Attention Shoppers Start Your (Search) Engines!

For those that are new around here, this is weekly newsletter where I highlight new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hey hey!

Happy Friday folks!

In this week’s issue:

• Product of the Week ✨

• Free tool find! 😃

• Other AI Things Happened 📰

• What I’m Watching 🎥

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of AI products this week. Here’s my report!

Ever feel out of your depth to figure out what you should be buying? Or maybe you want to see some new ideas for a thing you know you’re trying to buy? The product of the week this time around is a great accelerant to all things online shopping. Meet Claros.so! This shopping accelerator’s changing the game by taking out a lot of headaches tied with product research online, and I love every second of it. This promises a shopping experience that's blissfully straightforward.

This isn't just shopping anymore; it's treasure hunting equipped with a sophisticated map, a GPS, and a log of how it got there.

The Process to use Claros is as clear as it gets. Don’t be shy to try it for yourselves! It all starts by: 

1. Declaring what you’re shopping for, assisted with handy suggestions (point of improvement is more of these as this product evolves).

2. Then the product jumps to action, conducting a thorough an online reputation & public opinion scan while it alo picks apart & augments the search with some key features it reads up on. 

3. As first pass results pour in, you find yourself in command of a tool that feels like the lovechild of regular shop[ping filters and an LLM chatbot. This is where your adventure gets pretty sweet; you can prompt your personal shopper to refine and tweak your shopping results to better adjust to your taste.

4. Obviously, this means you get to a treasure trove of top product picks curated from the vast expanse of the internet.

I found the experience to be of a tasteful simplicity. Most online shopping tends to involve much of deciphering branding, opinions, and flashy colors everywhere. In sharp contrast, Claros delivered with near nude simplicity. This stripped-down interface might initially seem sparse, but it's within this simplicity that the platform's true value shines. Most of what I hate about shopping was stripped away, so I suddenly felt that my daily shopping was refreshing~! The platform's design, while minimalist, is a clear reflection of Claros.so's philosophy: to cut through the noise and clutter of online shopping, leaving you with a seamless path to your desires. 

Notably, eyes may turn to Coveo.com, a player in the Canadian Enterprise AI-Search Engine arena, who might see Claros.so's as an echo of their mission in the B2C space. In the dynamic arena where AI meets e-commerce, I wonder whether this step towards both simplicity and consumption efficiency will lead to an over enhancement, or an outstripping of brand-based selling. Either way, The future of online shopping looks not just bright but streamlined, thanks to visionaries like Claros.so.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

• GoDaddy is playing in the GenAI field with some classic areas. It’s a step forward, but somewhat disjointed since their play seems to target eComemrce, but aren’t directed at enhancing a particular point of the client experience. They’re appearing to go for a blanket approach with their first go to market in this department. eShop Product Descriptions, Customer Service Message and Ad Copywriting are on the GenAI GoDaddy menu.

• Here Comes Grok! xAI, Elon Musk’s company has open-sourced a brand new LLM - It demands a GPU to run, and it’s on GitHub for those interested in trying it out for themselves. So far, more experimentation with its performance, general tendencies (bias, default writing style, and such) are quite unknown. Expect more developments in this space as yet another big tech player launches their flavor of a promptable LLM model.

• Google VLOGGER is a thing! Say hello to your AI-persona built & moving based entirely on your fixed still picture! If you’re tired of being on video calls, I think this you juuuuuust might be able to hodge-podge your way into keeping the camera off forever, at the expense of some development work. The research paper is here if you want to have a look at some of the methodology behind its development.

• Oracle is relevant once again? They’ve got some Cloud Superclusters Infrastructure setup and running with quite a few players buying in. Have a look.

• A Sidekick for IT Service Management? Sounds like Atera’s ChatGPT integrations are going to have a run for their money! Here comes Productiv’s Sidekick.

  Raises & Mergers Recap (Pretty quiet this week)

• A large series A raise was announced by Hippocratic, a venture built to help mitigate the US Healthcare staffing crisis. Notably, the survey responses coming from this product’s staffing decisions are leading to surprisingly impressive outcomes!

• Big Raises, little consolidation according to Crunchbase. Leaves to think that we are truly in phase one of a market cycle, and we should be expecting much more (probably in the next few years) much of the consolidation as the winners by differentiation will be eating the others in their vicinity.

• Music & AI = At times contentious, but it’s happening! There’s a startup , Beatoven.ai, that’s raised 1.3Million in a Pre-Seed round, looking to generate a great load of background music content for creators in desperate need of it all, and they’re looking to set the mood for many B-Roll scenes in a near future!

WHAT I'M WATCHING

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

- Marcel Proust

A Look Back on Humanloop’s Productizing of the LLM-to-Production Journey.

A pleasant, short, listen on how the Humanloop founders got started, got to scale, and how they were able to bring rigor to non-deterministic spaces like AI responses.

Stay well, and until next week.

-✌🏽 Sam

P.S. Interested in private feedback about a product you’re building? Send me an email: [email protected]