Next level mind maps and ChatGPT gets a voice and face

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

It was a big week for me professionally (also in AI launches). After more than five years, I'm leaving Reddit and embarking on my long-awaited entrepreneurial adventure. I'll be exploring various business ideas (some of which involve AI) and continuing to write this newsletter. Now, let's get to it! In this week’s edition:

• Next level mind maps

• ChatGPT gets a voice and face

• Multi-model playground fun

• The future of Search becomes more clear

• The 🐙 octopus paper (is your interest piqued?)

• and more

NEW PRODUCTS

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

Whimsical: Level up your mind maps with AI-powered suggestions. In case you aren’t familiar with a mind map, it’s a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy. They are often used when brainstorming new ideas, visualizing complex info, or organizing the relationships between ideas. I’ve used them at Reddit when coming up with solutions to a user problem. What’s neat about Whimsical, is that they’ve added an AI button to their mind map tool that basically gives you a brainstorming partner. Super useful when you are generating new ideas. Personally, I’m excited to use this on my next project. [Public Launch - Paid and free plans]

D-ID: Giving ChatGPT a face and voice. D-ID is an Israeli startup behind Deep Nostalgia, an app that enabled you to turn your old family photos into Harry Potter-esque animated images. Now, they’ve combined their expertise (text-to-video streaming technology) with ChatGPT to create a life-like person (named “Alice”) that speaks the ChatGPT responses. I’m not going to lie… it’s eerie chatting with Alice. Seeing and hearing Alice respond to my questions was a trip. D-ID gave me a glimpse of what a future AI companion might be, but their voice to text transcription is bad, so I was forced to type my questions rather than speak them to Alice, making it feel a bit clunky. [Beta | Free]

OpenPlayground: Nat Friedman, ex-GitHub CEO and frequent investor in AI startups, launched a multi-model playground that enables you to compare most of the large language models (LLMs). This is a useful tool if you are interested in learning about how different LLMs perform for a given prompt. Super helpful if you are considering which LLM to use for a product. See below where I compared how three different LLMs would respond to my prompt asking them to describe the benefits of comparing LLMs. Very meta, I know. [Beta | Free]

ChatGPT in Slack: Instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance. Slack has a large share of the corporate messaging market, so lots of people are going to get their hands on Slack’s new AI bot. My general feeling is that I am not excited about receiving bland inbound Slack messages from co-workers that have been written by AI, unless of course, it helps some of them write better messages…(I’m looking at you, former co-worker who would send me random ”you there, bro?” pings…really?? 😠  I digress.) I think the conversation summary feature will be the most helpful. Too often threads in project channels rabbit-hole and having an AI give a brief summary to the channel could be a big time saver. [Beta - Paid]

Type: An AI-first document editor that helps you write content quickly. There have been a lot of AI content creation tools launched in the past few months and I usually don’t highlight them here. But, Type (which launched on Product Hunt yesterday) stands out to me because it’s solely focused on leveraging AI for long-form content creation. This is all they do and I expect them to iterate and improve the AI component much faster than say someone like Notion does. I also really like that Type puts an emphasis on keeping the human involved in the writing process. It has nice little prompts on the sidebar to give me ideas on related topics to include in my content. That being said, if you rely on organic search traffic from Google, I’d be very hesitant to use a tool like Type beyond having it write a first draft. It’s been rumored that Google is penalizing content written purely by AI. [Public Launch | $19 per month]

DuckAssist and Brave Summarizer: The future of Search is taking shape. This week, two small search engines, DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, updated their search results to include snippets generated by LLMs above the search results. Interesting to see how Search might look in the future with a more conversational response or snippet at the top of the page, followed by the regular SEO results. Definitely more helpful than some snippets I get on Google. [Public Launch - Free]

WHAT I'M READING

If you only read one thing this week let it be this. 🎩 Hat tip to Becca for sending me this.

You Are Not a Parrot by Elizabeth Weil

"Nobody likes an I-told-you-so. But before Microsoft’s Bing started cranking out creepy love letters; before Meta’s Galactica spewed racist rants; before ChatGPT began writing such perfectly decent college essays that some professors said, 'Screw it, I’ll just stop grading'; and before tech reporters sprinted to claw back claims that AI was the future of search, maybe the future of everything else, too, Emily M. Bender co-wrote the octopus paper. Bender is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. She published the paper in 2020 with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller. The goal was to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do.The setup is this: Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other..." NEW YORK MAGAZINE

WHO I'M FOLLOWING

People passionate about AI that are doing cool shit.

Charlotte Caucheteux is a PhD. student at Meta AI and Inria Saclay (a research institute outside of Paris, France 🥐). She's focused on language processing in deep neural networks and the human brain. She and her team recently released a paper that dives into understanding how human brains listen to speech and predict the following words contrasted with how a LLM predicts the words. Super fascinating.

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 and send them my way.