Issue 18: Open AI, Oh My!

OpenAI drops two big announcements, a music AI tool you’ll love, and a step-by-step guide to running your own private AI assistant.

Author

Mike Murphy
August 08, 2025

🗞️ AI News of The Week: OpenAI’s Big Week!

  • OpenAI Releases "Open Models" gpt20b & gpt120 – Their first openly available models for researchers and developers. Advanced open-weight reasoning models to customize for any use case and run anywhere. This means people can download the models, train them, use them locally. They are also really good models, so people in the AI world are pretty psyched about this. Prior to these ‘open’ models, ChatGPT was under lock and key, but these open models change the game for many.
    Check out the OpenAI Blog →

  • GPT-5 is Here – A highly anticipated release. GPT-4 was beyond impressive and GPT-5 is officially entering ‘crazy town’. Super smart and fast and apparently very impressive at coding. This is OpenAI’s unveils most advanced model yet, promising major leaps in reasoning, memory, and multimodal capabilities. It’s available now on all plans and it’s a big deal.
    Check out the OpenAI Blog →



🧠 AI Term of The Week: RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

RAG is a way to make AI models smarter without retraining them from scratch. Instead of relying only on what the AI “knows” from training, RAG lets it search an external database or document set in real-time, then use that fresh info to generate a response.
For creators, this means:

  • Better accuracy for niche topics

  • Dynamic updates without retraining

  • Custom knowledge bases for your audience or business

If you’ve ever wished ChatGPT “knew” your notes or project files — RAG is the magic behind that.

Note: My next big project will be diving into RAG as I am going to build a knowledge base of all of my content (video transcripts, notes, docs, podcast transcripts, articles) and RAG will be the magic sauce for this.

💬 Quote of the Week:

❝


“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”

– Zig Ziglar

🧰 AI Tool of The Week: ElevenMusic by ElevenLabs

Adding to a big week in AI news was the release of ElevenMusic by ElevenLabs.

Description: Create full-length, royalty-free music tracks with AI. Perfect for YouTube creators, podcasters, and indie filmmakers who need unique background scores without licensing headaches.
🎵 Choose a genre, mood, and tempo — ElevenMusic does the rest.

Mike’s Review: 10/10. It’s awesome. Enter text prompt and get a full song that is fully customizable and incredible quality.


🛠 What I Made: Ollama Desktop App: Private AI Chat Assistant

🎥 How To Create a Free & Private AI Chat Assistant on Your Computer using Ollama
A step-by-step guide to installing the new Ollama desktop app, running multiple LLMs locally, and keeping your data private — no cloud required.

📌 Benefits of Ollama:

  • Runs locally on computer so your data remains private.

  • Upload docs or PDFs and get help writing copy, blog posts, scripts, brainstorming, etc

  • No internet connection required (works on a plane or in the Sahara desert!)

  • 100% Free.

  • Download Ollama App & run your own private AI chat assistant



Mike Murphy — The AI Handyman 🧰
Helping creators & small businesses turn their content & documents into AI‑powered tools.