AI Unleashed: Chinas Cheap Thrills, Musks Court Flop, and Harvards Rx Wizardry

Time to chug some scalding tech tea, because Chinas Baidu is back with a vengeance, dropping two AI powerhouses at prices so low they make OpenAIs GPT-4.5 look like a luxury yacht—and even DeepSeeks R1 is getting a run for half its money. With killer performance and costs that scream “bargain bin brilliance,” we’re staring down the barrel of an AI price war that’ll shake the globe!

Heres todays sizzling AI lowdown:

Chinas Baidu unleashes ultra-cheap AI goodies
Judge slaps Musks hand in OpenAI showdown
Code with AI without leaving your geek cave
Harvard cooks up an AI doc for your personal pill fix
4 hot AI tools & 4 gigs to cash in

Chinas Baidu launches ultra-cheap AI models

The Lowdown: Baidus crashing the scene with two wallet-friendly multimodal marvels—ERNIE 4.5, a souped-up upgrade to their core model, and Ernie X1, a deep-thinking newbie ready to flex.

The Juicy Bits:

ERNIE 4.5s got charm—amped-up EQ, smoother talk, fewer crazy tangents, and coding skills thatd make your techie pal weep. Baidu brags it outshines GPT-4o across benchmarks for a laughable $0.55 and $2.20 per million tokens—just 1% of OpenAIs VIP rate!
Ernie X1, Baidus debut reasoning champ, goes toe-to-toe with DeepSeeks R1 for half the dough. This step-by-step brainiac crushes tricky math and doc-wrangling like its nothing.

Why It Matters: Chinas churning out smarts so cheap you could run it off pocket change. With ERNIE 4.5 at 1% of GPT-4.5s cost and Ernie X1 matching R1 for peanuts, the West might have to drop prices or watch AI go full-on worldwide free-for-all. Price war, anyone?

OPENAI Judge rejects Musk’s bid to block OpenAIs evolution

The Lowdown: A federal judge just tossed Elon Musks plea for a timeout on OpenAIs for-profit makeover, speeding his lawsuit to a fall slugfest while chucking some of his gripes out the window, per a March 4, 2025 ruling.

The Juicy Bits:

Musk begged for an injunction, but the judge said, “Not today, pal—you didnt sell it.” Parts of the suit live on, racing to trial this fall.
OpenAIs got receipts—old emails hinting Musk once drooled over fusing them with Tesla for profit, which kinda nukes his current “save the world” sob story.
Musks mad OpenAI ditched its do-gooder roots for cash; OpenAI shrugs, “Non-profits still kicking—this for-profit tweak just fuels the mission.”

Why It Matters: With a rumored $40B SoftBank deal riding on OpenAIs profit pivot and a $157B valuation in play, this legal brawl could rewrite their playbook—and the AI game. Stakes? Higher than a rocket launch!

AI TRAINING How to code with AI, directly in your editor

The Lowdown: This tutorials your ticket to bossing around ChatGPTs updated macOS app, using its “Work with Apps” trick to tweak code without ever leaving your nerd nook.

Step-by-Step:

Grab the “openai.chatgpt” extension from your editors marketplace—like VS Code or Cursor—or sideload the VSIX file for oddball setups.
Fire up ChatGPT, hit the “Work With” sidebar, and pick your editor from the lineup.
Open a code file, and ChatGPT latches on like a clingy sidekick.
Type plain English orders—explain this, fix that—check the tweaks, hit “Apply,” and watch your file transform.

Pro Tip: ChatGPT models vary—some zip through quick edits, others flex on big refactoring jobs. Choose wisely!

AI RESEARCH Harvard team creates AI agent for personalized medicine

The Lowdown: Harvard and MITs brainiacs just birthed TxAgent, an AI whiz that mixes multi-step smarts with real-time medical know-how to whip up trusty, custom treatment plans.

The Juicy Bits:

TxAgent rocks 211 slick tools to sniff out drug clashes, spot red flags, and craft treatments tailored to your age, genes, and that nagging cough you wont fess up to.
It digs into molecular, pharmacokinetic, and clinical dirt, pulling live intel from legit sources like openFDA and Open Targets.
This AIs a relentless med geek, rethinking and polishing Rx ideas with structured precision.

Why It Matters: TxAgents a game-changer for personalized medicine—think safer meds, faster doc visits, and a lifeline for strained healthcare zones. Your next prescription might just get an AI high-five!

Everything else in AI today

Googles Gemini 2.0 Flash is reportedly helping folks zap watermarks off pics, even from big shots like Getty.

Robot maker Figure unveiled BotQ, a factory pumping out 12,000 humanoids yearly, with dreams of hitting 100,000.

Patronus AI dropped the first multimodal LLM-as-a-judge tool to catch and fix glitches in AI apps.

Pika Labs unleashed 16 new effects for its AI video platform, turning pics into wild character clips.

Sesame, fresh off a viral voice tech flex, open-sourced its CSM-1B model for text-to-speech fun.

Vogent AI rolled out voice agents that tweak themselves, learning from flops without prompt prodding.

Y Combinator’s CEO says a quarter of their startups now run on 95% AI-written code, hitting $10M revenue with tiny teams.

OpenAIs CPO Kevin Weil bets 2025 is when AI outcodes humans for good, calling it a “democratizing” superpower for software newbies.