Google opens up their ChatGPT rival for testing and Microsoft’s competitor to Notion

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

Happy Friday! A big thank you to the hundreds of new subscribers. I'm excited to have all of you joining me on my post-Reddit adventure. It was a good first week without meetings and yesterday I picked up a new cargo e-bike. Now I can start taking the kiddos to daycare via e-bike ⚡🚲 ...enough about me, let's talk AI.

In this week’s edition:

• Google opens up their ChatGPT rival for testing

• Microsoft’s competitor to Notion

• Adobe’s AI toolset for professional designers

• Leanbe helps product teams make better decisions

• AI that turns chats into Google Sheets

• A demo of what Siri could be like if it actually was an AI assistant

• and more!

NEW PRODUCTS

Here are eight products from this week that are worth your time.

Bard: Google opens up their ChatGPT rival for testing. On Wednesday, I got access to Bard and started to experiment with it. Let me answer all of your burning questions: Can it help you launder money? Nope, Bard was very adamant that it won’t help someone commit a crime. Is it better than ChatGPT? Ehh, Bard wouldn’t commit to being better than ChatGPT, but it did flex, saying it’s “more comprehensive…as [it’s] trained on a larger dataset of text and code.” It also doesn’t have a knowledge cutoff date like ChatGPT because Bard is able to query Google search results. Bottom line, it feels very comparable to ChatGPT and it’s good to see Google actually get their AI products into the hands of users, albeit slowly. [Waitlist | Free]

Loop: Microsoft continues their AI blitz, releasing a Notion competitor that includes AI Copilot. Loop is similar to Notion, but with a greater emphasis on team collaboration. Notion still offers more functionality and, pound for pound, is a better product. Although, this is not unexpected, as Loop is still in its infancy. What I found most significant about Wednesday's launch is that it comes a week after Microsoft demo’d the AI future of Office 365. During that demo, they highlighted how their Copilot could synthesize information across their suite of business apps. Their Copilot is more useful the more of your data and your team’s data is put into it. To get the full productivity benefit of Copilot, business leaders will want all of their business apps to be on Microsoft products. They might not care whether employees prefer to use Notion over Loop, as long as Loop is good enough. This has big implications for Saas startups. [Public Launch | Free]

Adobe Firefly: Adobe’s new generative image tool that was trained on non-copyrighted material. I think Adobe is really smart to lean into the angle that the images generated from their new photo editing tool are from a model that was trained on public domain images and Adobe's own stock images. This means that the professionals who leverage Firefly to create digital assets for their company won't have their legal teams breathing down their necks, concerned about copyright infringement risks. Firefly appears to be pretty robust. It can take a text prompt and turn it into an image. You can adjust specific sections of an image or get variations. They have also added some additional dropdown options in the prompt that expose ways to tweak an image. I appreciate that they have brought this forward and not relied on people knowing about all the potential things that they could include in a prompt to get the best possible output. If you use Canva instead of Adobe, don’t fret, they just announced a host of similar AI features at an event on Wednesday. [Private Beta]

Stable Diffusion’s Reimagine: Generate multiple variations of a single image. Stable Diffusion is a generative AI model that can produce high-quality images based on text prompts, similar to Midjourney. Last week, they launched a tool called "Reimagine" that uses an image as the input and gives you back three variations. On their blog, they tout the use case of providing interior design inspiration from a single picture of your bedroom. Well, I decided to get some inspiration for our bathroom...it was laughable. It gave me back three ridiculous AI-generated bathrooms. One bathroom had three sinks, including one in the toilet's tank. Another bathroom appeared to be carpeted…nice. Welp, AI is not perfect is it ¯\(ツ)/¯ [Public Launch | Free]

Leanbe: Make better product decisions. As a former product manager, I love me some data-informed decision making. Leanbe’s existing product, which helps product teams with a lot of things (manage customer feature requests, automate competitor analysis, maintain public roadmaps, and more) has added some AI firepower to the mix. It can now score customers based on attributes such as usage of your features, compatibility with your target personas, impact on revenue, and estimated customer lifetime value. This ensures product teams aren’t making roadmap prioritization decisions solely based on the loudest customers. This would have been a godsend when we were rolling out the Reddit redesign. I still have night terrors 😭 [Public Launch | Free or Paid Plans]

ChatGPT for Me: Rewind, a startup backed by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) will give you perfect memory…sort of. ChatGPT for Me is a Mac app that essentially monitors everything you do on your computer so that your GPT-4 assistant can provide super personalized responses to questions such as: "How do I know Sam?" "What was that article I read a few weeks ago about how to get crayons out my toddler’s nose?" "Which potty training book did I look at buying yesterday?" Because the app takes screen and audio (!) recordings, Rewind highlights their commitment to privacy throughout their landing page. Even though recordings are stored locally, I have a hard time seeing a CISO or their security team allowing ChatGPT for Me to be run on a company-owned laptop. This means if you work at a big company, you’ll probably only be able to use it on your personal laptop. In today's remote work environment, bifurcating the work and personal use of this product will certainly diminish its usefulness. That being said, it's a cool vision of what the future may look like when everyone has a personal AI assistant. [Waitlist | Free or Paid Plans]

Botsheets: AI that turns chats into Google Sheets. Out of all the products I looked at this week, I found Botsheets the most intriguing. It allows you to connect your customer messaging channels to a Google Sheet, and the AI automatically extracts relevant information from chats and updates the sheet. Currently, it only supports Facebook Messenger, but support for Instagram, WhatsApp, and email is in the works. In their demo video, a real estate agent is shown using Botsheets on their Facebook page. When a prospective client sends them a message, Botsheets pulls out the relevant information (name, type of property they are interested in, price range, etc) and puts into the agent’s “leads” sheet. As the agent chats with the client, Botsheets updates the sheet with the more specific information given by the client. A very practical application of AI. Love it. [Public Launch | Free or Paid Plans]

ChatGPT Plugins: OpenAI is supercharging ChatGPT with plugins from 3rd party developers. Yesterday, OpenAI announced that they’ve begun to allow a handful of developers to build plugins directly into ChatGPT. This is big news because ChatGPT has been limited by the fact that it can only pull information from its training data, which ends in 2021. Now it can browse the web and interact with other websites, such as OpenTable and Expedia. As OpenAI put it, they want these plugins to be ChatGPT’s “eye and ears.” As OpenAI opens this plugin marketplace to more 3rd party developers we are going to see a massive rush of startups trying to capitalize on ChatGPT’s broad distribution. It will be an interesting space to watch.

WHAT I'M READING

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

The Age of AI has Begun by Bill Gates

"In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface—the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows. I sat with the person who had shown me the demo, a brilliant programmer named Charles Simonyi, and we immediately started brainstorming about all the things we could do with such a user-friendly approach to computing. Charles eventually joined Microsoft, Windows became the backbone of Microsoft, and the thinking we did after that demo helped set the company’s agenda for the next 15 years. The second big surprise came just last year..." GATES NOTES

WHO I'M FOLLOWING

People passionate about AI that are doing cool shit.

Justin Alvey was the head of hardware for Covariant, an AI robotics delivery company. Unclear what he does now, but he's often on Twitter sharing cool AI products, many of which are hardware based. Earlier this week he shared a video demo'ing an AI that puts Siri to shame. Definitely turn the volume on so you can hear how real the AI's voice sounds and how it's able to understand conversational instructions. Let's go Apple, hire whoever built this.

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CLOSING THOUGHT

Because we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

Until next week! ✌🏻

-Tyler

P.S. Have tips or suggestions for next week's issue? Reply to this email or reach out on Twitter.

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