An AI career coach is my product of the week

A weekly newsletter that highlights new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hi all!

On Wednesday I woke up to some wildfire smoke and it turns out that of the six small wildfires that were started here in the Pacific Northwest over the last few days…all were started due to fireworks…SMH

It was a quieter week for AI because of the Fourth of July holiday here in the states, in this week’s issue:

• Practica, your career copilot, is my product of the week

• Shorty, an AI assistant built by a solo indie developer takes on a $225m funded startup

• Journey helps you make better presentations

• Plus, a recommended read on how generative AI is different than all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of new AI products this week. Here’s my top pick.

Practica: Your career copilot. This is a great example of how a company can leverage AI to enhance their product offering. Practica's primary product is a platform that connects people with career coaches in their field. They also offer educational courses. Recently, they released a beta version of their AI career coach, which is a LLM that they have trained with a curated set of high-quality career advice resources. Initially, I was skeptical when I tested it, but it performed well with the example scenarios I provided (all based on real experiences in my career).

Here's how it works: you type a few sentences to describe the challenge you are facing, and the AI coach provides a recommended course of action and some links to articles for further reading. I see this AI coach as a great way for Practica to increase its customer base by offering a low-cost option, especially for young professionals early in their careers. As they gain experience and face more nuanced challenges, Practica can upsell them to their 1:1 coaching product.

Here’s a quick 4 minute video of me demo’ing Practica’s AI career coach:

RUNNER UPS

Two more AI products that are worth your time.

Shorty: Your new AI assistant. This iOS app was built by an indie developer who clearly take a lot of care on the user experience elements of an app. It’s designed to be a fun and friendly version of ChatGPT. It also has support for Siri Shortcuts so you can ask Siri to go ask Shorty a question. A bit of a game of telephone, but still cool nonetheless. In May I reviewed Pi, a $225m funded chatbot that was being called the empathetic AI. If the word used to describe Pi is empathetic, then the word I would use to describe Shorty is friendly. Chatting with Shorty is almost like having a fun friend to hang out with and chat. I'm looking forward to seeing how this app progresses and improves. Will Pi, the Goliath with $225m in funding be beaten by this little bootstrapped indie app, Shorty?

Journey: Make better presentations. Journey is a new type of presentation builder that recently integrated AI into the creation process. By simply typing in a topic, Journey will create a deck with 6 to 10 well-formatted slides that include text and Stable Diffusion generated images. Although Journey creates a good-looking slide deck, you will need to go in and tweak the content and images to improve it. For instance, when I asked it to create a presentation about "How AI is Changing How We Work," it lacked any personal details, emotions, or a story arc to keep the audience engaged, but it generated a great starting point. View it here. Also, on slide 8 does the doctor have a penis for a finger??

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

Over 150 executives from companies like Renault, Heineken, Airbus, and Siemens have signed an open letter urging the EU to rethink its plans to regulate AI. European companies claim the EU’s AI Act could ‘jeopardise technological sovereignty’

The parent company of Gizmodo and Jalopnik laid off dozens of writers this week. Shortly after they told employees they would begin testing AI-produced stories. Welp, there goes the quality of Gizmodo articles.

MidJourney, the popular AI tool to generate art, just announced a new feature called panning, which allows you to expand an image in the direction with a single click.

OpenAI announced that Code Interpreter is being released to all GPT+ subscribers in the coming days. This thing is super powerful when it comes to data analysis. Read my Code Interpreter review from May.

OpenAI has disabled their “browse with Bing” feature within ChatGPT+ because users found that you could get around paywalled articles with it. This caught my eye because it’s an indication that OpenAI clearly has a way to get through paywalled content for scraping purposes and they accidentally exposed that functionality to their premium users. This probably goes against a lot of these website’s usage policies for their paywalled content.

The number one trending project on Github this week is “GPT-Migrate” which helps you migrate your codebase from one language or framework to another within minutes. A useful application of an LLM to solve an often arduous task

WHAT I'M READING

If you only read one thing this week let it be this.

AI and the Automation of Work by Benedict Evans

"Pretty much everyone in tech agrees that generative AI, Large Language Models and ChatGPT are a generational change in what we can do with software, and in what we can automate with software. There isn’t much agreement on anything else about LLMs - indeed, we’re still working out what the arguments are - but everyone agrees there’s a lot more automation coming, and entirely new kinds of automation. Automation means jobs, and people. This is also happening very fast: ChatGPT has (apparently) over 100m users after just six months, and this data from Productiv suggests it’s already a top-dozen ‘shadow IT’ app. So, how many jobs is this going to take, how fast, and can there be new jobs to replace them?..." BEN-EVANS.COM

HELP ME OUT

Refer a friend and get a reward.

If you enjoyed today's issue (and are feeling generous), can you share it with your friends or colleagues? This newsletter primarily grows from referrals and a referral from you would mean a lot to me.

Refer just ONE person and I'll send you my write-up: "Trends and Opportunities of this AI Inflection Point." In this write-up, I have outlined seven AI trends that I have observed over the past six months, along with the opportunities they present.

Refer FIVE people and get your name and website featured in AI Product Report. Refer 15 people and get an e-version of one of my favorite books on AI.

Share using your personal referral link:

https://www.productreport.ai/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

PS: You have referred 0 people so far

Until next week!

-✌🏻 Tyler

P.S. Have tips or suggestions for next week's issue? Reply to this email and send them my way.

P.P.S. Interested in having me give you private feedback about a product that you are building? Learn more here.