Must-Know 2024 AI Updates To Supercharge Your Work In 2025

ChatGPT’s vision & voice, o3, creating AI Agents, automating email replies, generating a Christmas song, here are what you should bring to 2025.

Welcome to Stay Ahead #56 from FlexOS!

Every Wednesday, we share the latest tools and tips to help you work smarter, not harder.

First of all, I hope you and your loved ones are having a joyful Christmas and a holiday season filled with warmth and laughter. This time of year invites us to reflect, recharge, and explore new ideas—and that’s exactly what we’re diving into this week:

1. News of the Week: AI updates to bring into 2025.
2. Prompt and Guide: How to automate your email replies with ChatGPT in 5 steps.
3. Must-read News:  The next big leap in AI is behind schedule.

Let’s dive in!

The only AI updates you need to carry into 2025

2024 has been a wild ride for AI advancement. If you need a reminder, here are something that wasn’t possible before this year:

• Browsing specialized GPTs for specific tasks in the ChatGPT Store.
• Debugging and running your code in real-time with tools like  Claude’s Artifacts and ChatGPT’s Canvas
• Getting accurate, up-to-date info with citations directly from the web.
• Having actual conversations with AI—like talking and listening.
• Letting AI not just tell you how to do something, but actually doing it for you.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all these updates, especially when life is already busy. Here’s the thing though: not all these changes are equally important, and you definitely don’t need to know everything to step into 2025 more productive and ahead of the game.

Let’s focus on what actually matters and is here to stay:

1. Superprompting: No matter how advanced AI gets, one thing hasn’t changed: it only knows what you tell it. The quality of its responses depends entirely on the quality of your input. That’s why knowing how to write a great prompt—being clear, specific, and giving context—is still the secret sauce to getting the most out of AI.
2. What’s possible now with ChatGPT: If you are a technical folk, o3 model coming in January 2025 is a big deal—it’s smarter, better at math, and a coding powerhouse. But if you simply want to get stuff done faster, here are the key updates you should know about:some text

• ‍ChatGPT Tools: Forget having to pick the right model for each task. With Tools, you can tag a specific feature for your prompt (e.g., browsing the web or analyzing data) without worrying about switching between models.

• Projects: If you’ve ever scrolled through old conversations trying to find that one golden nugget of info, this one’s for you. Now, you can organize chats into projects with instructions and files all in one place.

• ‍Vision and Voice: With Advanced Voice Mode, you can literally just speak to ChatGPT. And now it can “see,” too—ask it questions about your surroundings via video and get real-time support.‍
• Apps Integration: For Mac users, ChatGPT can now work in the background, pulling context from your open apps to help without you needing to copy, paste, or screenshot. Think Notion, Apple Notes, Xcode, or VS Code.

3. Podcast is a new way to store and digest information: NotebookLM lets you store all your messy files—images, videos, PDFs, text—then retrieve the info with proper citations (and almost no hallucinations). But the real magic? It can turn your materials into a two-host podcast that dives deep into the topic. Bonus: you can even give instructions and join the conversation to ask questions.

4. Opening the AI black box: One of the biggest gripes with AI has been that it’s a bit of a mystery how it works. Models like ChatGPT’s o1 and o3, or Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Mode, are changing that. They’re designed to think “out loud,” breaking down their reasoning step by step so you can see how they arrive at solutions.
5. Agentic AI: Imagine this: instead of just telling you how to do something, AI goes ahead and does it. That’s where we’re headed in 2025. Claude’s Computer Use, ChatGPT’s apps integration, Microsoft’s Magnetic-One are just the beginning. These tools are getting more accessible and easier to use, meaning more time saved for you.

The holiday season is the perfect time to reflect, get ready, and focus on the updates that actually matter to you. Your journey with AI should never be a FOMO (fear of missing out) experience, but a self-improvement one. 

If you want to spend some days off to get hands-on with AI, I have some interesting projects for you in the next section. 

Prompts and Tutorials

In 5 Steps: Automate Your Email Replies with ChatGPT

With the power of ChatGPT and Zapier, you can save hours every week by automating email responses. This guide will walk you through a simple, 5-step process to set up an automated email reply system that still feels personal and professional.

Build Anything with Claude Agents, Here’s How

This guide walks you through a straightforward process to set up and customize your own AI-powered assistant tailored to your needs, using Claude MCP.

OpenAI Api Crash Course For Beginners | Financial Data Extraction Tool Using OpenAI API

Learn how to build a financial data extraction tool using the OpenAI API. The tutorial walks viewers through creating an account, obtaining API keys, and writing Python code to extract company information (like revenue and net income) from news articles.

In 5 steps: Create a personal website with ChatGPT Canvas

On Day 7 of the OpenAI Shipmas series, Thomas Dimson demonstrated how he used ChatGPT Canvas and Projects to create his personal webpage from an existing template. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps to create your own website—without writing a single line of code!

Create your own holiday song with AI

Never take the fun out of the AI experiment! Try to create a holiday song with the help of ChatGPT for the lyrics and Suno to put them all together. Here is my 2024 Holiday AI Recap Song for you:

‍→ Read more news at the end.

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Create better prompts with our GPT Prompt Generator

Every week, we pick must-read articles about the future of work so you can stay ahead.

The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive‍

The delays and high costs of developing cutting-edge AI systems are shedding light on the increasing complexity of achieving breakthroughs in generative AI.

BREAKING: OpenAI's new O3 model changes everything

An in-depth look at OpenAI's latest O3 model, highlighting its enhanced reasoning capabilities and potential applications.

Instagram teases AI tools for editing appearances, backgrounds in videos using prompts​

Instagram is testing AI-powered tools that enable users to alter appearances and backgrounds in videos simply by providing descriptive prompts.

When Your Team Bypasses You to Get Things Done‍

The article examines the dynamics of teams bypassing their leaders for efficiency, highlighting the balance between empowerment and maintaining authority.

The Paradox of Choice in Generative AI: A Framework for Simplifying Decisions in 2024‍

This piece provides a framework to navigate the overwhelming choices in generative AI tools, helping HR professionals focus on what adds real value.