I tried to have ChatGPT write the newsletter intro as if it were Kevin Hart, but it was pretty bad so we will forgo the traditional celebrity intro in favor of going straight into the news this week. But first…

Also, really quick, I’m doing an ad giveaway this week. First person to send me a reply with the emails of 5 people they got to subscribe (I’ll check on my end) will get to run an ad copy on the next issue. I’ll email whoever won for their ad by end of day tomorrow and they get to run an ad for free to thousands of folks who like AI. Pretty sweet deal, no?

Anyways, ready yourself for an AI Avalanche of News.

News Headlines

• Bing(er) Bing(er) Chicken Dinner 🐓

• Google Memo Leaked: It Ain’t Looking So Hot

• US Gov. Stance on AI 🇺🇸

• Another ChatGPT Casualty: Chegg It Out

Bodacious AI Stuff

• You.ai: Digitize your mind into a Personal Digital Agent (still trying to wrap my head around what exactly this would even look like— the site is not exactly forthcoming on implementation details, but it looks super cool) 😱

•  GPTZero Browser Extension: Free of charge in-browser AI detection is here. Use it wisely 😳

✈️ An AI Flyby for the Week ✈️

Bing(er) Bing(er) Chicken Dinner 🐓

Bing’s really making a comeback from being a second-rate search engine to a household name. If Statista is to be believed, as of March 2023, “Bing accounted for 8.23 percent of the global desktop search market, while market leader Google had a share of around 85.53 percent”. If true, this is pretty incredible, as this is about a 4% increase since 2019 for Bing (sounds smalls, but we’re talking billions here). And let’s not forget that Google is liable to loose it’s spot as Samsung’s default search engine, which would give up further market share to Bing.

Capitalizing on this momentum, Bing recently announced a batch of new features, so let’s take a look at what they’ve been working on.

1) First and foremost the waitlist for using Bing Chat has been scrapped (finally 😩), opening it up to billions (remember that’s GPT-4 on the back-end). Powerful stuff.

2) They’re making search more multimodal on Bing, allowing you to search with images and also responding to queries with visuals and graphs instead of static text. Yippee for visual learners.

3) The Bing Image creator has been out for a while now and is built on top of DALL-E. Try it out!

4) Bing will maintain your chat history and keep it available as shortcuts, so you can continue lines of inquiry at any time (like ChatGPT does with the sidebar).

5) Perhaps the most exciting news is Bing Plugins (we already covered what plugins are, but just in case you need a refresher).

You might be thinking, it’s kind of hard to tell if Microsoft is collaborating or competing with OpenAI at this point. Well, my take is that they are competitors that are extremely reliant on one another. Microsoft needs OpenAI’s models and OpenAI needs Microsoft’s funding, especially after spending 540 million in development costs for their chatbots.

READ MORE

Google Memo Leaked: It’s Not Flattering for Google

A leaked internal Google document claims that neither Google nor OpenAI will win the AI race; the disgruntled employee believes it will be the open source community that comes out on top. Take that you corporate whales. Score one for the little guys.

So, why does this unnamed Google employee feel this way? It’s because recently, there’s been a surge of open-source progress with new LLMs being trained by the community almost every week. The spark that started this open source frenzy seems to be Meta’s leaked Lllama model. After that, came models that were faster, less storage intensive, less expensive, and more accessible to ordinary users, like Stanford’s alpaca model and various others. If this continues, the Google researcher predicts that the rise of cheaper, customizable AI models will leave OpenAI and Google in the dust. The researcher points to what happened with Stable Diffusion as a cautionary tale for AI companies. Stable Diffusion boasts better generated images than DALL-E or any other corporate alternatives at this point in time, despite being open sourced.

However, I’m not so sure I buy into this researcher’s narrative and am hesitant to believe Google is going to loose at anything just yet. I’ll reserve judgement for after they release Project Magi, their new set of search tools powered by AI. Also, it’s not as if Google has been slacking. At their Goole I/O event that just happened a day ago, they unveiled upgrades to Bard, AI-powered search results, upgrades to Google Workspace, and Imagen, their AI image generator. And after watching the video linked in this Twitter post, I don’t think Google will fall behind in the AI race just yet.

READ MORE HERE.

US Gov. Stance on AI 🇺🇸

The Biden-Harris administration is taking AI seriously. So far, they have announced a $140M initiative to fund the creation of a National AI Institute. They have also begun conducting public assessments of existing generative AI technologies and platforms and are meeting with CEOs to impress the importance of releasing safe AI models.

Kamala Harris was recently dubbed the “AI Tsar“, as she has been placed in charge of overseeing the responsible development of AI amid rapidly growing concerns that weakly regulated expansion of the tech could quickly turn dangerous. Recently, our AI Tsar met with CEOs from Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI to discuss the formation of an AI Bill of Rights that would protect American citizens, society, national security, and last but not least, our beloved economy. When discussing the dangers of AI with these industry leaders, here were the central themes that came up:

• Data privacy: LLMs are notoriously hard to secure, especially when they are updated as users interact with them.

• Misinformation: LLMs are at their heart statistical models (neural nets), so they are not guaranteed to produce credible outputs 100% of the time.

• Copyright: This concern has ratcheted up in intensity as AI music has now become a thing, so now some writers, artists, and musicians are all riled up.

• Plagiarism: Teachers are concerned students’ educations will suffer as a result of overuse of these AI models. Last week Chegg shares fell 40%+, primarily due to ChatGPT(we’ll talk about that).

However, amid discussions of the dangers of AI, there are equally valid concerns that overregulation of AI could give up our competitive advantage to other nations, like China, which could have some not so thrilling consequences. Tough Pickles indeed.

READ MORE HERE

Another ChatGPT Casualty: Chegg It Out

Bad puns aside, Chegg really, really does not like ChatGPT right now. In fact, Chegg’s feelings about ChatGPT are probably very similar to how Soulja Boy feels about Drake:

Ok, ok I’ll explain the backstory if you insist. The story goes Drake copied Soulja Boy’s (am I spelling this right) whole flow for his song Miss Me from Soulja Boy’s hit single Kiss Me Through the Phone. But now AI is copying everyone, so I guess it’s all good now? But random story aside, Chegg, which provides “homework assistance“ (cough, cough gives student answers for money), is already feeling the effects of AI. Their shares fell over 40% as students flocked to using ChatGPT and GPT-4 for their academic needs. Chegg is trying to churn out a new AI powered feature called Cheggmate, a personalized homework helper service, but if they don’t get it out fast enough, it might be them who ends up Cheggmated. Ok, sorry, last pun. But, seriously, they really need to ship that feature faster.

Many other businesses are feeling the effects of ChatGPT’s burgeoning popularity, like StackOverflow. In Stack Overflow’s case though, I can’t help but feel bad because it’s helped me through some very tough times. I can’t say the same for Chegg 😒.

But this just shows the importance of having a defensible business moat when ChatGPT comes knocking. Who will be the next to fall victim to ChatGPT 👀. TBD

READ MORE HERE

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow (But Please Keep Reading LOL)

Well that's a wrap on the newsletter. Before I launch into my ending monologue, please take a moment to drag this email to your primary, so that you never miss it each week! Thank you!

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Cool Things You Should Try/Buy

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