AI round-up: Week of April 8,2024
I’m sorry for the late send, but I have a very good reason: I was busy.
I'm busy sinking my teeth into some pretty substantial news. So let’s not delay any further.
The Big 5
1. How tech giants cut corners to harvest data for AI.
I mean, the headline says it all. This is some top-notch reporting about a challenge that AI companies are facing (running out of things to learn on) and a concern we should all have (how far are AI companies willing to go to get our data and information?). This is a serious concern as these tools increasingly become more sophisticated and need to learn. Just ask YouTube.
Wait, are you telling me companies aren’t telling the truth about how they’re training their AI models? I refuse to believe that these companies, talking about ethics and regulation, would stoop to do anything so … wait. Um. Hold on. Hmmm. Ok. Nevermind.
2. US and EU join forces to boost safety and AI research.
Reading this reminded me of ‘that kid’ in high school and/or college who was in your group … but their only contribution was just putting their name on your paper. That’s how I picture the U.S. “committing” to this.
3. OpenAI sees tremendous growth in the corporate version of ChatGPT.
In January, there were 150,000 subscribers. Now there’s 600,000. As I’ve been saying in presentations, one day, you will wake up and realize you have no choice but to use AI. I’d rather make the choice before it’s made for me.
4. Is Apple finally jumping into the LLM race? It would seem so.
Learn more about ReALM, and if this rumor is true … this offering would be good enough to compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Claude. To my earlier point, one day, you will wake up, and Siri will look and sound a lot different.
Side note: this announcement led to a $112B stock surge. No biggie.
5. Content Remix, from HubSpot, is a little … interesting.
On one hand, this is a really impressive way to get more out of your content. On the other, you have to ask if this is the best way to get the most out of your content. A rule I’ve held myself to over the years is “Don’t just make ‘stuff’.” This seems like a lot of ‘stuff.’
Learn a little
Continuing with this week’s theme of significant news and developments, Christopher Penn recently wrote about the impact of generative AI on search. He goes pretty deep, and it’s a fascinating and concerning read all at the same time. If you touch or depend on search in your business (and who doesn’t these days), you need to be aware. Our team is already talking to clients about this and the best ways to be aware and prepare. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, I asked Claude to summarize the top 10 takeaways:
1. Generative AI-based search is already affecting traditional search traffic, with some sites seeing 20-40% traffic loss due to AI-generated summaries.
2. AI-based search provides a better user experience by delivering compact, ad-free information aggregated from multiple sources.
3. Generative AI models get their information from training data, user prompts, and search results.
4. Influencing user prompts is about building brand awareness and mindshare through marketing.
5. To influence training data, create a high volume of high-quality public text content, including on your own properties and through collaborations and PR.
6. From a language model perspective, the quantity of content across many sources is more important than a few placements in top-tier publications.
7. Traditional SEO still matters because search-enabled language models partly rely on search data to generate summaries.
8. To succeed in a generative AI-powered search world, focus on creating the highest quantity and quality of content in your niche.
9. Embrace a transmedia content framework, publishing in multiple formats like text, video, audio, etc. to maximize your presence in training data.
10. Ensure your brand name and key terms are mentioned in your content to build statistical associations in language models and search results.
Did you hear about…
…Five ways to get the most out of Midjourney?
…WPP is entering into an agreement with Google to possibly use AI to create ads?
…how Amazon’s CEO feels about AI and its role in the company’s future?
…Google making its Magic Editor AI Photo Tools available to everyone? (More data!)
…Nike put the AI in Air with their latest sneaker design.
…TikTok is introducing an AI avatar that could make ads.
Must read/must discuss:
This is from March, which might as well be six years ago at this point, but the article is still a good one. Remember when we talked about ChatGPT being able to remember?
Well, this article does a great job of showing that in action. You will likely laugh out loud a little as well as just be amazed. A question that came up recently during an AI workshop I led … and it was SUCH a good one … was around release forms. If you take a picture (customers, employees) and want to remember it in ChatGPT, do you need to get that person’s permission to ‘file’ it there? My guess, plain and simple, is ‘yep’. Do you think HR and legal teams are all thinking of this? ‘Nope.’
And that’s not their fault … it’s just an example of how many little things are going to pop up with AI tools. And one more reason why your company needs an AI Council and an AI Roadmap. (We can help with both, by the way.)
Always here to talk or brainstorm!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share!
-Ben
As a reminder, this is a round-up of the biggest stories, often hitting multiple newsletters I receive/review. The sources are many … which I’m happy to read on your behalf. Let me know if there’s one you’d like me to track or have questions about a topic you’re not seeing here.