AI Advancements Like GPT-4.5 Are Here -

Exploring this week’s tech releases, news, and highlights:

🚀 OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 enhances AI with better accuracy, emotional intelligence, and reasoning.

📚 Lesson of the Week: Enhance your data visualizations with encoding techniques like shape, size, color, and position.

🤖 AI advancements with agents accelerate work, automate tasks, and drive innovation.

💻 Weekly Tech Tip: Reset your Chromebook in under a minute.

🚀 What’s New: Confetti animation for top performance and refreshed icons.

📗 Book of the Week: “Source Code” by Bill Gates.

Get a Quick Lesson In

OpenAI Introduces GPT-4.5

OpenAI has introduced GPT-4.5, its most advanced AI model to date, featuring enhanced world knowledge, emotional intelligence, and reduced hallucination rates.

The model, available to ChatGPT Pro users and API developers, was built using extensive compute and data, improving its natural language capabilities, factual accuracy, and creative reasoning.

However, despite its AI advancements, GPT-4.5 is not considered a frontier model and faces limitations in reasoning tasks compared to specialized AI models from OpenAI and competitors.

The company is evaluating its long-term API availability due to high operational costs, with plans to integrate AI advancements in future models like GPT-5.

Lesson of the Week

This week’s lesson is from our unit, “Designing chart data encoding,” and covers how various encoding techniques.

Question of the Week:

When should you use text encoding when designing charts?

Select one:

A) To compare proportions in a pie chart.

B) To label data points and axes.

C) To show data trends in a bar chart.

See if you’re right–the answer is at the bottom!

The Power of AI Agents

AI is redefining the future of work, pushing businesses to move faster, think bolder, and innovate like never before.

Companies that embrace AI advancements in workflows and agile workforce structures are unlocking new levels of efficiency and competitive advantage.

From streamlining software development to revolutionizing customer engagement, AI advancements are already delivering massive gains for organizations.

This isn’t just an upgrade—it’s a full-scale transformation, and those who hesitate risk being left behind.

Weekly Tech Tip

Reset Your Chromebook in Under a Minute

Resetting your Chromebook takes less than a minute and restores it to a fresh state–here’s how to do it quickly and easily.

Before Resetting:

Backup your data: Manually save local files and ensure cloud sync is on.
Check sync settings: Go to Settings > Sync and Google services to verify backups.
Verify app backups: Some apps may need manual cloud sync.

Factory Reset (Powerwash):

Open Settings and search for Powerwash.
Click Reset, then Restart and confirm.
After rebooting, select Reset again and log in.

After Resetting:

Sign in: ChromeOS restores settings, extensions, and apps.
Restore local files: Re-download any backed-up data.
Check for updates: Ensure ChromeOS is up to date.

Alternative: Safety Reset

Disables extensions, resets system settings, but keeps local files and logins.
Requires reconnecting to Wi-Fi.

What's New

Celebrate top performance with festive confetti animations! Plus, explore our updated icon library for a fresh look.

Book of the Week

This deeply personal memoir shares the untold story of Gates’ early life, tracing his journey from childhood to becoming a transformative business leader and philanthropist.

Unlike previous works focused on Microsoft or his philanthropy, this book delves into the experiences and challenges that shaped him—including his family, friendships, and early passion for computers.

With insight and warmth, Gates offers a revealing look at the AI advancements and technological revolution he helped ignite.