Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 84 - February 2025

The items included in this newsletter are listed below. Our newsletter go out about once a month - if you'd like to subscribe, just let us know!

A tale of two new AI tools: ChatGPT's Sora (for video generation) and the Chinese DeepSeek AI app

We were excited to bring you news of the new video creation tool from ChatGPT called Sora, which allows you to create a video with just a text prompt. However our excitement faded a bit on use: Sora successfully generates a video in under a minute, but judge for yourself how well it does this.

Another AI tool getting a lot of publicity at the moment is DeepSeek: after initial teething problems we managed to create an account, and ran the same 5 tests on it as we had previously done for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini. You can see the results of the tests - and our conclusions - here.

We've completely revamped the second and third most important pages of our website

Apart from our home page, the two most important pages of our website are the one showing the courses available for a particular application and the ones showing the details for an individual course. We've completely changed both pages in a bid to make them easier to navigate and use - please do take a look and let us know what you think, good or bad.

The January Power BI updates include a new file picker, treemap changes and data model scripting

There wasn't an update to Power BI in December, but the January update included a welcome new file picker (which we'll turn on by default for all Power BI courses), the ability to change layout and spacing for treemaps and - most importantly - a preview feature allowing developers to script data models (semantic models) in a language called TMDL (we plan to offer a separate course in this when it emerges from preview - let us know if you'd be interested).

Our ChatGPT competition's amazing images (and winner), and a look back over our first 50 puzzles

We were surprised to realise that this newsletter's competition is our 50th, so we thought we'd take a moment to look back nostalgically at the history of our puzzles. Returning (almost) to the present day, we were amazed (and hope you will be too) by the quality of images from our single-shot picture generation competition in our Christmas/New Year newsletter - it was really hard to choose a winner.

This month's competition: identify the 20 famous singers/bands from the picture clues

This month we're asking you to identify the 20 individual singers or band names from the picture clues. We've divided them into 3 categories: easy, medium and hard. You don't have to get all of the answers correct to enter the competition, although your chances of winning the prize (a £50 voucher) will be higher the more artists you identify. The winner and answers will be included in the next newsletter, although if you send in your answers before this we will put you out of your misery and give the solutions to the ones that you couldn't get.

One of the best lunchtime diversion sites we've seen, plus an Excel theme song to stir the spirits

Neal Agarwal is clearly a brilliant programmer, but he's also creative and funny too. His Neal's fun page includes beautifully designed webpages asking you to draw a perfect circle, create a password with increasingly ridiculous (but plausible) demands, review features of planet earth for aliens and much, much more. Or if you've only got 5 minutes of your lunch hour left, you could just listen to the theme song composed for the Excel World Championships.

Note that to keep our website content up-to-date we only publish newsletters from the last 3 calendar years.

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