Posts tagged with "OpenAI"

DeepSeek Tops the App Store Charts and Sends AI Stocks on a Wild Ride

DeepSeek's newfound popularity has made it impossible to log in as of the publication of this story.

DeepSeek’s newfound popularity has made it impossible to log in as of the publication of this story.

And just like that, ChatGPT has been dethroned from its perch at the top of the App Store’s free app list, replaced by DeepSeek, another AI app. What’s interesting is that DeepSeek, which was developed by a Chinese startup, was reportedly created at a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT and other large language models developed in the US, which has tech stocks in turmoil.

Last week, DeepSeek revealed its latest LLM, which matches or outperforms OpenAI’s o1 model in some tests. That’s nothing new. AI companies have been one-upping each other for months. What’s different is that DeepSeek was reportedly built with a fraction of the hardware and at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s o1 and models like Anthropic’s Claude.

DeepSeek is also open source, potentially undermining the financial viability of U.S. and other for-profit companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing models that require a paid subscription. And, because it’s free, DeepSeek rocketed to the top of the App Store’s free app list, passing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been at or near the top of the list for months.

That has caused a stir in Silicon Valley. As VentureBeat’s Carl Franzen puts it:

The open-source availability of DeepSeek-R1, its high performance, and the fact that it seemingly “came out of nowhere” to challenge the former leader of generative AI, has sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and far beyond, based on my conversations with and readings of various engineers, thinkers and leaders. If not “everyone” is freaking out about it as my hyperbolic headline suggests, it’s certainly the talk of the town in tech and business circles.

Now, as DeepSeek is starting to look like the real deal, the stock market is causing competitors’ stocks to drop, including NVIDIA’s, which, according to the Financial Times, fell 13% at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange.

If there’s one thing that has been a truism of the AI industry over the past couple of years, it’s that it moves very fast. Today’s leaders are tomorrow’s laggards. Will DeepSeek dethrone the U.S. AI companies? It’s far too early to know, but it certainly is beginning to look like there’s a new horse in the race.

Audio Hijack Gains Beta Audio Transcription Feature

I’ve been playing around a lot with OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text engine this year. Whisper isn’t perfect, but it does a remarkably good job, substantially lowering the effort and cost of generating transcripts.

There are dedicated apps to transcribe using Whisper like MacWhisper by Jordi Brun and Transcriptionist from the makers of Ferrite, both of which I’ve tried. However, the most promising option so far is a new Transcribe block released today as part of Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba.

The new block is a beta feature that Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis says the company will continue to refine. It’s using the same underlying Whisper technology as other apps, but by reducing transcription to part of your existing recording flow, it’s possible to transcribe on the fly as you record and identify speakers whose audio is coming from separate channels.

We weren’t recording any shows today, so to test the new feature, I copied our MacStories Unwind recording session and used the Zoom audio settings as a stand-in for Federico. I spoke into my microphone, which was one source, and used the piano music from Zoom’s settings as the other source. Audio Hijack recorded both and started transcribing the audio as I was still recording. Here are the results:

This was a very limited test. It remains to be seen how the app does with a longer recording session, but the ease with which I set this up has me excited. By renaming the sources fed into the Transcribe block, I was able to create a real-time transcript complete with timestamps and our names.

Still, as impressive as the results are, I don’t publish what I record in Audio Hijack. It still needs to be edited, at which point the transcript created with this session would diverge from the released audio. Nonetheless, for a newly released beta feature, I’m impressed and looking forward to seeing where Rogue Amoeba takes this.

Introducing S-GPT, A Shortcut to Connect OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Native Features of Apple’s Operating Systems

S-GPT for Shortcuts.

S-GPT for Shortcuts.

Update, April 13: I’ve updated S-GPT to version 1.0.2. You can read the full changelog here. All download links have been updated.

Update, April 13: For Club MacStories+ and Premier members, I’ve published Part 1 of an extensive ‘Making Of’ series about S-GPT. This is a technical deep dive for my Automation Academy series. You can find it here and sign up for or upgrade to a Premier account using the buttons below.

Update, April 7: For Club MacStories members, I’ve shared some optional prompts to add different personalities to S-GPT, including two inspired by Roy Kent and Steve Jobs. You can get the prompts and read more here; the main S-GPT shortcut is and will remain free-to-use for everyone, of course.

Update, April 7: I’ve updated S-GPT to version 1.0.1. You can read more details here. All download links to the shortcuts have been updated to the latest version.

It’s the inaugural week of the second annual edition of Automation April, and to celebrate the occasion, I’ve been working on something special: today, I’m introducing S-GPT, an advanced conversational shortcut for ChatGPT that bridges OpenAI’s assistant to native system features of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS.

S-GPT (which stands for Shortcuts-GPT) is free to use for everyone, but it requires an OpenAI account with an associated pay-as-you-go billing plan since it takes advantage of OpenAI’s developer API, which has a cost. S-GPT was built with the latest ChatGPT API, and it can be used both with the existing ChatGPT 3.5 model or – if you have access to it – the ChatGPT 4 API.

While the shortcut is free for MacStories readers, I will be publishing a detailed, in-depth Automation Academy class soon for Club MacStories Plus or Premier members to explain the techniques and strategies I used to build this shortcut. I genuinely think that S-GPT is, from a technical perspective, my best and most advanced work to date; I hope my Academy class will help others learn some useful tips for Shortcuts and, in return, make even better automations for our contest.

With that said, let’s look at what S-GPT is and what you can do with it.

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