China's GPT-4o Rival Launches

The AI world is moving fast—and this week, three powerful breakthroughs show just how deep the transformation goes.

First up: Seedream 3.0 by ByteDance. This new bilingual image generation model doesn’t just make pretty pictures—it understands complex prompts in both Chinese and English, renders tiny text beautifully, and delivers stunning native 2K visuals. It's a creative leap that makes digital storytelling sharper and more expressive than ever.

Meanwhile, at Fudan University, scientists have built Poxiao—the world’s fastest flash memory. This rice-sized chip erases and rewrites data in just 400 picoseconds, over 100,000x faster than current memory tech. It’s a breakthrough that could erase the line between memory and computation, and power the next generation of AI locally, without expensive GPUs.

And finally, Instagram is rolling out new teen safety features, using AI to detect underage users—even if they’ve entered an adult birthdate—and automatically place them in safer settings. With private profiles, messaging restrictions, and time limits built in, and parents looped in through notifications and tips, it’s a more thoughtful, protective approach to social media.

From faster chips to smarter models to safer platforms—the future of tech is unfolding fast, and it’s more powerful, personal, and protective than ever.

Seedream 3.0: Enhanced Bilingual Image Generation

Seedream 3.0 is a high-performance Chinese-English bilingual image generation model developed by ByteDance Seed. It addresses challenges in Seedream 2.0, such as alignment with complex prompts, fine-grained typography, visual aesthetics, and limited image resolutions. The model enhances its capabilities through a defect-aware training paradigm, mixed-resolution training, cross-modality Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE), and a vision-language model-based reward system. It achieves native high-resolution output up to 2K and significantly improves text rendering, especially for small-size Chinese and English characters. Seedream 3.0 also pioneers a novel acceleration method, reducing inference time while maintaining image quality, and ranks first in the Artificial Analysis Text to Image Model Leaderboard1.

Poxiao: World’s Fastest Flash Memory

Fudan University researchers have created "Poxiao," the world's fastest flash memory, capable of erasing and rewriting data in 400 picoseconds—100,000 times faster than existing flash memory. This rice-sized device overcomes limitations of current storage architectures by allowing electrons to transition directly to a high-speed state, eliminating the traditional "warm-up" phase. While the prototype holds only kilobytes, it promises to revolutionize AI computing by potentially blurring the lines between memory and computing. The team aims to scale the technology to tens of megabytes within five years, with plans for licensing and mass production, potentially eliminating the need for hierarchical storage systems in personal computers and enabling local deployment of large AI models.

Teens, Parents & AI: Teaming Up for Safer Social Media!

Instagram is expanding Teen Accounts to ensure more teens benefit from enhanced protections, working closely with parents and leveraging new AI technology to identify and enroll suspected teen users—even if they entered an adult birthdate—into these settings. Parents are being notified on Instagram with guidance and expert tips for verifying their teen’s age and discussing the importance of accurate age information, while built-in features like private profiles, messaging restrictions, sensitive content filters, time limits, and sleep mode automatically apply to users under 16, requiring parental approval for any changes. This approach, now rolling out globally and soon to be available across Meta’s platforms, aims to give parents peace of mind and help teens have safer, more age-appropriate online experiences, with over 54 million active Teen Accounts and high satisfaction reported among both parents and teens.

Hand Picked Video

In this video, we’ll look at how GPT‑4o’s brand new image generation capabilities let you create stunning, photorealistic visuals—right from a simple prompt.

Top AI Products from this week

• Strawberry - A browser that brings AI superpowers into your daily workflows. Strawberry helps you research 100s of websites in seconds, write content that matches your voice, take meeting notes and automate tasks on any website. Now in pre-beta.

• AgentR - AgentR leverages reasoning-driven talent analysis to evaluate career patterns and achievements, helping organizations identify exceptional candidates beyond traditional ATS filters.

• Orpheus TTS - Orpheus TTS is the open-source TTS using a Llama-3b backbone for human-like speech with natural emotion/intonation. Features zero-shot cloning, guided emotion & low latency streaming.

• Corgea - Corgea helps developers ship fast without worry about security. It is an AI-powered developer platform that automatically finds, and fixes insecure code. Sign up today for free to try Corgea.

• Pino - Fact Checker - I built Pino to cut through misinformation. This Chrome extension fact-checks claims instantly using AI, providing multiple sources and a truth score. Whether you’re reading news, or researching, Pino helps you separate fact from fiction in seconds.

• AQX - Build human-like AI voice agents that handle calls and website interactions 24/7. Engage customers, instantly qualify leads, and convert more customers while reducing costs up to 70%. Free up your team for high-value tasks. Try AQX for FREE today!

This week in AI

• Krea AI Create 3D Worlds Instantly - Krea AI lets you build full 3D environments from images or text in seconds—just upload, convert, and interact with your scene in real time247.

• Claude Code Agentic Coding - Claude Code is a command line tool for agentic coding, offering a native way to integrate Claude into coding workflows. Customize setups with CLAUDE.md files, use bash tools, and try workflows like "explore, plan, code, commit". costs by up to 600% when deep reasoning is turned off—ideal for cost control.

• Robo-Race Humans Triumph - In a world-first, Chinese humanoid robots competed in a half-marathon but were beaten by human runners by a mile. Despite tech advances, humans maintain their lead in long-distance running.

• AI's Next Leap Imagination - Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicts AI with human-level cognition in 5-10 years. Future AI will understand nuances, be imaginative, and solve problems, possibly ending disease and scarcity, but needs safety guardrails.

• OpenAI Model Score Discrepancy - Epoch AI found OpenAI's o3 model scored 10% on FrontierMath, lower than OpenAI's claimed 25%. The public version is tuned for real-world use, impacting benchmark results. A more powerful variant, o3-pro, is expected soon.