BB Digest: New Gemini and Llamas

Digest #496 → Subscribe | Upgrade to Pro

Hey folks, let me take a second to breathe first.

Now, woah! Past 2 days were crazy with too many updates and launches. But that’s the benefit of our new schedule, you get to keep up with all of it in just a quick read and no FOMO.

ps: Taking a break from workshops next week. They’ll be back from 8th October, with more being added regularly.

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• Google, OpenAI and Meta—all chime in with new AI.

• ICYMI: 6 amazing tutorials and 2 blogs for applying AI.

• snack n skill - create a Lindy AI assistant to automate note-taking.

• 7 of the best new AI tools

• 7 interesting posts from around the web

• to-do’s

Alright, let’s get to it!

 🔎 Trends & news

• Google subtly launched three new models on Tuesday under the same Gemini 1.5 branding, with major price reductions. I’ve more thoughts on them below. Plus, Google Cloud hosted a Gemini at Work event which featured 50+ companies using AI with 185 real-world use cases. Do you want more Google and Gemini-related tutorials? Let us know.

• Meta AI is getting more useful. Zuckerberg announced a ton of impressive AI upgrades at Meta Connect—including voice and image understanding in Meta AI, four new Llama models, features for creators, and a bonkers AR glasses prototype. 🍿 Our Summary

• OpenAI also released their much anticipated Advanced Voice mode for ChatGPT. It has a new look and 5 new voices. But what’s OpenAI without some content for an HBO show: A day after the release, CTO Mira Murati and two other top execs are leaving the company. To top it off, OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit company is probably nearby, with Sam Altman getting 7% equity.

• Notion released a revamped version of Notion AI. You can now search across all your knowledge bases inside Notion and connected apps like Slack and Gdrive. It has a fresh look too, moving away from the AI sparkle logo.

• Achieve unparalleled speech-to-text accuracy with AssemblyAI’s updated Automatic Language Detection model—outperforming all alternatives. Test it out in their no-code playground, or start building with $50 in free API credits.*
  *sponsored

👀 ICYMI: New stuff we’ve launched

Tutorials:

• Use Claude to create comprehensive job descriptions for open positions in your company.

• Identify and add outbound SEO links to blog posts with AI and Zapier.

• Summarise YouTube videos using transcripts and automate the process.

• Make learning new things effective and fun with the help of AI.

• Create a business valuation model sensitive to industry-specific factors and market conditions.

• Create custom supply chain risk models to identify and mitigate potential disruptions using Claude.

Blogs:

• The rapid explosion of AI in the workplace — insights from a real-time survey in August 2024.

• Transform your sales, lead gen and RevOps with AI

🍽️ Snack ‘n’ skill

Learn how to create an AI meeting note-taker

Taking notes during meetings is time-consuming and distracts you from fully engaging in the conversation. What if AI could handle this task, allowing you to focus on what matters most?

Step 1. Duplicate Lindy AI's note-taker template

Lindy AI offers pre-built templates to jumpstart your automation. We'll show you how to duplicate and customize their "Meeting Notetaker" template for your needs.

Step 2. Configure your AI assistant

• Set up calendar integration and event filtering to choose which meetings the AI should join.

• Define how detailed you want the meeting notes to be and where to save the AI-generated notes.

• Set up how you'll receive the notes (email, Slack, etc.). If you prefer a document, add automatic document creation for notes.

Tip: Experiment with different summarization prompts to find the perfect balance of conciseness and detail for your needs.

This walkthrough is a condensed version of this tutorial. It’s part of our new course: Create a team of AI personal assistants. Check it out to automate your daily admin tasks.

⚙️ Top new tools

• AI Search Grader* - See your brand visibility on ChatGPT and other AI search engines and get insights to boost your AI search performance.

• Nuts & Bolts - AI sales tool for Google Sheets. Chris demoed this tool in our workshop and now it’s publically available.

• Polymet - AI product designer at your service.

• Sequel - AI to navigate data and get instant insights.

• Blaze - Make great content as a team of one.

• Velvet - Store OpenAI requests in your own database.

• Algomo - Personalize your website for every visitor.

More tools here →
*sponsored

🗣️ Everyone’s (not) talking about

Google just dropped some serious upgrades to their Gemini AI models. Think better, faster, cheaper - the whole shebang. But since the branding is the same—Gemini 1.5, there’s less enthusiasm about the updates.

What's going on here?

Google released updated versions of Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash models with big improvements across the board and I think you should pay attention.

What does this mean?

There are two new production-grade models: Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002.

• These models are zippy: 2x faster output, and 3x lower latency.

• Higher rate limits for both: 2x higher for Flash, 3x for Pro. Build more, wait less.

• They're smarter too: 7% bump in general tasks, a whopping 20% jump in math skills.

Also, Gemini 1.5 Pro's price got slashed by over 50% for both input and output tokens. From the benchmarks analysis, this new Pro model is better than GPT-4o and also tries to pick a fight with the new o1-preview.

Oh, and there's a new experimental Flash model too that devs love (Google said so).

Why should I care?

Google is starting to ship really impressive models. They are yet to make it to Gemini the app (Gemini Advanced), but if you're building with AI, this is huge. Better performance, lower costs, and higher limits mean you can do way more with these models.

You can try all of the new models free of cost in Google AI Studio and see if they perform better for your use case or not.

 📜 Interesting posts

• James Cameron joins Stability AI’s Board of Directors.

• The end of advertising - The business model that funded the internet is going away.

• EA shows off a new AI that dreams up an entire video game from scratch.

• Spotify’s AI playlist builder is now available in the US and a few more countries.

• OpenAI agrees to provide review access to its training data for a copyright case by authors.

• How AI can improve each phase of the software development lifecycle.

• Enterprise philosophy and the first wave of AI.

📌 To-dos

That wraps things up for today! Let us know if you have any tutorials or courses you want us to create—we’re always open to ideas.

See you again next Tuesday. 👋

Ben