ChatGPT is now my personal stylist

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. Baby comes today! That means no newsletter from me for the next few weeks as I spend time with the family and get to know the little one.

In this week’s issue:

• ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak

• Whoop introduces an AI health and fitness coach

• Plus, a recommended read on whether AI a leveler, king maker, or escalator

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

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

ChatGPT Vision & Audio

You can now show ChatGPT one or more images to troubleshoot issues, plan meals, analyze data or figure out what to wear. OpenAI also introduced the ability to speak to ChatGPT and have it respond in a lifelike voice. There are a handful of voices to choose from. The future is coming quicker and quicker.

To use images with ChatGPT, simply tap the photo button within their mobile app to capture or choose an image. You can also use the drawing tool to ensure ChatGPT focuses on a specific part of the image. These capabilities are made possible by the multimodal GPT-4V (GPT-4 with Vision), which OpenAI showcased earlier this year.

I used it to determine the optimal pants and socks to wear with a pair of brown boots. I was pleasantly surprised by its ability to identify the most suitable colors and styles that complemented each other. You can watch the video below to see me testing it out. There are going to be so many use cases that this unlocks.

When it came to testing out the new voice functionality I found it to be a bit buggy and the app crashed multiple times when it tried to process my audio input.

Overall, I'm impressed by the pace of improvements that OpenAI has been making. It will be interesting to see how small indie startups, which have been building similar features on top of OpenAI, will fare. OpenAI is the dominant force in the industry. For these indie startups to succeed, I believe they need to focus on specific use cases (e.g., personal stylist or home improvement advisor) and establish a strong brand authority.

Back to the OpenAI app, the only pain point I have had when using it is that you can’t interrupt ChatGPT when it get’s too verbose. You can pause it’s output, but then it doesn’t let you write anything in the chat. You have to let ChatGPT finish speaking before you can respond and often times it wants to write a lifestory response to a simple question. It sometimes gives me SEO-optimized recipe vibes.

View full video here.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

Wearable tech brand Whoop launched “Whoop Coach” which leverages AI to give users a personal coach with “highly individualised, conversational responses to your health, fitness, and wellness questions.” I signed up for their free 30-day trial and will report back on how well it works. I expect the coach to tell me that having a new baby is bad for my sleeping habits.

OpenAI is seeking a new valuation of up to $90 billion. That’s 3x what it was earlier this year. If you are a mortgage broker or yacht salesperson start reaching out to OpenAI’s early employees on LinkedIn.

Anthropic — the AI startup behind the ChatGPT competitor Claude — announced a $4 billion investment from Amazon. With the deal, AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and AWS customers will get access to Claude.

Spotify is testing out the ability to translate podcasts into different languages while still using the voice of the host. Demo here.

Meta is developing AI chatbots with personalities, including a ‘sassmaster general’ bot in the hopes of driving engagement among Gen Z. Personally, I don’t see how sassy chatbots are going to drive any meaningful engagement among Gen Z’ers.

Getty Images launched an AI-powered image generator trained on it’s 477 million image library. Getty claims that it will “commercially safer” than other solutions.

German enterprise giant SAP announced that they are building an AI assistant called Joule that will help corporate clients in finance and HR. “Joule’s capabilities range from answering questions in multiple languages to suggesting solutions based on data from SAP’s various services and third-party sources.”

The Writers Guild of America and studio execs have reached a deal to end the strike. In regards to AI the agreement requires writers to obtain consent if they want to use generative AI when writing and gives studios the right to train AI models based on writers' work, but they must credit and pay those writers if they do.

WHAT I'M READING

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

Everyone is above average by Ethan Mollick

"Congratulations - you are now above average! It may sound like an old, bad statistics joke, but I mean it quite literally. We now have very strong evidence that AI elevates the skills of the lowest performers across a wide range of fields to, or even far above, what was previously average performance. This is a big deal because skill gaps among humans can be quite large. In many fields, the difference between top and bottom performers is profound, including programmers, middle managers, and radiologists, among many others. If you are able to find, train, and retain these top workers, you get tremendous benefits. A large part of schooling and work is focused on getting people to this highly skilled state. However, people who are good at one skill may not be good at another - the top-performing salespeople are usually not also top-performing sales managers. Modern professional work consists of a wide range of activities, rather than a single specialization…" ONE USEFUL THING

Ciao.

-✌🏻 Tyler

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