OpenAI’s dev-focused GPT-4.1

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI has “numerous good things” lined up this week, based on Sam Altman—and its first release is a step back…in name only.

A newly launched GPT-4.1 (?) family features million-token context windows, improved coding abilities, and significantly lower prices across the board — potentially laying a brand new foundation for the fast-approaching era of agentic AI development.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI’s dev-focused GPT-4.1 family

• ByteDance’s efficient Seaweed video AI

• Create conversational branches to explore ideas

• Google’s AI to decode dolphin speech

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🤖 OpenAI’s dev-focused GPT-4.1 family

The Rundown: OpenAI just released GPT-4.1, a brand new API-only model family built specifically for developers — featuring major improvements in coding abilities, instruction following, and the flexibility to process as much as 1M tokens of context.

The main points:

• The brand new API-only lineup includes GPT-4.1, 4.1 mini, and 4.1 nano, significantly outperforming GPT-4o on key developer tasks.

• All three models support 1M token contexts, enough for 8 full React codebases, while being 26% cheaper than GPT-4o for typical queries.

• The models also show gains in real-world tasks like frontend development, with evaluators preferring 4.1’s web interfaces 80% of the time over GPT-4o.

• Pricing is reduced across the board, with GPT-4.1 coming in 26% cheaper than GPT-4o and 4.1 nano appearing as OpenAI’s fastest and most cost-effective model yet.

Why it matters: The one thing moving backwards is OpenAI’s naming convention — but GPT-4.1 is a serious breakthrough for devs. With an enormous context window, lower costs, and sharper focus, it sets a brand new foundation for the agentic coding and will be a precursor to the corporate’s rumored Agentic Software Engineer.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

🧠 100+ ChatGPT prompts to revolutionize your workflow

The Rundown: HubSpot’s free, comprehensive  “How you can Use ChatGPT at Work” guide provides 100+ ready-to-use prompts to assist professionals boost efficiency and adopt AI-driven workflows.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A fast crash course to master ChatGPT in under half-hour

• Practical industry use cases to spark real-world inspiration

• 100+ prompts to streamline tasks and speed up productivity

• Expert tricks to tackle common AI roadblocks with confidence

Get your free copy and join 10,000+ professionals leveling up with AI.

BYTEDANCE

🎥 ByteDance’s efficient Seaweed video AI

The Rundown: ByteDance introduced Seaweed, a hyper-efficient 7B-parameter video generation model that’s competitive against much larger models like Kling 1.6, Google Veo, and Wan 2.1, despite using significantly less compute resources.

The main points:

• Seaweed features multiple generation modes, including text-to-video, image-to-video, and audio-driven synthesis, with outputs going as much as 20 seconds.

• The model ranks highly against rivals in human evaluations and excels in image-to-video tasks, massively outperforming models like Sora and Wan 2.1.

• It may also handle complex tasks like multi-shot storytelling, controlled camera movements, and even synchronized audio-visual generation.

• ByteDance says Seaweed has been fine-tuned for applications like human animation, with a powerful give attention to realistic human movement and lip syncing.

Why it matters: Between Wan (Alibaba), Kling, and now ByteDance’s Seaweed, China is totally crushing the AI video leaderboards. This byte-sized (pun intended) release also shows that scale isn’t the one path to top-tier video generation, opening up efficient, limitless creativity with available, near-SOTA video models.

AI TRAINING

🔀 Create conversational branches to explore ideas

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the way to use Google AI Studio’s recent branching feature to explore different ideas by creating multiple conversation paths from a single place to begin without losing context.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit Google AI Studio and choose your chosen Gemini model from the dropdown menu.

2. Start a conversation and proceed until you reach some extent where you desire to explore an alternate direction.

3. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) next to any message and choose “Branch from here.”

4. Navigate between branches using the “See original conversation” link at the highest of every branch.

Pro tip: You’ll be able to create branches at key decision points to match different AI approaches to the identical problem without starting over.

PRESENTED BY UNSTRUCTURED

🛠️ Simplifying RAG with Unstructured + AstraDB

The Rundown: Unstructured just introduced a brand new feature that made constructing a knowledge graph easier than ever: Custom Prompting for NER to construct your nodes and edges.

Join Unstructured’s live session to learn the way to:

• Use Unstructured API to load data into Astra DB

• Utilize the Custom Prompting Feature & OSS Graph Retriever library

• Leverage the Graph Retriever for dynamic retrieval

Register here to affix live or to get the recording.

AI RESEARCH

🐬 Google’s AI to decode dolphin speech

The Rundown: Google unveiled DolphinGemma, a specialized AI model designed to research and generate dolphin vocalizations — designed in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech to potentially uncover patterns of their communication.

The main points:

• DolphinGemma leverages Google’s Gemma and audio tech to process dolphin vocalizations, trained on many years of information from the Wild Dolphin Project.

• The AI model analyzes sound sequences to discover patterns and predict subsequent sounds, just like how LLMs handle human language.

• Google also developed a Pixel 9-based underwater CHAT device, combining the AI with speakers and microphones for real-time dolphin interaction.

• The model can be released as open-source this summer, allowing researchers worldwide to adapt it for studying various dolphin species.

Why it matters: While previous attempts at dolphin communication have struggled, combining many years of research with modern AI could finally open the door for brand new understanding of how these intelligent creatures communicate. If successful, DolphinGemma could open recent frontiers in understanding animal intelligence.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🧠 ChatGPT – Recent memory feature that remembers all previous conversations

• ❎ Grok 3 – xAI’s top model, now also with recent memory capabilities

• 🎨 Canva Visual Suite 2.0 – Create across all design types with AI

• 🤖 Appsmith Agents – Secure, embedded agents powered by your data

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧾 Weights & Biases – Deal Desk Manager

• 💼 Horizon3 – Enterprise Account Executive

• 🛎️ Rad AI – Customer Support Engineer

• 🧑‍💻 Perplexity AI – AI Software Engineer

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

NVIDIA announced its first-ever U.S. AI manufacturing effort, partnering with TSMC, Foxconn, and others to start chip and supercomputer production in Arizona and Texas.

OpenAI is reportedly planning to release two recent models this week, with o3 and o4-mini capable of making recent scientific ideas and automating high-level research tasks.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy published his annual shareholder letter, saying that genAI will “reinvent virtually every customer experience we all know.”

Meta announced plans to coach AI models on EU users’ public content, offering an opt-out form and noting the importance of incorporating European culture into its systems.

Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics and introduced Reachy 2, a $70k open-source humanoid robot designed for research and embodied AI applications.

LM Arena launched the Search Arena Leaderboard to judge LLMs on search tasks, with Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro and Perplexity’s Sonar taking the highest spots.

NATO awarded Palantir a contract for its Maven Smart System to reinforce U.S. battlefield operations with AI capabilities, aiming to deploy the platform inside 30 days.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team