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Starting today all Claude.ai users – whether you pay for the service or enjoy it for free – can create and view Artifacts across the website, as well as Android and iOS apps, and it’s an upgrade ChatGPT is sorely lacking.

To catch you up to speed on this AI bot, Claude is a ChatGPT rival from Anthropic with similar features – such as being able to be prompted by text, files, and images, or a combination of the three. However, beyond privacy it doesn’t have much that truly sets it apart from the big-name AI – which is perhaps why Claude on iOS saw 157,000 total global downloads in its first week compared with ChatGPT’s 480,000 downloads in its first five days (via TechCrunch).

This is where Artifacts could lend a hand in helping Claude finally stand out. As explained by Anthropic in a blog post Artifacts turn conversations with its AI into a more ‘collaborative experience.’ With Artifacts turned on Claude will open a separate window that shows you the project it’s helping to create next to your prompts allowing you to see in real-time what your tweaks and edits look like without needing a third-party tool. 

To turn on Artifacts, simply navigate to your Claude.AI Profile Settings by clicking on your initials in the lower left corner of the screen, then tap Settings, and then toggle on (or off) the 'Enable Artifacts' option. When you're next using Claude it can start to generate Artifacts though there are some restrictions – such as the content needing to be "significant and self-contained" which Anthropic says is typically "over 15 lines of content." You can check out a more in-depth look at Anthropic's other Artifacts rules on the official FAQ.

Examples shown off in the Artifacts announcement video (shown above) include seeing a draft version of a website, or digital games like a virtual Rubik’s Cube. If you see any features you’d like to tweak you can alter your prompts and see how they affect what you’re working on in real time. That’s not offered by ChatGPT, and makes the process of iterating an idea with an AI (especially on mobile) a much more straightforward task.

With the rollout of Artifacts users on the Free and Pro plans can also choose to publish their Artifacts, which other users can subsequently remix – altering what others have made to suit their own ideas. Team plan users can share Artifacts too, but only with their teammates. This kind of collaborative AI design process is also something we’ve not really seen before, and we’re excited to see if Artifacts live up to Anthropic’s hype.

Nevertheless, coupled with its emphasis on privacy, Claude is shaping up to be a proper ChatGPT rival rather than a mere clone. We’ll have to watch this space but if you’ve been having issues with OpenAI’s bot and want to try something new, Claude could be the bot you need.

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More details of OpenAI’s secretive Project Strawberry have dropped, including its expected release date and the areas it will specialize in.

A recent report in The Information quotes “two people who have been involved in the effort”, and goes on to say that Project Strawberry could drop this Fall, and be better at math and programming than any chatbot we’ve seen so far. 

Previously it was thought that OpenAI’s Project Strawberry would be aimed at “deep research”, the ability to perform follow-up research on its own, without human intervention. While this still seems to be true, the additional information that Project Strawberry will do math better than we’ve seen before comes as welcome news to many, given that ChatGPT’s relationship with math so far has been, shall we say, fraught? For a while now, there have been plenty of memes of screenshots showing ChatGPT getting simple math problems wrong, leading many to ask why ChatGPT can’t do basic math. The reason for ChatGPT's mistakes in math is down to its training data not containing enough mathematical information, which, as we shall see, could be one of the improvements that Project Strawberry aims to make. Whatever the reason, something was definitely not adding up.

Improved ability to solve programming challenges is also welcome, but Project Strawberry’s scope is way beyond just being better at math. In demonstrations to other employees, people working on Project Strawbery have shown how the new AI is capable of more advanced levels of thinking enabling it to solve puzzles like the New York Times Connections, which is a complex word puzzle.

Sam Altman's mysterious strawberry tweet. (Image credit: X.com/Sam Altman)

Open AI CEO, Sam Altman kickstarted the rumors about Project Strawberry when he tweeted an image of some strawberries growing in a pot on August 7 with no further explanation than the text, “I love summer in the garden”. Since then there have been widely reported rumors that OpenAI was working on a powerful new LLLM, and had demonstrated a version of Project Strawberry to national security officials.

It’s still not clear when Project Strawberry will be released, but insiders think it could be as early as Fall (September or October) perhaps with a smaller version of it becoming a part of the ChatGPT chatbot in ChatGPT 5. If Project Strawberry doesn't end up as part of ChatGPT 5 then its ability to produce higher-quality data could be utilized in producing the vast amount of training data that Open AI’s next LLM will require if it’s going to reduce the amount of hallucinations (otherwise known as factual errors) that it's prone to.

ChatGPT recently, and quietly, released an improved version of its cutting-edge ChatGPT-4o model, which is much faster than the previous version, leading many to speculate that this may have been what Project Strawberry was all about. Now it seems that the project is set to bear even more exciting fruit.

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After the Crowdstrike incident shone a light on Windows’ utter dominance across enterprise in late July 2024, users may be relieved to hear perennial up-and-comer Linux may be on course to hit 5% market share by 2025.

While new data from StatCounter, providing data for July 2024, shows that Windows is still the stalwart favourite with 72% market share, Linux was recorded as having reached 4.5% market share.

This could be welcome news for anyone not already in or looking to get out of the Apple ecosystem, or displeased with Microsoft’s interminable attempts to turn Windows into a service.

Linux and your small business

As our sister site Tom’s Hardware has addressed - Linux’s rise hasn’t been smooth sailing. Though it reached 4% in late February 2024, it then slipped back to a 3.9% share in April and May. This latest result, however, shows that progress is happening thick and fast, and if the alternative operating system’s current market share trajectory holds, it will hit 5% by February 2025.

Windows and MacOS are the ubiquitous household names in the OS space, and Crowdstrike has, in the case of the former, shown that many enterprises also reach for brand recognition and, more pertinently, interoperability with existing Windows client systems.

However, Linux does offer several advantages over either of these that are pertinent to a smaller business environment, should you be up to the task of convincing your sysadmin to acknowledge that it exists. The first and foremost one is price: an overwhelming majority of Linux distributions (popular ones including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Zorin OS) are free, or offer modestly priced versions bundled with additional productivity tools (Zorin OS Pro, for $47.99/£47.99, is one example). 

Meanwhile, legal use of MacOS requires purchasing premium hardware well into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and Windows 11 Pro, before you even get into being pushed into buying into the subscription-based Microsoft 365 collaboration tools, is $199.

That will help drive adoption in the future, but for now, a key factor in Linux’s immediate rise is the popular distributions that are leaning heavily into features and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are not only intuitive, but pointedly resemble the ‘big two’. 

Ubuntu - the operating system this writer is running - combines a Windows-like taskbar with MacOS’ ‘Launchpad’ for apps, as well as an ‘app store’ serving cross-distro apps (‘flatpaks’) from popular app distribution platform Flathub. The average user or employee can get by without ever touching the command line, and that’s been the case for a handful of years now. 

In truth, even 5% market share won’t shatter any records or expectations, but it’s no wonder that Linux is having its day, when its competitors seem committed to ‘walled garden’ philosophy. If you’re not convinced, consider Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, the increasing dependence on Microsoft accounts to set up Windows in the first place, and Apple since the beginning of recorded time, 2007 AD.

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We’ve heard before that Windows 11 could be getting a ‘hot-patching’ feature with version 24H2, arriving later this year, whereby (some) future cumulative updates won’t require a reboot – and we’ve just been treated to another clue that this might come to fruition.

Windows Latest reports that PhantomOfEarth on X flagged up a new support article for hot-patching in Windows 11, though there’s a twist here in that it was evidently accidentally published – and swiftly yanked down by Microsoft.

It's gone. RIP https://t.co/MNX9PDXWKgAugust 23, 2024

The post can still be viewed using the Wayback Machine but as you’ll see if you take a look, the article is just a copy-and-paste of guidelines for crafting a support document (which, as mentioned, has clearly been mistakenly published).

The key part here is that Microsoft beavering away in the background with content relating to hot-patching for Windows Ge or Germanium – which is Windows 11 24H2, with Germanium being the codename of the new platform it’s built on – is a heavy hint that this is indeed inbound. If not, why be working on any material pertaining to hot-patching at all, at this point?

A seamless way of updating Windows 11

Given the date mentioned in the now-retracted article, which is 2024.08, this suggests we might see some kind of update from Microsoft on hot-patching functionality incoming for Windows 11 before the end of August.

Of course, all this could still come to nothing – but this does seem to be a feature Microsoft is planning, according to previous info from Zac Bowden, a reliable leaker on all things Windows.

Indeed, Bowden claimed that it’s planned for the 24H2 update, and he explained a bit more about how hot-patching would work in an info dump early this year. The long and short of it is that only some cumulative updates (the monthly patches that arrive for Windows 11) would be applied without a reboot – two in a row – before the third baseline cumulative update is pushed out that does need a reboot. Meaning two-thirds of updates would be hot-patched, but do note that the big annual updates for Windows 11 – like 24H2 – always necessitate a reboot, as these are far larger in scope, naturally.

It’d be pretty cool to have some of Windows 11’s monthly patches downloaded and installed on your PC seamlessly, with no need to reboot, so you can just keep on working (or gaming, or whatever you’re doing).

It’ll also remove that small amount of danger involved every time you reboot for an update on a desktop PC, where you pray that a power cut won’t strike. As if your PC is switched off during an update of any kind, that might be bad news, and could result in corrupted files – and maybe the OS not booting up at all, if you’re really unlucky.

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AI image generators are having a moment right now with a recent rush of upgrades to many of the options out there. Ideogram is the latest synthetic image developer to join the trend this week with the launch of Ideogram 2.0. The new iteration of the image generator promises to outshine its predecessor as well as its competitors with several new and improved features, as well as a new iOS app and searchable library of the more than a billion images generated by users over the past year.

Ideogram 2.0 's text-to-image engine gives the user much more control over shaping the AI-generated image. That includes a collection of several distinct styles to choose from. The Realistic style is undeniably the most interesting, as it produces images that closely resemble real photographs. The skin, hair, and other details are much better than those of the earlier Ideogram model. 

The Design style, on the other hand, focuses on text accuracy within images, a notoriously difficult area for AI models to master. With Ideogram 2.0, users can generate graphic designs with long, stylized text that is still readable. The other options are fairly self-explanatory, with 3D making three-dimensional objects that could be rotated in real space, while Anime goes for that distinctive animated style and General avoids slanting the image to any particular look. 

Ideogram on the go

Ideogram 2.0 has also improved upon its Magic Prompt and Describe tools. Magic Prompt expands upon an initial prompt from a user, while Describe reverses the usual setup and creates a text prompt from an image. They are now better at working out how to fill in details from an initially short text prompt and at explaining an image using words, respectively. 

Ideogram paired its new model with the launch of its iOS app. The app allows users to create and customize images directly from their mobile devices. An Android version is also in the works. In addition to the mobile app, Ideogram AI has introduced the beta version of its API so that you might open another app or website that has an AI image generator and actually be using Ideogram's model. It's similar to how Microsoft uses OpenAI's DALL-E or how X embedded Flux into the Grok AI chatbot. All of them and more are Ideogram's rivals, and while there's no sense of which, if any, will win out in the space, there's no denying the final picture will be crisp and photorealistic, with words anyone can read.

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