MCP, Google AI Mode & Megaround | Weekly Edition
PLUS HOT AI Tools & Tutorials
Hello and welcome to our weekly roundup!
How was your week? For some reason, mine was filled with talk about model context protocol (MCP). Although the news about it is old (we covered it in November), this standard is only now capturing the people's attention on X.
Who knows, maybe it has something to do with the vibe coding trend.
If you want to know more about it, check the post below and the first link in the (Bonus) Materials:
Now, let's talk about the actual news.
This Creators’ AI Edition:
Featured Materials 🎟️
News of the week 🌍
Useful tools ⚒️
Weekly Guides 📕
AI Meme of the Week 🤡
AI Tweet of the Week 🐦
(Bonus) Materials 🎁
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Featured Material 🎟️
Google’s New AI Search Mode
Google is again trying to take its search to the next level. The first attempt wasn't the most successful, but this time around, the idea looks promising.
The company introduced AI Mode. It's an experimental feature that lets you turn your Google search into something akin to ChatGPT Search and Perplexity. Users with a One AI Premium subscription can use the feature on google.com and the Google mobile app. You can switch to the AI Mode tab after creating a search query.
AI Mode is powered by the latest Gemini 2.0 and promises to be useful for questions that require clarification or a deeper dive into a topic. Like Perplexity, Google's AI summarizes information from various sources, offering a brief answer with links to relevant sites.
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The new feature supports text, voice, and image inputs. It can process multi-part questions and provide detailed explanations or comparisons, such as product reviews or in-depth breakdowns of concepts. It could be pretty handy with the entire Google ecosystem at AI Mode's disposal.
Here's how it works in the mobile app:
As part of today’s announcement, Google also shared that it’s launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. The company says AI Overviews can now help with more complex questions, including coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries.
In addition, users no longer need to sign in to access AI Overviews.
How to Access
You can get to AI Mode by logging into Search Labs, then typing a question in the search bar and clicking the “AI Mode” tab. Or you can head to google.com/aimode to access the feature that way. On mobile devices, you can open the Google app and tap the “AI Mode” icon under the search bar on the home screen.
Whether the feature will become available to a broader range of users is unclear.
(But I'm betting that, of course, it will.)
News Of The Week 🌍
Anthropic Closes Mega Funding Round with $3.5B Investment
Anthropic secured $3.5B in funding during its latest round, achieving a valuation of $61.5B, as reported by Bloomberg. With this investment, Anthropic promises to advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its computing capacity, deepen its research, and so on.
The E series follows the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code.
Future Plans for ChatGPT Could Reach $20,000/mo
If you thought $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro was expensive, prepare to be surprised. According to The Information, OpenAI plans to charge hefty sums for specialized AI agents. Insiders are now talking about the following subscriptions:
$2,000/mo for high-income knowledge worker
$10,000/mo for software developer agent
$20,000/mo for PhD-level researcher.
But, of course, we are talking about enterprise-oriented agents. This approach can be one of OpenAI's strategies for breaking even.
Opera Unveils AI-Powered Browser Operator
Opera has revealed an AI agent that can perform tasks in the browser instead of you. In a demo video, the company showed how the agent found socks at Walmart, bought a ticket to a soccer match from a club's website, and found a flight and hotel for a trip using Booking.com. The feature will soon be available to users through its Feature Drop program.
Mistral Launches New OCR Model
Mistral announced the release of a new API for developers handling complex files. It's an optical character recognition (OCR) model which is designed to enhance text recognition across diverse languages and document types. OCR can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models (and people) to ingest. It recognizes not only text but also other objects, including photos and pictures.
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Larry Page’s New AI Startup
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, has reportedly launched a new AI startup named Dynatomics, which aims to revolutionize product manufacturing. The company operates in stealth mode and uses AI to create "highly optimized" designs for various products that can be efficiently manufactured in factories.
It's funny that the news of Page's project comes shortly after Google's other founder, Sergey Brin, also returned to activity because of AI development.
ChatGPT Now Offers Direct Code Editing on macOS
OpenAI has updated ChatGPT to enable direct code editing on macOS systems. This feature integrates with native macOS development tools to streamline developers' coding tasks. You can find the complete list of supported IDEs on OpenAI's website, but some of the more notable inclusions are Apple's own Xcode, Visual Studio Code, and offshoots of JetBrains like Android Studio and PyCharm.
Useful Tools ⚒️
Fynix – AI-powered development, from idea to execution
Quadratic AI – The AI spreadsheet with code and connections
Latitude Agents – Build self-improving AI agents
Basalt – Integrate AI into your product in seconds
Currents AI – AI social media deep research 24/7
Currents is another platform dedicated to deep research of various topics. But what I found notable here was the large amount of customization space. Currents allows you to search for information on X and Reddit (Instagram support is coming), track specific creators and brands, and quickly get users' opinions on a specific subject.
Great stuff for those who work a lot with trending content.
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Weekly Guides 📕
How to Build an AI Model: A Beginner’s Guide
How I use LLMs - by Andrej Karpathy
Creative AI Superpowers You're Not Using Yet
Time Travel POV | How to Create AI-Generated Historical Videos
AI Meme Of The Week 🤡
AI Tweet Of The Week
Not just a tweet, but the topic of the week!
(Bonus) Materials 🏆
What is MCP & why it's a big (huge) deal - by John Rush
How I built a SaaS product with 100% AI generated code
The US Army Is Using ‘CamoGPT’ to Purge DEI From Training Materials
AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving
OpenAI’s startup empire: The companies backed by its venture fund
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