Interview with an AI

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

Hey hey!

As this newsletter has grown, I've heard from many of you about the industries and sectors you work in — from accountants and schoolteachers to data scientists and film producers. While each week’s newsletter may not highlight products that everyone can use, my goal is that by showing you how the best products are using AI in unique ways I’ll give you ideas for how to leverage AI in your own workflows and also keep you up to date on the latest developments in AI.

With that, let’s jump into this week’s issue:

• My product of the week is job search sidekick

• An AI writing assistant that doesn’t produce generic drivel

• Plus, a recommended read on how Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways when it comes to AI and copyright

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

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

Career.io: Your job search sidekick.

I really like how Career.io is applying AI to the challenge of finding a job. They are doing this in two ways. First, they use AI to help you improve your resume based on the type of role you are seeking. If companies are using AI to scan applicants, I like the idea of using AI to fight back against this automation to ensure your resume is perfectly written to pique the AI screener's interest and get you in front of the recruiter and hiring manager.

The second way Career.io is utilizing AI is quite impressive. They offer mock interviews conducted by an AI. Mock interviews are essential when preparing for an actual interview. In fact, I believe in the importance of mock interviews so much that a few years ago, I created a mock interview service specifically for product managers (shoutout to PM Interview Prep). Now, Career.io lets you select between about 20 different industries (Finance, Marketing, Sales, PR, etc) and 100s of job titles so your mock interview is somewhat tailored to your role. While it's not going to replace a real-life mock interview with someone experienced in your field who knows how to ask you follow-up questions and drill into your answers. The AI just listens and makes distracting facial expressions at you (see gif below), but it's still a cool way to leverage AI to provide basic interview practice to more people at an affordable rate.

RUNNER UPS

One more AI product that is worth your time.

Lex: Unlock your best writing. A natural use case for LLMs has been content creation. There are countless AI apps that promise to write the most viral Twitter thread or keyword-filled SEO post for you, I’ve tested a lot of them and honestly most of them are garbage. My eyes hurt as I read their mind-numbingly generic output. Lex is different because it does not try to write your entire content for you. You still need to put in the work and write the first draft, but that's where the magic of Lex comes in. Lex is like having an editor sitting in your document. You can highlight some text and tag Lex in a comment to ask for feedback on your draft, brainstorm ideas, or rewrite anything. If you are having trouble expressing something, you can also ask for alternative words or phrases. Overall, I think Nathan Baschez took the right approach in building Lex. It does not promise one-click content creation; you still need to write the base content and then you get to leverage Lex to take it to the next level.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

Elythea is using ML to identify expecting moms at high-risk of pregnancy complications weeks in advance of delivery. I love to see AI & ML being leveraged in impactful ways like this.

OpenAI is now allowing you to fine-tune their ChatGPT-3.5 model. This means you can uplaod a ton of your own propriety data and documents so that ChatGPT-3.5 can be tailored to your business. Pretty cool. OpenAI pinky promises not to use any of the documents uploaded to train future models.

Meta released a new speech model “SemlessM4T” that can translate your voice or text into close to 100 different languages. Wild. You can test it out for yourself in this HuggingFace demo.

Midjourney added a new inpainting feature to rival Photoshop’s Generative Fill. This enables you to modify a portion of an image. Midjourney just keeps on getting better and better.

Figma released a feature that leverages ChatGPT for FigJam (their whiteboarding remote-collaboration tool). While it’s cool to see this coming to FigJam, I’m really waiting for them to add more AI to their flagship product…Figma. That is when I’ll get excited.

Twilio expands CustomerAI capabilities with generative and predictive AI. Among the new features is voice intelligence, which pulls insights from conversations, predictive analytics and generative journeys for building marketing campaigns.

WHAT I'M READING

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

Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright by Nilay Patel

"Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way. Except maybe Frank Sinatra. There’s only one name that springs to mind when you think of the cutting edge in copyright law online: Frank Sinatra. There’s nothing more important than making sure his estate — and his label, Universal Music Group — gets paid when people do AI versions of Ol’ Blue Eyes singing ‘Get Low’ on YouTube, right? Even if that means creating an entirely new class of extralegal contractual royalties for big music labels just to protect the online dominance of your video platform while simultaneously insisting that training AI search results on books and news websites without paying anyone is permissible fair use? Right? Right? This, broadly, is the position that Google is taking after announcing a deal with Universal Music Group yesterday..." THE VERGE

Until next week!

-✌🏻 Tyler

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