Week 13 Smart Homes and more

FBI Warning:  Latest scam may be the more daring yet

https://www.al.com/news/2025/04/fbi-warning-latest-scam-may-be-most-daring-yet.html 

FBI Scam Warning: Protect Yourself!

What's Happening:

• Criminals are pretending to be the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

• They target people who have already lost money in scams before.

• The scam often starts through an email, phone call, or social media message offering help to recover your lost money — but it’s fake.

How the Scam Works:

• A fake female persona joins fraud support groups online, pretending to be a past victim.

• She recommends contacting a fake FBI official (often named “Jaime Quin”).

• The fake official asks for personal information like bank account numbers or Social Security numbers — and steals more money.

Important Warnings:

• The real IC3 will never contact you directly by phone, email, or social media.

• IC3 will never ask for payment to recover lost money.

• Be very suspicious of anyone online asking for money or personal information.

How to Stay Safe:

• Never send money, gift cards, or cryptocurrency to someone you don't know personally.

• If you think you’ve been targeted, report it at www.ic3.gov.

• Save any information about the scammer (emails, phone numbers, websites) when reporting.

AI models released in 2025

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/the-hottest-ai-models-what-they-do-and-how-to-use-them/

This article summarized the AI models of 2024 and 2025.  They are growing like weeds!  Note that the top one (Gemini 2.5) is at the top of the list.  How many have you tried?  Which are your favorites?

Google Gemini 2.5

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, a reasoning model, excels at building web apps and code agents according to Google. However, it underperforms on one popular coding benchmark compared to Claude Sonnet 3.7. The model requires a $20 monthly Gemini Advanced subscription.

ChatGPT-4o image generator

OpenAI has upgraded its existing GPT-4o model to generate images, not just text. The souped-up model soon went viral for transforming images into Studio Ghibli-style anime, despite obvious copyright concerns. Accessing GPT-4o requires, at minimum, a $20 per month ChatGPT Plus subscription.

Stability AI’s Stable Virtual Camera

Image-generation startup Stability AI has launched a model that the company says can generate 3D scenes and camera angles from a single 2D image. However, it still struggles with scenes featuring more complex elements like humans and moving water. The model is available for noncommercial research use on HuggingFace.

Cohere’s Aya Vision

Cohere released a multimodal model called Aya Vision that it claims is best in class at doing things like captioning images and answering questions about photos. It also excels in languages other than English, unlike other models, Cohere claims. It is available for free on WhatsApp.

OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 “Orion”

OpenAI calls Orion their largest model to date, touting its strong “world knowledge” and “emotional intelligence.” However, it underperforms on certain benchmarks compared to newer reasoning models. Orion is available to subscribers of OpenAI’s $200-per-month plan.

Claude Sonnet 3.7

Anthropic says this is the industry’s first “hybrid” reasoning model, because it can both fire off quick answers and really think things through when needed. It also gives users control over how long the model can think for, per Anthropic. Sonnet 3.7 is available to all Claude users, but heavier users will need a $20-per-month Pro plan.

xAI’s Grok 3

Grok 3 is the latest flagship model from Elon Musk-founded startup xAI. It’s claimed to outperform other leading models on math, science, and coding. The model requires X Premium (which is $50 per month.) After one study found Grok 2 leaned left, Musk pledged to shift Grok more “politically neutral” but it’s not yet clear if that’s been achieved.

OpenAI o3-mini

This is OpenAI’s latest reasoning model and is optimized for STEM-related tasks like coding, math, and science. It’s not OpenAI’s most powerful model but because it’s smaller, the company says it’s significantly lower cost. It is available for free but requires a subscription for heavy users.

OpenAI Deep Research

OpenAI’s Deep Research is designed for doing in-depth research on a topic with clear citations. This service is only available with ChatGPT’s $200-per-month Pro subscription. OpenAI recommends it for everything from science to shopping research, but beware that hallucinations remain a problem for AI.

Mistral Le Chat

Mistral has launched app versions of Le Chat, a multimodal AI personal assistant. Mistral claims Le Chat responds faster than any other chatbot. It also has a paid version with up-to-date journalism from the AFP. Tests from Le Monde found Le Chat’s performance impressive, although it made more errors than ChatGPT.

OpenAI Operator

OpenAI’s Operator is meant to be a personal intern that can do things independently, like help you buy groceries. It requires a $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro subscription. AI agents hold a lot of promise, but they’re still experimental: A Washington Post reviewer says Operator decided on its own to order a dozen eggs for $31, paid with the reviewer’s credit card.

Google Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental

Google Gemini’s much-awaited flagship model says it excels at coding and understanding general knowledge. It also has a super-long context window of 2 million tokens, helping users who need to quickly process massive chunks of text. The service requires (at minimum) a Google One AI Premium subscription of $19.99 a month.

AI models released in 2024

DeepSeek R1

This Chinese AI model took Silicon Valley by storm. DeepSeek’s R1 performs well on coding and math, while its open source nature means anyone can run it locally. Plus, it’s free. However, R1 integrates Chinese government censorship and faces rising bans for potentially sending user data back to China.

Gemini Deep Research

Deep Research summarizes Google’s search results in a simple and well-cited document. The service is helpful for students and anyone else who needs a quick research summary. However, its quality isn’t nearly as good as an actual peer-reviewed paper. Deep Research requires a $19.99 Google One AI Premium subscription.

Meta Llama 3.3 70B

This is the newest and most advanced version of Meta’s open source Llama AI models. Meta has touted this version as its cheapest and most efficient yet, especially for math, general knowledge, and instruction following. It is free and open source.

OpenAI Sora

Sora is a model that creates realistic videos based on text. While it can generate entire scenes rather than just clips, OpenAI admits that it often generates “unrealistic physics.” It’s currently only available on paid versions of ChatGPT, starting with Plus, which is $20 a month. 

Alibaba Qwen QwQ-32B-Preview

This model is one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1 on certain industry benchmarks, excelling in math and coding. Ironically for a “reasoning model,” it has “room for improvement in common sense reasoning,” Alibaba says. It also incorporates Chinese government censorship, TechCrunch testing shows. It’s free and open source.

Anthropic’s Computer Use

Claude’s Computer Use is meant to take control of your computer to complete tasks like coding or booking a plane ticket, making it a predecessor of OpenAI’s Operator. Computer use, however, remains in beta. Pricing is via API: $0.80 per million tokens of input and $4 per million tokens of output.

xAI’s Grok 2 

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has launched an enhanced version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot it claims is “three times faster.” Free users are limited to 10 questions every two hours on Grok, while subscribers to X’s Premium and Premium+ plans enjoy higher usage limits. xAI also launched an image generator, Aurora, that produces highly photorealistic images, including some graphic or violent content.

OpenAI o1

OpenAI’s o1 family is meant to produce better answers by “thinking” through responses through a hidden reasoning feature. The model excels at coding, math, and safety, OpenAI claims, but has issues with trying to deceive humans, too. Using o1 requires subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, which is $20 a month.

Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 

Claude Sonnet 3.5 is a model Anthropic claims as being best in class. It’s become known for its coding capabilities and is considered a tech insider’s chatbot of choice. The model can be accessed for free on Claude, although heavy users will need a $20 monthly Pro subscription. While it can understand images, it can’t generate them.

OpenAI GPT 4o-mini

OpenAI has touted GPT 4o-mini as its most affordable and fastest model yet, thanks to its small size. It’s meant to enable a broad range of tasks like powering customer service chatbots. The model is available on ChatGPT’s free tier. It’s better suited for high-volume simple tasks compared to more complex ones.

Cohere Command R+

Cohere’s Command R+ model excels at complex retrieval-augmented generation (or RAG) applications for enterprises. That means it can find and cite specific pieces of information really well. (The inventor of RAG actually works at Cohere.) Still, RAG doesn’t fully solve AI’s hallucination problem.