03 and a lot of other models right now, web search capabilities, hallelujah.

7:17Maybe the thing that troubled me the most while using Cloud regularly is that it didn't have web access. So that's coming in Cloud 4 and a lot of other small steps. And all of that was revealed by somebody drilling into their Cloud iOS app and finding new icons that are going to appear in the next version. So there's going to be a lot of new capabilities coming up from Claude. I must admit that I'm surprised it's not out yet. Anthropic has been surprisingly quiet with all the madness of releases in the last few months. And so I'm anticipating that they have something really big to release that if I have to guess, will do more than just align with everybody else's capabilities of web access and deep research and reasoning, but probably will add more stuff that we haven't seen before.

7:59And that's presumably coming in the next few weeks. And the rumors are saying that the release may come in the next few weeks or a few months. The company itself has not provided any timeline, but these are the rumors that are going around the industry right now. Now, two other interesting things are happening in the industry, and these are quasi rapid fire items, but I will roll them in right now with what's happening in the industry and coming releases and funding rounds. So Superintelligence, the company founded by Ilya Suskover, who was one of the co-founders in OpenAI, is in negotiation to raise another billion dollar, which with a$30 billion valuation, they just raised a similar amount not too long ago.

8:36So this would be their second fundraising in less than six months without any clear plans to revenue or even path to a product. But just because of the people that are leading that research, they're going to probably raise that amount of money. Another interesting person who left OpenAI who finally shared what they're doing or share what they're doing is Mira Morati. She was the former CTO. She left OpenAI in October for a stealth startup. And now she finally revealed what they're about to do, or maybe kind of revealed what they're about to do. So their new company name is going to be Thinking Machine Lab.

9:07And she has attracted several leading developers, such as John Shulman, who's another co-founder from OpenAI, and Barrett Zoff, who was the ex-chief research officer. So a lot of big figures, but they haven't really shared exactly what they're going to do. What they said is that they're going to close the gap between the capabilities that are now saved to the leading research labs with the actual needs of people in the industry with a focus of breakthrough applications, science and programming. And so it's very vague. There's nothing really clear there. If you go and read the actual page, it's a lot of mumbo jumbo that doesn't really explain what they're going to do.

9:45I don't know if they're doing that on purpose or they're doing that as part of raising funds, which will not surprise me. But right now, the only thing that's clear is that there's some serious hitters there. And just like Ilya Saskover, they will probably raise the amount of money that they're trying to raise. Another company that's making a big splash again is Mistral. We talked about them many times on this podcast. They're a French company and they just hit 1 million downloads in just 14 days after launching their iOS app. So a big success from their perspective. And this comes because the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has suggested to French citizens to go and download the app in his speech in the Paris conference just less than two weeks ago.

10:28So that drove immediate huge amount of downloads to the French application, mostly by French people. Very little people outside of France actually downloaded that, but they're definitely doing something right, and they actually have a very powerful and capable model. The other interesting piece of news about Mistral is that they're making a very strategic, strong pivot into the enterprise world. We talked about this as well, but now we know that they're already working with companies like Stellantis and Franz Travail and European defense company Helsing. So really big clients are using their technology.

11:02One of the biggest benefits of Mistral enterprise capabilities is that you can install it on premise and actually run it on your own servers, not exposing your data to anything outside your existing environment. And that is obviously very attractive to a lot of other companies. Now, going back to releases, Perplexity has launched their deep research mode. So another deep research capability, similar to the one we have from Google and u.com and OpenAI, et cetera. The biggest difference is that it's available to free users. By the way, u.com is another platform where you get very powerful deep research capability for free.

11:37So the perplexity deep research model was able to achieve a 21.1 score on humanity's last exam, which we talked about in previous shows, outperforming Google Gemini thinking at 6.2 % and GPT-40 at 3.3%, but still behind OpenAI's deep research at 26.6%. I don't think Grok has taken the test or if they haven't shared the score, which means they probably didn't score very high. Now, the other cool thing in the perplexity deep research tool is to actually provide answers faster than both Google and OpenAI. Google takes a few minutes, OpenAI the same thing, and this usually takes about a minute, up to two minutes to actually give you the researched answers.

12:14So definitely worth using. And as I mentioned, if you don't have any paid service, that's a very good option to go after. Right now, it's only on the web, but they're planning to release it to their Mac, iOS, and Android applications. Now, I want to stop for a second to talk a little bit about this deep research madness, but say how significant this is. Those of you who haven't use any of the deep research tools. They're now available, as I mentioned, from Google, Gemini, if you have the personal pro version, not the business one. I don't know why it's not on the business one. It's actually really annoying as a business user of Google as well.

12:46It's also available from OpenAI, but only on the$200 a month licensing level. They said that they will open it with a limited access to the lower levels, but that hasn't happened yet, at least not for me. u.com, as I mentioned, which had that functionality for a very long time, is a very good free option. They also have a premium option as well. DeepSeek has the same thing and now Grok. The biggest deal about these tools is that they involve an agentic capability of understanding what is it that you're trying to find, understanding the goal, defining multiple steps of research, and then doing those steps of research.

13:17And only after they're done, aggregating the information and providing an answer. So instead of a very quick, shallow answer, you get a well-researched, in-depth answer that sometimes is a summary of hundreds of websites visited. So a work that used to take a person hours or maybe days to do is now done by these tools in just a few minutes. And it's an extremely powerful capability to find information and do in-depth research on any topic. And I highly recommend you to try the ones, at least the free ones from deepseek, you.com, Grok, and now Perplexity. Now let's switch gears to the next big item, which is what's happening with different AI tools around the world right now and how many people are actually using them.

13:55So the first one to talk about is obviously the 800-pound gorilla, which is OpenAI. Their CEO, Brad Lightcup, shared that they have reached a staggering 400 million weekly active users on the platform, and they're definitely leading ahead of everybody else. Enterprise adoption has doubled since September of 2024, so less than two quarters ago. Their enterprise users has doubled with over 2 million businesses now using ChatGPT at work. Major corporations like Morgan Stanley, Uber, T-Mobile are using OpenAI as their AI infrastructure. And they're now getting into government agencies. And we talked about that in the past few shows.

14:34But now the USAID is implementing Chachapiti Enterprise in their administrative work. Now, we said last week already, but I'm going to mention this as we started talking about what releases are coming. GPT 4.5 is imminent. It's going to be released most likely this coming Monday. So if you're listening to the show this weekend, September 22nd or 23rd, it's probably before, but you might already have access to GPT 4.5 if you listen to that after that. And GPT 5 is planned right now. The rumors talk about beginning of May. So just around the corner. If you remember, GPT 5 is supposed to be unifying the universe of the GPT models and the reasoning models, the O series of models, while eliminating the drop-down menu and just giving us a great user experience that will have a lot of intelligence and will figure out in the back end what it actually needs to do.

15:22I cannot wait to see what that's going to do. I assume Pt4.5 and definitely GPT5 will take the leading spot in the LMSys chatbot arena and will remove Grok from there, but I obviously don't know that and time will tell. Now a new survey from Future Publishing has looked at other applications and how they're doing around the world. So ChatGPT maintains the first position as the most popular two, with 37 % of people surveyed saying that they're using it regularly, but only showing a modest growth of 7 % from the last time they did the survey. Google Gemini, on the other hand, is taking second place with 22%, but doubling the previous survey that they have done.

16:02Microsoft Copilot takes number three with 20%. I think that's not totally fair because Microsoft Copilot is available with every Microsoft license out there. So this might be like people are measuring Meta's daily users on AI, which is everything Meta is doing has AI built into it. So I don't think that's a totally fair comparison, but still in this survey, the number three with 20%. Grammarly with 20 % of users being used daily. I use Grammarly all the time. I've been using it way before the AI craze started and probably a lot of you as well. And maybe you don't consider that an AI solution, but it is an AI solution.

16:34A surprising next thing is DALI, the image generation tool from OpenAI with 9.5 % of the people saying they're using it. The reason I'm saying it's surprising is that there are much, much better image generation tools that are absolutely free. I think it's the number one ranked image generation tool just because it's a part of ChatGPT that has the highest deployment in the world. And that's why more people are aware of it. The following place is tied by Grim Studio, Mid Journey, and Stable Diffusion with 8.5 % of users. All of them are significantly better image generator than Dali, but yet ranked lower.

17:10Again, I think just people don't know about them. And then the emerging platforms that jumped into the list in this survey compared to the previous server, iPerplexity at 11%, Claude at 10%, and Jasper at 9%. So this is telling you that there's still very low exposure to AI tools on a random survey across people that are not necessarily in the tech industry and so on. So the top tool, the big dog, OpenAI is only used by 37 % of people who were surveyed with most of the other stuff in single digits. And to our next big topic, which is the impact and the usage of AI at work. And where is this going?

17:46We've been tackling this topic in several of the recent news shows, but there's some interesting new facts that I want to share with you. First of all, a comprehensive study from Stanford University Research, finds that 30.1 % of US workers are currently using generative AI tools in their jobs as of December of 2024. So this is a very recent survey. Nearly 50 % of workers with graduate degrees use AI at work. 37 % of college graduates utilize AI technology. And it is very clear that AI usage increases significantly as the income increases. There's a big jump with people making more than$50 ,000 a year and almost 50 % of workers earning$200 ,000 or more use AI tools at work.

18:29Now, IT services are leading as the top industry that is using AI with more than 60 % of employees saying they're using it, followed by real estate construction and education with more than 40%, which is actually surprising. And the sectors with the least amount of usage are agriculture, mining, and government that are using it the least. Now, the most interesting thing is that workers report that used to take them 90 minutes now take them 30 minutes on average using AI, meaning a 3x improvement on efficiency. So I said that many times before in this show, even if AI development stops today and we don't get better models, and even with people that are not fully knowing how to utilize the technology, they're seeing a 3x efficiency improvement.

19:12That's obviously on specific tasks, but it tells you how profound the implications of this technology is going to be on the future of work. Now let's talk a little bit about potential negative implications beyond job loss, which we're going to talk about in a minute. And we talked about many times in the past, but Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon has actually published a research on February 18 that reveals concerning trends about AI's impacts on workplace cognitive abilities. So they have done a survey of 319 knowledge workers in different levels and in different industries. And they're finding that workers who use AI increasingly rely on AI tools instead of actually thinking of and analyzing the task.

19:50People focus mostly on verifying the AI outputs and they have higher and higher confidence of the AI outputs, which correlates to further decreased critical engagement in the actual tasks that they're doing. And the research identifies shifts in the worker's approach to tasks, moving from information gathering and cognitive analysis to mere verification of results, reduction in active problem solving in favor of just response and integration of results, and transition from task execution to task supervision. Now, this is very obvious that this would happen. There are good benefits from that. We talked about this, huge efficiencies.

20:30there are huge disadvantage in our ability to think critically. And I think the key thing that we have to understand both as individuals and people, as well as employees and definitely employers, is that we have to find a way to elevate the cognitive thinking level to a different level while allowing the AI to just do the tasks. But the reality is people are lazy and they just let the AI do the entire work, whether it's going to be better or worse than them being a part of the process. This is obviously really alarming on multiple levels. And it's even more alarming by the fact that Microsoft is the leading researcher on this when they are one of the largest companies providing AI tools to employees right now.

21:12Now, going back to job loss, USA Today is reporting that major tech companies are continuing layoffs in the beginning of 2025, with Meta leading the charge letting go of 3 ,000 employees, which is 5 % of their global staff, Workday laying off 1 ,750 employees, which is 8.5 % of their staff, and other companies as well. The somewhat good news is that tech layoffs has slowed down dramatically compared to the same time last year. So these companies are still laying off employees, but at a significantly slower pace than they did a year ago. And their optimistic overall outlook for hiring in 2025, not just in the tech industry.

21:49So Zip Recruiter survey reveals that tech sector is bullish on hiring new employees, mostly because of the economical terms with the reduction of interest rates and growth in the economy. Now, staying on the topic of employment, a Y Combinator backed startup called Firecrawl has posted a job specifically for an AI agent, and they were willing to pay that AI agent$10 ,000 to$15 ,000 annually. Now, the position, it was looking for an agent that can autonomously research, search trending models and build sample apps. They received about 50 AI agent applications by different people for that task before they pulled it off.

22:28And they are claiming that they actually did this as part of the recruiting strategy for human AI engineers. Now, this may sound like science fiction to you, but this is coming, meaning companies will look for AI agents and will find AI agents that will do tasks that otherwise employees would do. And it would pay for the developers and the people who create, deploy, and run these agents X number of dollars less than they would pay a human employee to get the job done without actually having to develop it in-house. Now, you may or may not believe me that this is what I think, but the reality is that Workday, one of the largest HR management companies in the world, just launched what they call Workday Agent System of Record, which is a platform that allows enterprises to manage and monitor the work of their AI agents, both workday native and third party in a centralized control center.

23:18So what does that tell you? It tells you that one of the largest companies in the world that is building a platform to manage employees is now looking to add the ability to manage agents because they're going to be a part of the workforce. That will obviously continue to a whole industry of, like I said, hiring AI agents from third party suppliers to do different works. I I anticipate that there's going to be platforms like Fiverr and Upwork that will just offer millions of AI agents that can do different tasks and will get reviews and you'll be able to hire them for whatever you want, either on your personal life or on an enterprise level.

23:52So what does that tell us? It tells us that the workforce is going to change dramatically and it's going to impact everything that we know from the way we hire to the way we fire, to the way we train, to the way we manage the workforce, because the workforce itself is going to be comprised of both humans and AI agents that will have to work together. And as the time goes on, there's going to be more and more AI agents and less people. And the people will have to find different tasks to focus on. And as we've seen, the people are currently on their own letting go of tasks and transferring over to AI, giving more and more trust in the AI capabilities.

24:26This is ringing so many alarm bells in my head, but we will have to figure this out. And we'll have to figure this out very, very fast. My personal suggestion to people, learn how AI works, understand where you provide value, where you can learn new things to provide even more value, either on your own or by deploying AI tools and capabilities and learning how to manage them in the most effective way, because that is going to be the most powerful capability in the next few years. Switching gears to the robotics world, which we talked about a lot in the past, the robotics world, on one hand, very exciting.

25:00On the other hand, is a very high risk to blue-collar jobs. So Figure AI, which is one of the leading robotics companies, has just unveiled Helix. It's a new AI model that they have developed that they call a Vision Language Action VLA model that enables humanoid robots to respond to voice commands and the surrounding environment around them. This comes only two weeks after they more or less fired OpenAI. They were using OpenAI models before that in order to drive their robots. And now they're announcing their own in-house development that they're claiming that is more suitable for running the robotics world.