Has the AI party started yet?

Welcome to another edition of what we’re determined to make the best damn newsletter in AI. Here we’ll break down AI topics that matter, open your mind to use cases, and keep you ahead of the curve.

Our #1 goal is to be useful. So please shoot us an email 📩 if you have questions or feedback, and especially if you implement something we share!

Here's what we're covering today:

• Other companies you should be watching in the AI arms race

• Create your own blog generator with AI + Airtable + Zapier

• AI - it's coming to a product near you

Let’s get to it! 👇

TODAY'S PERSPECTIVE

Has the AI party started yet?

Last week’s attention was on big tech, AI, and the search wars.

But the quickly evolving AI landscape is obviously much bigger than that.

And it’s not just Microsoft and Open AI at the helm.

Google was the original team to work on the transformer, the tech behind all of the generative AI models we see today. Despite them fumbling the bag last week, Google has put out an impressive number of demos and is clearly investing across the AI space. PaLM and their healthcare-specific version MedPaLM are two that we are watching closely. And mixed into their Bard announcement, Google confirmed that they are working to open up APIs and more toolkits for developers to use this tech in their products.

Anthropic is another lesser-known startup in the scene, but not any less impressive. Anthropic was founded by former Open AI employees who believed there was a better way to train these AI models. They are now investing heavily in building out an approach called Constitutional Learning, and their ChatGPT competitor Claude is slotted to be released soon.

Meta is waking up and coming onto the scene. Their release of a pretty big paper on AI learning tools called Toolformer got AI builders all giddy.

There are a handful of other players emerging - Cohere.ai being another well-funded and supported startup that serves enterprise customers and has its own AI model training in the works. Nvidia, Amazon, Salesforce, and others seem to be aiming at potential investments.

We do agree that Open AI, and by association Azure, are the farthest along in the commercialization of these language model tools. But they aren’t the only ones, and the next 6-18 months are likely going to see a hyper-competitive landscape emerge - which is great news for us as consumers.

All being said, it feels clear that we will have options for our AIs.

If you're integrating generative AI into your product or business, it's best to keep model interchangeability in mind (aka make it easy to switch AI models later). We're early and you want to keep your options open.

USE CASE DEEP DIVE

Build your own blog generator

We’ve seen how language models like ChatGPT have completely transformed our content creation workflows - but what if AI could automatically generate an entire blog post for you, with images, from just a topic?

That’s where combining the magic of automation tools with the power of AI really gets exciting. 🤩

Using Airtable with Zapier's OpenAI integrations (for GPT and DALL-E) makes all of this, and so much more, possible.

Here’s a full video walkthrough by Aron Korenblit, at Automate All The Things, and Yohei Nakajima, the creator of the OpenAI Zapier integration where they explain how the OpenAI integration works within Zapier and dive into a simple application: a blog post generator. The actual Airtable + Zapier tutorial starts at around 11 minutes, but the entire video is worth the watch in our opinion!

TL;DR on the video walkthrough:

• GPT-3 generates a blog post based on the blog idea from Airtable

• The blog post is used to generate a prompt for DALL-E

• DALL-E uses that prompt to generate an image for the blog post

• All outputs get populated back into to Airtable record for posting!

And if you’re looking for ways to customize or improve upon this workflow, here are some suggestions to get you started:

• Use prompt engineering tips to refine your prompts to GPT and emulate your specific writing style or tone

• Generate multiple images so that you have options of what to include in your blog

• Add another step into your workflow that will send the content directly to your blog platform once the draft is ready to be published

LINKS

For your reading list 📚

AI is coming to many, many tools near you

• Replit, an emerging code editor, shipped yet another AI feature. This time, chat with your code. It can even help you debug.

• Buffer, a popular social media scheduling tool, announced their AI writing copilot

• Repurpose, our favorite content repurposing tool, announced an AI integration to help you rewrite your repurposed content (early pulse though is that it's got some room for improvement)

And at the pace at which AI is advancing, it’s no surprise we have a good amount of controversy

• An amusing, but also very important, detail of a Bing Chat transcript shows that we still have a long way to go on language models like ChatGPT actually following our instructions

• Spotify and the platform they owned, Findaway, face controversy around what data was used to train their synthetic voices and if audiobook narrators were actually aware they were going to be part of training data

Go deeper and start building with AI in your products

• Rachel interviewed Harrison, the founder of LangChain on the basics (YouTube)

• Then we also published a deep dive in one of the most popular use cases right now Q&A over any document dataset (YouTube)

MEMBERSHIP UPDATE

We've officially launched! 🙏

A huge shoutout to our current members and the great conversations we're already having within the Slack!

Interested in joining? Join the growing community of people using AI in their work and products.

That's all!

We'll see you again on Tuesday. Thoughts, feedback and questions are much appreciated - respond here or shoot us a note at [email protected].

Cheers,

🪄 The AI Exchange Team