😸 The AI race is heating up

Happy Friday, legends! Welcome back to the Leaderboard. We've got a bumper issue today covering a new AI model from China, a 2017-esque game, and a productivity tool that kind of does it all. Alongside that, we also have an AMA from the 2024 Golden Kitty Maker of the year. Let's goooo.

Qwen2.5-VL: An AI that watches, clicks, and books flights

DeepSeek-R1 has the hype, OpenAI has the CopenAI memes, and now Alibaba is making its move. Qwen2.5-VL isn’t just chatting—it watches videos, analyzes documents, and even controls apps. In demos, it booked a flight on Android and fumbled around a Linux desktop (mostly switching tabs). Alibaba claims it outperforms GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 in key areas, but whether it’s actually useful or just a flex is still up for debate. Either way, China’s AI race is getting harder to ignore

seefood: A game that tells you if an image is a hot dog or not

You might disagree, but products don't always need to solve a problem...they can simply be fun or remind us of fun times. If you're familiar with the show, Silicon Valley, you may recall a time when building was whimsical and the small founders were trying to take on the global giants. seefood is a great nod to that memory and... we might be getting back to it. As Ryan put it.... is it 2017!?

Sense: AI search for all your apps and automatic work hub

The productivity scene is full of AI tools - AI search, AI writing, etc. What makes Sense powerful is it brings it all together - it connects all your apps, all your conversations, all your documents and surfaces important insights. Beyond AI search, it highlights important priorities and gives you an overview of any given project you’re curious about- across all platforms, conversations, and email etc. I can see Sense eliminating the need for status update meetings as you have all this data at your fingertips!

"before i even learned to code, i was making wallpapers & windows xp themes trying to win "daily deviation" awards on deviantart. when i *did* learn to code i built a pokémon battle with jquery right after coding my first working rock-paper-scissors game"

Pascal Pixel, the winner of the 2024 Golden Kitty Maker of the Year award and founder of Horse, the productivity superstar of the browser world is hosting an AMA to answer any questions about learning to code, being a maker, how he built Horse, and more.