Notion AI and Artifact (from the creators of Instagram) go mainstream

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

It was an action packed week! No, I'm not talking about having to take care of two sick kiddos home from daycare this week (that's for the parenting newsletter). Anyways, in this week edition: Notion AI and Artifact (from the creators of Instagram) go mainstream, Spotify teases a new DJ, Kraftful launches a tool that may become an essential part of a product manager's toolkit, Uizard is making early stage prototyping faster, and a partnership between Hugging Face and Amazon. Plus a professor shares what he's learned from requiring his students to use ChatGPT. -Tyler

NEW PRODUCTS

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

Notion AI: A seamless integration of AI into your workflow (assuming you use Notion). Yesterday, Notion made their AI tool publicly available, it's free for now, but I bet they add it to one of their premium packages. I've been using it for the last two weeks and it's surprisingly useful. What I've found it most helpful for is to have it rewrite a paragraph. This is super useful to me because my approach to writing is to write stream of conscious-style without stopping to make edits. This means I write long overly verbose sentences and the paragraphs are messy. Instead of having to edit and rewrite them myself, I now ask Notion's AI to take the first pass and rewrite. If I like the changes, I keep it, if not, I ask it to redo with additional prompts such as to make it longer or shorter, or change the tone. This has become something in my daily toolkit, especially because it's so well integrated into Notion where I do most of my writing. [Public Launch]

Artifact: Tiktok for news, built by the founders of Instagram. Earlier this month, the founders of IG announced Artifact, a personalized news app that had initially only been available via a waitlist. This week, it was opened up to the masses. I'm intrigued to see how Artifact does because people have been promising "personalized" news for over a decade with little success. I've used Artifact for most of the week and while it does have a smooth interface and seems somewhat personalized (cycling news, cocktail recipes, and tech news 😬) I still see articles that are clickbait'ish or that are weeks old. Additionally, I haven't seen any local news from Seattle, which is odd since it shows my location at the top. That being said, my biggest concern with Artifact is that the feed will devolve into sensationalism and scare articles, the way that local news did. After all, humans tend to tap on these types of articles and the AI is incentivized to serve up more of what we tap. I'm talking about you "24 Surprising Ways The Kardashians Make Money" 👀 👀 [Public Launch]

Spotify DJ: A personalized DJ just for you. I consider myself a music connoisseur and spend a lot of time building my Spotify playlists, but Spotify will still sometimes surprise me with one of their AI generated playlists. On Wednesday, they announced that they are beta testing a DJ named "X" that will talk you through song transitions and their AI-curated playlists, sort of like a radio DJ without all of the mindless morning show banter. This will be another example used in the debate about the role of AI in creative fields. I'm excited to get my hands on this and test it out to see if it's actually a better experience. I'll report back to you when I do. [Closed Beta]

Kraftful: Helps product teams sift through all of their customer feedback to identify the highest priority product improvements. What better way to test out this product then to paste in the two pages of feedback that I received about this newsletter from my early testers (thanks again for that 😊). I've already done what any good product manager does and identified the common actionable takeaways. So, I pasted the raw feedback into Kraftful to see how good at my job it is...and I'd give it a B-. It was super simple to use, did a good job synthesizing the feedback and gave me a nice high-level summary, however it struggled to consolidate some of the feature requests that used different terminology but were essentially solving the same user pain point. Where I think Kraftful will be most helpful is if your product has app store reviews or community forums because you can plug Kraftful directly into those sources. This tool stands out to me because it can ingest a large volume of feedback and give you a summary at about the same level of quality as an entry level product manager. If you have a ton of user feedback it's a big time saver. If you only have small amounts of feedback from users, then stick with the manual analysis. [Public Launch - 7 day free trial]

Autodesigner from Uizard: Early stage prototyping is going to get faster. Uizard is a popular interface designer that has a lot of beautiful templates used by designers and user experience professionals. Earlier this week they announced "Autodesigner" a tool that enables you to type in a sentence or two and it will produce multiple screen mockups for your app or website. The demo video is slick. It's cool to see another company make complicated design tools more accessible. This will speed up early product validation. Previously you needed a designer to make your mockups or wireframes for early user testing. Now you can get high fidelity designs in a couple of hours, all by yourself. [Waitlist]

Hugging Face and Amazon partner: Turns out OpenAI and Microsoft weren't the only big tech players shaking hands. Earlier this week Hugging Face (a platform for AI developers to build and train their models) announced a partnership with Amazon that will make it easier for Hugging Face developers to leverage Amazon's AWS compute power. One of my beliefs is that LLMs and other generative AI base layers are going to become commoditized. Prices to build these models continue to drop. Amazon's partnership with Hugging Face is another step in that direction. [Announcement]

WHAT I'M READING

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

My class required AI. Here's what I've learned so far. by Ethan Mollick

"I fully embraced AI for my classes this semester, requiring students to use AI tools in a number of ways. This policy attracted a lot of interest, and I thought it worthwhile to reflect on how it is going so far. The short answer is: great! But I have learned some early lessons that I think are worth passing on. First, as background, I required AI use in slightly different ways across three separate undergraduate and masters-level entrepreneurship and innovation classes. One class was built on extensive AI use: I required students use AI to help them generate ideas, produce written material, help create apps, generate images, and more. Another class had assignments that required students to use AI, and other assignments where AI was optional..." CONTINUE READING

WHO I'M FOLLOWING

People passionate about AI that are doing cool shit.

Jim Fan is a research scientist at NVIDIA AI with a research goal to develop generally capable autonomous agents 🤯. He regularly posts cool demos of how AI and ML are being leveraged to build cool things, many of which have a hardware element. 

HELP ME GET BETTER

Feedback is a gift...and I want yours! 🎁🎁🎁

CLOSING THOUGHT

Because we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

ChatGPT is playing to win!! 🤣🤣

Until next week! ✌🏻

-Tyler

P.S. Have tips or suggestions for next week's issue? Reply to this email and send them my way.