EP 195: AI News That Matter - Jan. 29th, 2024

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How can you possibly keep up with everything going on in the world of AI right here? Every Monday, this is what we do. We keep you up to date with everything that you need to know that's going on in the world of generative AI news, happening updates, everything. So thanks for tuning in. We're going to talk about AI news that matters today. My name is Jordan Wilson and I am the host of Everyday AI and Everyday AI. Well, it's for you. This is to help everyday people learn and leverage generative AI to grow their companies and to grow their careers. So thank you for joining me. If you're listening on the podcast, thank you so much. Make sure as always to check your show notes, a lot of other information in there as well as if you want to, you know, send me an email, ask me a question, connect on LinkedIn, whatever it may be. And we're going to actually start, you know, dropping some surprises there in the show notes probably this week. So make sure to keep an eye on that if you're joining us on the live stream, like Megan joining us and Woozy, thank you for tuning in as always. This is your, hey, this is your one stop shop, you know, if you can only tune in one day a week and if you want to know what's happening in the world of AI news and if you want to know how it impacts you, this is your show every single Monday. All right, so as a reminder, if you haven't already, go to your everydayai.com and sign up for the free daily newsletter. Yes, it's a live stream, it's a podcast, but both in today's news that we're going to be going over and in our other shows this week, we always, each and every day, probably about, you know, mid morning, you know, usually about 11, 11:30am Central Standard Time, we send out our newsletter. So if you want to know more about today's stories or just anything, make sure to sign up for that free daily newsletter and, and check out our website while you're there. I tell people it is a free generative AI university. Now we're nearing our 200, 200 episodes. So we have 200 back podcasts that you can go listen to as well as, you know, 200Now newsletters you can go back and read. So literally, I honestly think it is the top source of free vetted information on generative AI on the entire Internet. So make sure to go check that out. But let's get into it. Let's talk about the AI news that matters for the week of January 29th. All right, let's start it off high level. Some exciting news from OpenAI. And hey, let me know if you have access to this right now. So OpenAI has unveiled its Mentions feature. All right, so this is a brand new feature that was released, I believe, Friday afternoon. So obviously these big updates always happen a couple hours after, after our broadcast, but OpenAI just started to release this new feature called GPT Mentions. All right, so here's essentially what it is, how it works. Again, right now we don't, we don't have access. Usually when OpenAI, you know, kind of releases a big new feature like this, they slowly drip it out, you know, to their users. So I'd say, I don't know, maybe 5 to 10% of people have this right now. So make sure to check your account, you know, if you do have that chat GPT plus subscription, so you do have to have the 20amonth paid plan. But here's how it works. Essentially you can mention different GPTs when you are chatting. So here's what that means, and I have a little example here on the screen. But essentially, you know, if, if you create, let's say, your own custom GPT and if you don't know what that is, let me just quickly explain that. So then you can kind of see how this GPT mentions could be a huge step forward when it comes to working with large language models specifically for business use cases. Right? So a GPT is this, it's creating a custom version of ChatGPT, kind of tuned or tweaked for your own purposes, for your own use cases. So you can pretty easily upload different files into a knowledge base and you can kind of configure a GPT to work how you want it. Right? So you can tell, you know, essentially assign ChatGPT a role for this custom GPT, you know, upload different knowledge files and, you know, kind of instruct this GPT to, to use these knowledge files how you want it to. Okay, so let's, let's start here. Literally last week I talked about how I think OpenAI is making a mistake with GPTs specifically as it came to their kind of reported phase out of the plugins mode. Plugins mode. Still, it's still there today. Whether it's there next month or next year, who knows? But the, the reporting all along has been that Apple is going to, or sorry that OpenAI is going to phase out plugins in lieu of the GPTs. And I've been very hard on OpenAI because I said, well that you know, we're, we're all the everyday user is going to lose so much practical use cases for this OpenAI technology. When you can go into the, the plugin repository, I think there's 1300 plugins and you can easily add them and mix them, right? I think that was the big, you know, the, the big benefit of using plugins is you could use any three plugins at any given time, right? And I said phasing plugins out in favor of GPTs was going to be a huge mistake. But I did say this, I said GPTs as they are today, right? I said that in the newsletter. I said GPTs as they are today. But that changed, right? That changed pretty significantly now with this feature or this ability of mention. So again, I've only been able to go, you know, watch some demo videos. But what this should allow you to do is to have some of that plugins functionality, you know, that we teach in our free prime prompt polish course of being able to kind of tap into these multiple different services at once in one chat. So as an example example, let's just say that you are using a GPT that helps you code, right? Maybe you're not a great coder or maybe you are a great web developer, but you found a great custom GPT that helps you write better code faster, right? So now when you are chatting with that GPT that helps you do coding, then you can call on or mention a GPT that helps do web development as an example, right? So now you can see the power where you can kind of have a chat with a GPT that is geared toward web development or coding and then in the same chat go ahead and mention, you know, a GPT that helps you do web design. All right? So now you can see, you know, bringing some of that functionality that, that we love with plugins by being able to, you know, build what we call plugin packs, which is any three plugins at a time. I think that's where, if I'm being honest, and this is one of the reasons why we use chat GPT so much more than any other large language model is the ability to tap into these third party and outside services that can really start to automate a lot of the day to day manual tasks that you do, right? At least right now you don't really have that functionality in other large Language models like Anthropics, Claude Google Bard. It has its extensions that you know, sometimes work with, with its, you know, with, with YouTube and Gmail and you know, your Google Drive. At least in our testing it's, it's a little finicky. Right, but that's only Google Pro, Google's products. So with this, the GPTs inside of OpenAI with the ability to mention other GPTs, it really hopefully will bring in kind of that functionality that we've loved by using three plugins at a time. Because that's where you can start to literally automate so many, you know, of those manual time consuming tasks that we all have to do on a day to day basis. All right, hey, this is good. We, some people have it. All right, so Tara has access to it. Daniel said, you know, it does work. Tried it this weekend. So yeah, it looks like, you know, some people do have access to it. I've even seen that, you know, if you have a teams account, some people in the teams account have access to it, whereas some people don't. So at least, hey, as soon as we get more information, you can guarantee that we're going to be having a show specifically on GPT mentions. As soon as, you know, our team does get full access to this. Yeah, kind of like what Tara is saying here. It's, it's, you know, kind of bringing it into this, this plugin mode or this plugin model, which I agree. All right, enough about that, let's keep going. Although I could talk about that for a very long time. But there's some actually huge news that I think we should all be paying attention to, you know, when we talk about the news that matters. This is one of those news pieces last week that I think just kind of got swept under the rug. But the FTC is investigating big tech AI companies. All right, so here's what's happening. The Federal Trade Commission is now demanding information on partnerships from some of the biggest AI companies. All right, so here's what's happening. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI now have 45 days to provide information regarding investments and partnerships to the Federal Trade Commission. Right, so what's happening now is, you know, regulators are calling a lot of these partnerships quasi mergers and I quote right not, not my words, that's theirs. So here's what's happening in the ftc, it appears, is really starting to dig into some of these large partnerships because they're saying it's taking away the competitive landscape, you know, so at least here in the U.S. you know, one thing that the FTC does is it's always trying to make sure that the competitive landscape is fair and that no one or two companies, or three or four or five have a complete monopoly right, over, you know, the entire landscape. So here's kind of why the, the FTC is investigating here. And again, right now we don't know, we don't know anything aside from this announcement again showing the, the screenshot here on, on the live stream from the FTC website that's launching the inquiry into these generative AI investments and partnerships. All right, so if you don't know how these are working, here's kind of how. So essentially Microsoft reportedly has invested tens of billions of dollars into OpenAI and reportedly has a 49% ownership stake. So, okay, you can see how the, the Microsoft and the Open AI, you know, kind of two juggernauts in the generative, generative AI space. So the FTC is saying, all right, do they have too much power? Right, and it obviously doesn't stop there because you look at, you know, probably one of the other biggest players in the large language model kind of game you would say is Anthropics. Claude. You know, they're definitely a kind of top four large language model right now. But you know, two of their biggest funders are Alphabet, parent company of Google as well as Amazon. Right. So right there you have your three probably biggest tech companies in Microsoft, Google and Amazon investing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into these two startups. OpenAI, even though, you know, OpenAI has been been around for, you know, I think nine years, eight or nine years now, and anthropic. So this is something to definitely keep an eye on what measures may the FTC be looking to put in place, if any. But this new investigation was reportedly sparked by the OpenAI turmoil in November. So that was when OpenAI fired its CEO Sam Altman. And then about a week later, Sam Altman was reinstated as the CEO in part obviously because of Microsoft's involvement. They wanted to, you know, make sure that this situation, this turmoil was resolved in a way that obviously didn't impact, you know, its products, offerings or stock price. Right. So there was some heavy involvement in the kind of negotiation talks between Sam Altman, reportedly between Sam Altman, the OpenAI governing board and there's obviously some changes put in place at the board. So, you know, there's multiple things here that the FTC is taking a look at. And yeah, it should be interesting. You know, that 45 day window is, you know, should be coming, you know, early to mid March. So it's something to keep an eye on, at least for me personally. But who am I? I'm just a random guy that talks about generative AI every single day. To me, I don't think necessarily that these, these companies are squashing competition. I do think that this is the new direction of generative AI companies, right? And I think it's actually smart from the big companies, right? So even let's look at Google as an example. Google has their own large language model, right? They have their new model that they just launched a couple months ago, Gemini. So, you know, you have your Gemini Nano that's now coming out in the Samsung smartphones. You have your Gemini Pro, which is now powering, you know, Google Bard. And then you have your Gemini Ultra, which has yet to be released. So Google does have its own generative AI large language models, but at the same time is investing a lot of money into anthropic. So I think even just that one argument right there that Alphabet can make and say, hey, you know, we are, we not only have our own product, our own service, our own large language model offering, but we're investing in others, right? Investors. And these companies, you know, your Amazon's, Microsoft, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, you know, it's not like they're only investing in these companies. You know, they have dozens of other large investments into other generative AI companies. So yeah, regardless, it's something I think that you should definitely keep an eye on. I don't know if anything, you know, groundbreaking is going to come from this investigation, but still keep an eye out early march on what this investigation brings. And hey, I'd love to know, even from our, from our live audience tuning in here, what are your thoughts, you know, or if you're listening on the podcast, do, do these companies, are they building monopolies? You know, if, if you're a smaller, large language model company, can you still compete? I do think it's interesting that, you know, the one company, the one big tech company that obviously wasn't mentioned here is Meta, right? The, you know, parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They weren't mentioned, you know, in this investigation from the ftc. So a pretty interesting tidbit there. All right, let's keep it going and talk about our next big piece of AI news that matters. Apple making some big AI news kind of behind the scenes with its upcoming software update and some, some reports that are showing that they're really putting a lot of AI technology into Siri. Okay, so right now Apple is working on some major new AI features reportedly for its iOS 18, its next big update to its operating system for iPhone, including reportedly a new version of Siri that is powered by large language models. So to aid in this development, they are reportedly using OpenAI's ChatGPT API for internal testing, according to new reports, and comparing the results with their own AI models. So Apple is reportedly testing up to four different AI models, including its own AJAX model, which previous reporting has showed that they are spending more than a million dollars per day developing this new model. And they are using, you know, ChatGPT's OpenAI integration. So some, some, some new leaks have showed that they are kind of, you know, not just testing their own models, but also testing internally using ChatGPT in their new iOS. Also, Bloomberg is reporting that Apple's goal is to fill iOS 18 with features powered by, by the company's new large language model and also integrates AI into their Messages app. All right, so the iOS 18 update could potentially be the biggest update in the history of iPhones, right? When you talk about a decade plus of iPhones and a decade plus of operating system updates, bringing generative AI, bringing the functionality of large language models into the iPhone could be one of the biggest updates really ever in terms of, you know, operating software, you know, the iOS with Apple. So this is expected to be announced at the WWDC 2024 in June, which is the worldwide developer conference for Apple. So that's kind of the expectation on where we would at least see the first official announcement from Apple. So we've talked about this a lot here on the everyday AI show about Apple's moves in the kind of, you know, large language model and generative AI space. Said it once, I said it a hundred times. Apple historically is never first, right? They're very, very rarely first when it comes to breakthrough technology, but they are usually best or at least better than their competitors. And why this is especially timely right now is, well, Samsung, you know, probably Apple's number one competitor on the smartphone market, Samsung has been pushing their new, their new phone extremely hard. That has AI, you know, edge AI, which is essentially generative AI built into the phone. Okay, and let's just real quick talk about what that means. What does edge AI mean or, you know, edge devices? So that is when you have generative AI capabilities working on an actual device and not relying on the cloud, right? So what that means right now, if you log into Chat GPT as an example, you are logging onto a website or you are using the official ChatGPT app, okay? So you are using a third party's compute power, right? You're using their cloud. So the difference is when you bring that AI power to your actual phone, to your actual hardware device, it is not only much faster because it's running locally, it doesn't have to talk back and forth to the cloud. So it's not only much faster, but it technically has much more, much more capabilities into what it can actually do, right? Because when you bring generative AI to your device, if you give it access to, it can access everything on your phone. So again, think when you're typing in messages, right? So if you are using the next version of the iPhone, you know, who knows, maybe in a year the ability for this onboard AI, whether it's Siri or whether they call it, you know, Apple, Ajax, whatever, whatever it is, but you're going to have this generative AI living on your phone that knows everything, right? It knows everything that's been in your emails, it knows what apps that you're switching between, you know, at any given time. So, you know, think of what that means for productivity, for knowledge retrieval, and even just for how much more useful a device can be when it can remember all of this pertinent information, right? It's, it's like sometimes, you know, how much time do we spend on a daily basis, I would say hours looking for, in retrieving specific information that we maybe knew a week ago, or we looked it up yesterday, or we read it last month, or we created a presentation last month and as humans, we just forget it, right? So this is one of the huge benefits of, you know, edge AI and bringing artificial intelligence to hardware, to your actual phone device, is the ability for it to remember things much faster, you know, and who knows, maybe now Siri will become useful. You know, I've talked about this on the, on the show now here all the time. You know, I think our smartphone, you know, our quote, unquote, smart assistants, you know, your Siri, your Alexa, whatever you know, Google's is called, you know, they're just not very good, if I'm being honest. Especially the more and more that we get to play with large language models, right? I think when we're using large language models, they seem so intuitive that they, they can really understand our query. And then if you go use something like a Siri or an Alexa, it just seems like something's off, right? It is a painful experience now, especially even for me. I'm spending hours a day using large language models. And when I try to get something extremely simple out of Siri or Alexa, it is a mind numbingly painful experience. It's gotten to the point where I don't even use really Siri or Alexa anymore. Maybe aside from saying what's the weather. But I think with this new update in iOS, bringing all these generative AI features and functionality reportedly into the new iPhone, into iOS 18 is going to be huge. And again, Apple here just following the lead from Samsung, right, Because Samsung did just debut this on the S24 smartphone. You know, Samsung's S24 now has that generative AI built in. And I don't know about you, but I am seeing their advertising everywhere, right, for bringing AI to the phone. So I do think that is probably going to really light a fire under Apple to really announce it at this WWDC in June versus maybe pushing it out for a future announcement. So definitely that's a piece of AI news that really matters. Yeah, yeah, I, I agree here with what Daniel was saying here in the comments saying Siri and Alexa were amazing years ago, but they never got better. They always seem to get lost. Yes, absolutely right. It, it almost does. See Daniel, it, it seems like almost archaic technology now, right? These know, smart assistants that you know, years ago seem to be revolutionary. You know, it seems now like using a rotary phone right when you talk to Siri or Alexa or any of these other, you know, smart assistants that aren't powered by a large language model. It just seems to be a waste of time now. All right, Are you still running in.

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One more big piece of AI news that matters. All right, so Google has announced their new video AI model Lumiere. So Google has developed a new AI video generation model called Lumiere. And it utilizes a brand new technology that researchers at Google have developed called Space time unit Architecture. And this creates videos with seamless motion. So with Lumiere, Google is looking to surpass the quality of other AI video generators in terms of realism and movement portrayal. So Lumiere is not available yet. Google just launched you know, a landing page and you know, kind of promo marketing video, you know, in the middle of the week last week. And you know, if, if I'm being honest, it's pretty impressive results so far. So right now the leader in the space right now are, is, is Runway with their AI model Pika Labs. You know, they just a couple months ago launched their, their 1.0 model which is really good and then also Meta's newly announced EMU video. So why, why does this matter? Right? Well this the same way that in 2023, you know, that was kind of the year of large language models, right? So ChatGPT was announced in November 2022 and really grew in popularity and paved the way for kind of this big large language model, sprint, right? In 2023 where you saw like we talked about with the FTC investigation story, you saw every single large tech company either announce or update one of their models or, or make large investments in others, right? So every single big tech company, you know, if you look at the, the ones that we use on a day to day basis, so your Microsoft, your Google, your Amazon, you know, IBM, right? All of these companies either have their own model or maybe both they have their own large language model and they are investing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into others, into these, you know, smaller startups that are really starting to take the lead. So I do think, and I talked about this on the, you know, kind of 24 bold predictions for 2024, that 2024 is going to be the year of the video model. You know, obviously the text to Image Landscape in 2023 really blew up in terms of, of quality and quantity, right? Specifically, you know, you had your unveiling of Dall E3 inside of Chat GPT and worked into all of the Microsoft Copilot products and offerings and Microsoft designer. So Dolly, obviously Dall E3 made a huge splash for text to image but also mid Journey six, it's, it's gotten to the point where these image models are so good, it is hard to tell the difference, right. I don't, I don't even really talk about this a lot, but I essentially, you know, in my time formerly as a journalist, I also took hundreds of thousands of photos, right. I think I have probably three or four DSLRs sitting around somewhere here in my house or in, in my office. And you know, as someone that's technically a trained photographer, it is extremely difficult to tell the difference now between AI generated photos and photos generated from humans. Right. Early on, you know, a year or so ago, it was pretty easy. These, these AI images weren't very good. They're very good now. So now obviously the next iteration is video, right? Because what a lot of these video models do, yes, they have text to video where you can just type in a short prompt in real human language, right? Like you don't have to speak prompt speak. You can just type in a prompt in real human language and get a pretty good video out of it. However, most of these models also have the ability for photo to video, which is why I'm even bringing up AI image or, sorry, yeah, AI images in general. Because what's now happening is you're seeing a lot of little short films, little short teasers that look real AI video. When you start the kind of the video creation process with an image, you know, especially from, you know, a leading, leading platform like midjourney. I think right now, mid journey is so far ahead of the other AI image generators. But you know, when you now talk about, you know, new, these new AI video models like Google's Lumiere 2024 is going to be the year, it's going to be the year of we're seeing all of these extremely high quality AI video generators. I think we're going to start to see incredibly personalized, you know, short stories, right? Little kind of marketing campaigns that are tailored for you, right. So often in years past, you know, I have a pretty big background in marketing and advertising. You know, you couldn't make 20 different videos for different ICPs or different demographics or you know, different customer avatars. But hey, now with all these AI video models, you can, right? You don't just have to have one marketing video that appeals to the masses. You can have 20 or 50 or 500 highly personalized, you know, marketing videos that really speak to whoever you're trying to reach on the end. So something that I found kind of interesting here from Google's announcement video. So what, what we have on the screen here if you're joining live, you can see if you're on the podcast, I'll explain it to you. But Google's showcasing in the promo video the text to video capabilities and it says a time lapse oil painting of Starry Night with clouds moving. Right. So Starry Night, very famous, famous painting by Van Gogh. Obviously it's in the public domain now, but it is interesting. Now you're seeing these big companies, you know, they're, they're obviously not encouraging, you know, people to mimic, you know, copyrighted arts, but I did find this one interesting. Yes. You know, the Starry Night by Van Gogh is in the public domain, but I'm, I'm finding this interesting. Now that you're seeing these big companies, you know, encourage generating with, with old artists, old, old paintings, you know, like Google did here. I think it's great marketing. But I did find that one interesting. Right, because now you're seeing all of these, you know, large companies facing lawsuits. And I'm not talking about, you know, Google specifically here. I'm talking every single big company is running into lawsuits, you know, from image providers, you know, from your Getty Images, or from large publishing companies like the New York Times. So, so, you know, when I, when I watched the promo video last week from Google, number one, the model, the Lumiere model looks very impressive, especially for the first iteration. It's obviously not released yet. So you know, we'll, we'll see once, you know, users can access this and, and put it through the paces. But I was also kind of taken aback almost that, that you know, now companies are kind of using this as a marketing technique, you know, very famous, you know, works of art that are now in the public domain. All right, so I think I saw a question or two. Let me try to get here as we wrap up the news that matters. So Woozy's asking, what's the craziest example you have tried so far? Okay. With, with GPTs. So yeah, at least right now we don't have access to the GPT mentions. But you better believe Woozy, once we do get access to it, I will be breaking it. Right. That's one thing I always tell people here at Everyday AI, you know, when we go use new generative AI technology, you know, we're not just, you know, parroting back what a big company says in a press release or a marketing video or on its website. We try to break it. Right. So yeah, when we do get access to that GPT mention feature, you better believe we're going to Be bringing a lot of updates and letting you know what you can and can't do. All right, that's a lot, y'. All. So to recap, here's the big AI news that you need to keep an eye on this week and moving forward. So GPT mentions brand new feature from OpenAI that is slowly being rolled out across different accounts. The FTC investigating big tech companies and their AI partnerships. So looking at Google, Microsoft Anthropic, sorry, Amazon, Google, Microsoft anthropic and OpenAI looking at those relationships, Apple reportedly making some big splashes with generative AI. Reportedly big generative AI features coming to Siri and coming to the iPhone in the iOS 18 update. Potentially looking at an announcement from in June 2024 at the worldwide Developer Conference. And then last but not least here, Google announcing their new AI video model, Lumiere. All right, this week I'm letting you know we got some banger, we got some banger shows lined up. So we just told you, here's the AI news that matters. Now let me give you a little preview and let me know in the comments you know which one, which one of these shows you're looking forward to. So tomorrow we're going to be talking about the silent AI productivity killer and why companies can't fully leverage AI right now. Right? That, here's, here's the thing, y', all, like we're very lucky here at Everyday AI to have great relationships with all of the biggest tech companies, right? Having a direct line to trillion dollar companies is great. We get a lot of, you know, news and scoops and inside information, but also at the same time, you know, being able to talk with hundreds of of companies as well here in the US and to know how they are and hard and how they are not leveraging generative AI. So tomorrow we're going to be talking about the one biggest AI productivity killer that we've seen across companies big and small. Wednesday we're going to talk. This is going to be a great one. This is a blueprint if you want the blueprint on how to actually implement generative AI in your company. We're going to be going over on Wednesday the five simple steps to start using generative AI in your business today. Thursday, excited for this one. Bringing on former guest Rory Flynn to talk about mid journey version 6v6. So we haven't really dived into this very much aside from doing some tutorial videos that we talk about in our newsletter, but we're going to be talking about Mid Journey V6. What's new and how to produce powerful ad creative with AI. If you've been following Rory at all since we had him on our show a couple months ago, you know, I'd say he's one of the leading voices really using Mid Journey especially for creating real ad creatives. So that's going to be a great show as well. And then on Friday, maximizing the Effectiveness of AI in Healthcare with the President of the American Medical Association. All right, so we've got a lot of great shows in store for you this week, so make sure if you haven't already, go to your everydayai.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter. So I hope to see you back with these other shows this week and every day on Everyday AI. Thanks, y'. All.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.