Happy Tuesday! This digest comes from sunny (foggy) San Francisco as the Product Hunt team gets together for some IRL co-working sessions. 

Here’s some news: 

🤖 Google has confirmed it’s restricting Gemini election queries worldwide.

🍎 Apple will now allow iOS downloads directly from sites within the EU.

📸 TikTok may be working on an Instagram competitor, according to this leak.

A lot can happen in a week, especially if you’re an AI model. In just seven short days, not one, but two new large language models (LLMs) have dropped that could potentially challenge GPT-4 for its crown. First, Anthropic dropped a suite of new models and now Inflection AI is getting in on the fun. 

The startup, founded by Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, which raised a huge $1.3 billion last year, announced its latest flagship model, Inflection-2.5. 

Built on the learnings of Inflection-1, Inflection-2.5 is designed to take on AI heavyweights like GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini. It outperforms the company’s original model fairly significantly and gets close to GPT-4 across several metrics like mathematics, coding, and multi-task language understanding (MMLU). 

While 2.5 doesn’t beat GPT-4 outright, it has to be pointed out that this near-GPT performance has been achieved with much more efficient training. According to the launch announcement, it took only 40% of the FLOPs (compute) of GPT-4 to get to this level. 

Inflection-2.5 is currently powering the company’s chatbot, Pi. If you’re new to Pi, it’s the company's alternative to ChatGPT, and it strikes a more empathetic, witty, and fun tone. Back when it launched last year, it was particularly adept at offering personal and emotional advice, with its human-like voice setting it apart. 

Currently, Inflection-2.5 is available to play around in Pi on iOS, Android, web, and desktop, and the chatbot itself boasts an average conversation time of 33 minutes with over 4 billion messages exchanged so far. 

So, if you want your AI best friend to be a little more human, why not try…

• Picurious uses AI to turn your static photos into learning moments.
• Stargazer lets you create intros inspired by popular movie franchises.
• Travelicious is an AI-powered travel guide for your next big trip.

• Swipe Insight gives digital marketing and analytic insights from 100+ sources.
• Typper BI lets you create data charts using AI in natural language. 
• PitchBob is an AI pitch deck generator and startup copilot.