🍕 What most people don’t get about the AI revolution

Hey there,

Many of you told me that last week’s email didn’t get to your inbox, as the AI gods running email filters have decided it was not interesting 😢

I thought it was pretty dope, so I recommend you go find it in your junk folder and flag it as safe, this massively helps me tell the AI gods this newsletter is legit 🙏

If you missed that, you missed the announcement of my next open keynote “The Opportunities of Gen-AI at work: where are we and where are we going?” airing next week. I hope I’ll see you there!

This week’s news:

• What most people don’t get about the AI revolution

• Pizza Bytes 🍕: ChatGPT Enterprise, The "NeuroSkin" trousers, Google’s invisible watermark technology for Gen-AI, and more!

• Tiramisù 😋: Tea enhanced with AI…

Now let’s get started 🕺

What most people don’t get about the AI revolution

This week I read an article titled “Ugly Numbers from Microsoft and ChatGPT Reveal that AI Demand is Already Shrinking”. The author looked at a shrinkage in the traffic to the ChatGPT website and flat market share of Bing and concluded that the AI hype is over.

Let me tell you why the author hasn’t understood much about AI, and it’s probably the opposite of what he thinks is happening.

The first thing you need to always keep in mind is that AI is not a product per se. AI is a fundamental technology you can build products on top of.

From this point of view, AI is not different from electricity. When electricity was introduced, people didn’t start buying electricity just for the sake of it. People bought products that used electricity to deliver experiences that would have been considered magic before. People stopped using candles to light up their homes and bought light bulbs instead. People stopped buying ice blocks to keep their food cold and bought fridges, etc., etc..

Right now most of the products that use AI are very immature. They focus on showcasing how cool the technology is behind it, but they rarely have a great UX and rarely are built around solving a simple, strong pain that customers are facing.

Let’s take ChatGPT as an example. When I logged in to ChatGPT this morning, this is what it suggested me to do:

Let’s stop for a second and observe this. What the hell is this product for? Seems like it can do anything and nothing at the same time. And that’s because we need to remember that ChatGPT was not meant to be a product, but a research project instead.

What’s happening now is that companies are leveraging the technology powering ChatGPT to power their own niche products. The moat for these companies won’t be the tech (everyone has access to it), but the way they use it to solve customer’s problems in novel, unique ways.

So from this point of view, I’m VERY happy that ChatGPT is losing traffic! That means people are gravitating towards more mature products that solve their specific problems, rather than a chatbot that sometimes helps them and sometimes tells them crap.

The future of AI is not ChatGPT, exactly how the impact of electricity is not in just moving electrons around copper wires. The future of AI is in the products that will be built with it.

And excuse me for the shameless plug, but if you want to join this revolution I teach how to build AI-powered products in the Master in Prompt Engineering. We are about to open the 3rd edition after 2 successful sold-out rounds. Previous students have already built 40 projects ranging from a “McKinsey consultant on a budget” to a physiotherapy coach.

Join my upcoming keynote here, I’ll announce the new edition with an offer at the end.

Pizza Bytes 🍕

• OpenAI has released ChatGPT Enterprise, an AI platform that addresses data protection concerns, offering enhanced security, unlimited high-speed access to GPT-4, and the ability to ask more complex questions, providing businesses with the peace of mind they need to utilize the platform without compromising their data privacy.

• High-tech trousers powered by artificial intelligence are helping stroke survivors regain their walking ability. The "NeuroSkin" trousers stimulate the paralyzed leg using electrodes controlled by AI.

• Google has developed SynthID, an invisible watermark technology to counter misinformation by identifying computer-generated images. The tool embeds watermarks into images and can scan incoming images to detect if they are AI-generated.

• China's Baidu has launched its AI chatbot ERNIE Bot to the public, aiming to compete with global players. With new regulations in place, Baidu aims to control information while staying in the race with AI developers like OpenAI and Microsoft.

• Nvidia's shares reached a record high after partnering with Google, granting Google's cloud customers enhanced access to Nvidia's powerful AI technology, facilitating faster development and increased cost-efficiency.

• Amazon has acquired Fig, a startup that enhances the command line terminal experience for developers. This move is likely part of Amazon's efforts to tap into the generative AI revolution and improve their cloud services for developers.

• Activision has partnered with Modulate to use AI in games like Call of Duty for real-time voice chat moderation, targeting toxic behavior such as hate speech. Human moderators will still be involved to ensure fairness and avoid bias.

• The US military is rapidly adopting AI to develop swarms of cheap autonomous systems to counter military advancements by other countries, with a focus on defensive applications like an AI-enabled airspace monitoring system.

• AI has beaten three expert drone racers in a real-world race. The AI algorithm developed by researchers at the University of Zurich, called Swift, won 15 out of 25 races and achieved the fastest lap.

• Newspaper chain Gannett has stopped using an AI tool to write high school sports reports after the technology produced inaccurate and poorly written articles.

Tiramisù 😋

The sweet part of the newsletter: fun stuff from the crazy tech world.

Marketing genius:

You reached the end of this edition 😢

I’ll talk to you next week.

Ciao 👋