This AI Reads The Internet For You (Grok 2 Changes Everything)

On today's show, we are covering all the news from Grok, the AI tool you're probably not using but should be using every day. We're going to walk you through everything and show you how you can use it to consume 10x the information you are getting today and get way smarter. Let's dive into today's show. Grok is, I think, the least talked about of the core, kind of what we call frontier AI models and apps. Right. But Kieran, I'm using Grok every day. Are you using Grok every day? We're using it for very specific things, but I think we're using it pretty regularly, right?

Yeah, I'm using it. I'm using it. If I see something interesting, I basically say, if I see something interesting on X, I'll basically say, tell me everything about this thing that happened that's happening on X. It's actually better than going into trends. Obviously it can still hallucinate, but for the most part I use it for all of real time information.

Correct. And that's one use case I have one of the things that Grok has done. There's a good tweet here from Aaron Levy that I will share. There's a new Grok button. And you see this button right here on the post, this slash, which is essentially the Grok logo. Aaron's like, the Grok button is now being on every post is a clever new UX pattern for AI that could be more broadly useful across the web. Being able to provide instant analysis to anything with zero friction dramatically increases the ability to go deep on a topic. And what happens is you hit this button and Grok gives you an instant summary. What I like about this feature, Kieran, because I'm now using this feature all the time. The biggest reason I use this feature, you and I were talking off air. You're like, what the hell do you use this feature for? Do you ever read a tweet that is like, oh, I think I'm interested in this, but I clearly don't have the full context in this one tweet. Like, clearly this person is referencing something I don't understand or haven't seen or whatever. Grok fixes that problem now for me, right? I can hit that button and I'll be like, and it shows me all the web pages related to it and it gives me its take. And what's interesting in this case, Aaron's tweet was pretty brief. So Grok basically describes its take on the button, which is like a change in UX Community notes, comparison, and then search utility. But what's interesting to me is it just brings AI front and center and it's like, I don't really have to read anything anymore. You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It turns every tweet into an artifact. It means that any kind of tweet is a searchable artifact where you can say, tell me more about what this person meant in this tweet, or tell me more about the trend this person is referencing in this tweet. I think. I think that is a pretty cool feature. I was thinking of it as it's summarizing what's in a tweet, which doesn't make any sense because you don't need to really summarize what's in a tweet. But I actually think about it as well. It's just jumping off point. To be able to search and go deeper in a topic is actually a pretty cool function.

So here's a really good example. There's this guy, Tim, I follow him on X Twitter, I still can't really get used to calling it X. And he has a newsletter that's all about affordable, cheap properties to buy in Italy, Spain and France. And. And it's awesome. And I just like, look at these houses. And I'm like, oh yeah, I'd buy that house of day. And he wrote this like really long thread, as you can see here, right. With all this information about how would you actually buy a house in Italy? And what's great is I can now get like this very clear summary of what I would actually need to know right from this post in a way that, like, you often don't have the time to read this whole thing. So then you bookmark it and then you're like actually going to come back and read it. I doubt it. And so this is the other, like Groq summary feature that I just use sometimes. It's just like, if I have this really long piece of information, I just want like the quick summary of it.

Right. It's the same thing that I love about Gemini in your Google Drive. It basically sits on the right hand panel and can tell you what, summarize documents, summarize presentations, aggregate information together. Like, this is what AI is really good at, is you really don't have to consume content in the same way. So that person went to the trouble of probably spending hours to write this detailed, thoughtful post. But because we are being taught that we don't have to read all of the content, AI can just read it for Us and summarize it for us. Like it's like our friend telling us over the. Over coffee, I read this incredible post. Here's the core points that you need to know. It is interesting, right? Like it does change the way that we consume information in a way that is potentially not good for publishers.

Yeah, explain that. Because it's something that we haven't done our prediction show yet, but I think we should make a prediction around this. But explain what you're talking about.

Well, it turns like all of the content that we engage with into data for AI. And there's an AI layer that sits on top of the Internet and does all of the things that we used to do. Right. In that example, the AI is able to consume a content from someone you would normally read content from and then give you a bunch of time back. Because in any post that you read, it will just give you the core takeaways. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. But I would probably use that as well in a lot of ways. Like I have a ton of newsletters and they do really in depth analysis of tech and things like that. I would probably want a summary in a lot of occasions. And so I can imagine we talked about this in a previous episode. I can imagine a world within the next couple of years where we have agents, whether they are built into the platform like Grok, or they are just our own personal agents that go and consume all of the information for us and can probably give it back to us in whatever format we want and whatever like medium we want. Right? So if I say, hey, subscribe to these 20 podcasts.

This is exactly what I'm trying to build right now. Every. Every.

Yeah, every week. Create a transcript. And then basically you will be. You can give that to me in audio. I can say actually give it to me in a video form, whatever it may be. And so I can consume content very differently. But then the public, like we talked, this is like the publisher then is creating content for the agents to be consumed on behalf of the person. So it kind of just moves every. I guess what I keep saying about search, right, it moves everything back one step and there's this agent layer. And the agent layer is doing most of the work that we used to do.

Yeah, well, if you think about it, right, the first generation of the Internet, you still had basically some exclusive group of publishers were publishing content on places like AOL and charging a fee to access it, right? Then the second generation of the Internet companies like Facebook and Google and everything really scale up. And all of our free interactions to those companies then get sold and monetized through advertising. Now we're entering this third stage where the AI access to this information is going to become what gets monetized. And I think one of your takes is like, is this a good thing? And what does this mean for publishers? I agree with that. And I think if you're a marketer, it's a little terrifying because most marketers, you know what I know, what do they do? They obsess over their message. They craft it perfectly. They work to deliver it at the exact right time. What happens when that's just not possible anymore? One prediction I will make, Karen, today on the show ahead of our prediction show is we are going to see a pretty big rotation in marketing to channels in which they cannot be AI summarized. So I'm thinking things like in person, events out of home advertising, things where you're like, I can get my message directly to these people without any, without any filter or summarization. The irony is the Internet was the way you used to get information to people without any filter or summarization, and now that is basically going away.

Yeah, I agree. Do you buy that? Like, I do agree that people will, or brands will want to spend much more time and effort in places where they can control the message. It's just like Grok, Grok in and of itself that they, they are going to spin out Grok as a standalone agent. So I know it's embedded in the platform today, but at some point it will be accessible in the same way Claude is, the same way ChatGPT is. So at some point, like, we have this selection of agents which are basically personal assistants, and they are going to be able to consume most of the things that we consume today. So you are, you're just, it's just like a fascinating problem to think through of. The best example would be in traditional sales, you have a gatekeeper and you're like trying to get through the gatekeeper to book a meeting with this person. And now we all will have gatekeepers to what reaches us via the Internet, right? Like, we'll be able to actually tune out a lot of, a lot more things than we were able to tune out in the past, because even on these platforms they monetize through ads. But a lot of the times maybe I don't even need to engage in the platform to get what I want from it because the agent is consuming a lot of the content and giving me the nightly readout. Now on social, maybe different because you kind of want to interact with people, but there is a fascinating like change in the way that we're going to interact with content and interact with things that marketers used to create.

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Right. Yeah. This is actually a fun tool to play with. Grok is, does create pretty good images. I don't really know the practical use cases. I think the practical use case would not be from Grok. It will be a company that can train on your style guide and things like that and give you images that fit your kind of like brand style guides and all of that kind of stuff. But I, I had like, I did like really weird ones that are like Conor McGregor eating a lettuce with Bono. I'm gonna show it. Like it's actually pretty amazing how good it is. Why is it so good at life? Like, like a profile app.

Look, look. I said make it look like a LinkedIn profile ad for HubSpot featuring @search Brat. So instead of saying your name, could I just add at your, at your profile it's like, it didn't make a very great version of you, but it kind of kn. It clearly knows what you look like.

That's interesting. I wonder what the restrictions are around being able to like, kind of. Kind of doing what iPhone 16 does with like, GIFs. Well, just some other things around Grok. So a couple of other things they did recently was they made Grok free for all users, not Grok2. But I think Grok in general, like, can be used for all users, not just premium. They Grok 2 is like part of, I think, Pro and Pro Plus. They released the Aura Image generator. They're going to make it a standalone app. The big thing for me is I don't think these are like the things that Elon thinks. I don't think this is the model that Elon thinks is like, very competitive. I know he's talking about it being very competitive on X. It's really. Everyone is waiting for Grok 3. Grok 3 is the model that training on the 100K GPU cluster where Elon has figured out how to get all those things to actually talk to each other and he wants to move to even larger clusters that. But this is the first time we talked about on a previous podcast where we're really going to test the scaling laws. Have we hit max scaling or not? Because no one has figured out how to train at this scale before. And so we'll really see if data is the problem. And what we mean by that is these models have just run out of data to train on and synthetic data is not the same and so they're kind of capped. And Il, who is ex OpenAI co founder, did a talk last week and he did say that he believes that we have hit scale and laws and we run out of data. And what he believes will happen is we have the intelligence we have in AI and the apps built around it will get smarter. And that's how these things will evolve, not the models themselves, which is actually pretty bad news for the likes of OpenAI. But I think Elon's going to test that because his whole X AI, which is Elon's AI company, it really comes down to this, like, if it's not a giant leap, I don't see how he ever makes any inroads on Google or OpenAI or Claude. So I think this is a huge launch for Grok. It's like a do or die thing. They either make transformational gains or they're kind of just another player. But I don't think they would ever be a large player as a standalone AI app. I think they will have some cool capabilities on X, but not a huge standalone business.

I agree. Okay, so to kind of close out the show, what we're really saying is if you want real time information and to get clear summaries of news and information or real time AI search, Grok is really the tool for that. Right. If you go to the core Twitter search page and you just use Grok on any of the trending topics, it's very good. Right. And it gives you a very detailed breakdown of like what the heck's going on, what you actually need to know. That is very good. If you have some use cases around creating very like hyper real personal kind of imagery, the image generator could be interesting for that or at least again, I think it's kind of in the prototyping stage. Like if you were looking to like mock something up, it could give you something pretty good for a quick mock. But then you would probably need to do real photography for kind of the final shipped version. And then two, I do think as a user we all have to get into that summarization workflow and use Grok to summarize Apple intelligence. Whether you're using Gemini or anything else. But like you and I are now, I feel like we are consuming more information than ever before. I think the real unlock of AI is that it is giving my model in my brain way more data to train off of. Right? Yeah, that's what I feel like. More powerful as a, as a human than I have ever felt before.

Exactly. This is the AI. This is the whole thing with AI. It should actually allow you to do 10x more of than what you previously could. And we really do have the tools to already do that. There's nothing that these new model, we need from these new models to be able to do that. We have the tools today to be able to do that.

Totally agree. And so if you're a marketer, I think the last thing we'd leave everybody with, Kieran. Right. Is you need to make sure that your marketing mix, if you're growing your business, has channels that are maybe, I'm not going to say immune to AI, but where you can deliver your message in an unfiltered way. So that might be billboards, events, basically anything irl. Right. Is going to be a big part of that. And then I do think things like creator LED ads, content and everything, it's gonna be summarized far less if I just like, oh, I like Kieran. I like how he he frames everything. I just want to hear it directly for them from him. I don't want to have this AI summary. I do think this is where our thesis around personality led growth and personality being so important. I think it still holds and I think it's still going to work.

I think it gets larger. I think it gets larger.

I think so too.

You will still consume content is because of the person.

That's that is my take on what all is going to happen here. It's a wild time. More AI innovation has shifted the month of December 2024 than I thought possible. We hadn't talked much about Grok on the show. We wanted to do a deep dive. If you have any questions, tell us how you use Grok. Or if you have not used it, tell us why you're not using it. Leave Those in the YouTube comments below. We'll see you next time on Marketing against the Grain. This data is wrong. Every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days.

Ago I totally missed HubSpot Grow better.