What changed in the week of 27 January 2025

Deep research is a new agentic capability in ChatGPT designed for complex, multi-step research tasks, completing in minutes what would take humans hours. It independently finds, analyses, and synthesises online sources, leveraging reasoning to interpret diverse data like text, images, and PDFs. This tool generates comprehensive, well-documented reports with citations. Unlike GPT-4o, which is geared toward real-time conversations, deep research focuses on in-depth analysis and verified answers. Trained using reinforcement learning on difficult browsing and reasoning tasks, it can use tools such as a browser and Python to conduct research. It has achieved high scores on expert-level tests, demonstrating its ability to seek out specialized information. Although powerful, deep research has some limitations, such as the potential to hallucinate facts, struggle with differentiating authoritative sources, and make errors in formatting. It is currently available to Pro users with up to 100 queries per month, with access rolling out to Plus and Team users next.

OpenAI's o3-mini redefines AI by integrating advanced reasoning, structured thought processes, and safety-focused mechanisms. Unlike traditional models, it evaluates multiple approaches before formulating responses, ensuring accuracy and reliability. With a record-breaking performance in coding and problem-solving, o3-mini stands out as a powerhouse of intelligence. Its resistance to jailbreaks, reduced hallucination rates, and fairness evaluations make it one of the safest and most ethical AI models. Moreover, its multilingual proficiency enhances accessibility worldwide. As AI evolves, o3-mini sets a new standard for responsible, adaptive, and high-performing artificial intelligence.

In January 2025, Databricks released a number of new features and platform improvements. Some of the key updates include:

• Predictive optimization can now be enabled at the catalog or schema level.
• Filtering full datasets for large tables is now supported.
• Clean Rooms is now generally available, with new APIs for automation, self-collaboration within a single metastore, and support for output tables on Azure. Also, you can now create a Clean Room with a HIPAA compliance security profile.
• Delta Live Tables now supports publishing to tables in multiple schemas and catalogs.
• Databricks Runtime 16.2 is now available as a Beta release.
• OAuth token federation is now available in public preview.
• Notebook load times have been improved.
• Notebooks are now supported as workspace files.
• Failed tasks in continuous jobs are now automatically retried.

Apache Spark 4.0.0 is upcoming and a preview-2 version is available. Spark Connect is a major feature in this release. The preview version allows users to explore new features and debug from their local machines using hashtag#SparkConnect and hashtag#vsCode. The vision of running Apache Spark from anywhere is a key aspect of this release. The full release of Spark 4.0 will include enhanced usability and debuggability with Spark Connect's GA (Generally Available) release

Gemini's new 2.0 Flash model is now available for all users on web and mobile. This upgrade is designed for better agent-like interactions, providing faster responses and improved performance on common tasks like brainstorming, learning, and writing. Gemini Advanced users retain their existing benefits, including the large context window for file uploads, priority access to advanced features, extra storage, and more.

Gemini Advanced users will continue to have access to a 1M token context window for up to 1,500 pages of file uploads, priority access to features such as Deep Research and Gems, 2TB of storage, and more.