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Visa and Mastercard Bring AI To Shopping 💳
How to restore old photos with ChatGPT
Gina Acosta
May 01, 2025
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
Credit card giants are turning to AI, announcing new tools that aim to make online shopping more personalized, secure, and convenient.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Visa and Mastercard Are Getting Into the AI Game
Microsoft’s New Phi 4 AI Models Combine Small Size with Big Performance
AI Tutorial: How to restore old photos with ChatGPT
AI Tools to check out
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI Findings/Resources
AI News
VISA & MASTERCARD
Visa and Mastercard Are Getting Into the AI Game
Visa and Mastercard have announced plans to leverage AI technology to simplify how people find and buy products.
Details:
Visa's "Intelligent Commerce" allows consumers to set preferences and limits, then let the AI agents handle the rest—shopping and making purchases on their behalf.
Visa is collaborating with major companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Samsung to refine the experience.
With Mastercard's "Agent Pay", the company plans to enhance generative AI conversations by integrating trusted, seamless payment experiences into the tailored recommendations and insights already offered on conversational platforms, helping users shop online and suggesting the best payment methods.
Visa and Mastercard aren’t the only ones looking to offer AI-powered shopping, as PayPal recently announced its own agentic commerce offering, and Amazon started testing a new AI feature, “Buy for Me.” AI seems to be emerging as a potential game-changer in online shopping.
MICROSOFT
Microsoft’s New Phi 4 AI Models Combine Small Size with Big Performance
Microsoft just introduced three new “open” models that reportedly offer performance rivaling much larger models while remaining lightweight enough to run on lower-end hardware, including mobile devices.
Details:
Phi 4 mini reasoning is a 3.8-billion-parameter model designed for educational applications, such as “embedded tutoring” on lightweight devices.
Phi 4 reasoning, a 14-billion-parameter model, is designed to excel in math, science, and coding tasks.
The most capable, Phi 4 reasoning plus, is an adaptation of Microsoft’s earlier Phi 4 model into a reasoning model and reportedly approaches the performance levels of DeepSeek R1, which has significantly more parameters (671 billion compared to 14), and also matches o3-mini on OmniMath, a math skills test.
This marks another important step in the path to creating efficient, high-performing AI that works on even the most constrained devices. You can find the models and their detailed technical reports on Hugging Face.
AI Tutorial
How to restore old photos with ChatGPT
Old photo of Samuel L Jackson
Some people are using ChatGPT to bring old photos back to life. It’s not true restoration, but with the right prompt, the results look impressive—colorized, cleaned up, sharpened, and less likely to alter the subject so much that they end up looking like a different person.
Go to Chatgpt or use the ChatGPT mobile app.
Choose 'GPT-4o' as your model
Upload your image
Use this prompt:
“I have an old photo that I own the copyright to. Please upscale it to high resolution and colorize it in a way that stays faithful to the original image. Do not alter the composition, facial features, clothing, background, or expression. The final result should be identical in layout and structure—if placed on top of the original, it should match exactly. The only acceptable changes are increased detail and the realistic addition of period-accurate color. Keep the style photo-realistic and era-appropriate.”
AI Tools to check out
✍️ TurboScribe: Convert audio and video to accurate text in seconds.
🎨 Getim.ai: All-in-one creative toolkit for creating images with AI.
🤖 Trag: AI code review companion.
✈ Kayak.ai: Plan your next trip and comparison shop — conversationally.
🗣 Canonical AI: Monitoring and analytics for your voice AI agent.
AI Findings/Resources
👉 A prompting masterclass for vibe marketing
👀 60% of AI agents work in IT departments - here's what they do every day
🎯 Why AI is our ultimate test and greatest invitation
The latest in AI and Tech
The startup presented Orb Mini, a compact mobile verification device designed to distinguish humans from AI agents. The device features two large sensors on the front to scan users' irises, creating a unique blockchain-based ID to verify personhood and is intended to combat AI-driven fraud.
Meta has updated its U.S. privacy policy for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to enable automatic voice recording by default, with the recordings now being used to train Meta AI and other products.
Despite challenges from U.S. export restrictions, Huang emphasized the narrow gap between the U.S. and China in AI development and called for U.S. policies that accelerate the technology’s growth to avoid falling behind.
Nadella added that the amount of code being written by AI at Microsoft is going up steadily. He was speaking alongside Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at LlamaCon, who echoed a similar view, saying, “Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI.”
The new version delivers improved image quality, better rendering of hands and bodies, improved prompt alignment, and introduces a redesigned editor with smarter tools and direct access to key functions like "Vary" and "Upscale."
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻