BB Digest: Practical Upsides of AI

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Hey folks, we are hiring a content writer for Ben’s Bites blog, details here. If you know someone with a knack for creating high-quality content, send it their way.

Also, Ben’s Bites workshops are still on: Mike and I will discuss building custom GPTs from training calls tomorrow.

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• Anthropic’s vision of a powerful AI + Adobe’s plans to win artists

• ICYMI: a brand new course and tutorial for you to learn

• snack n skill - a bite-sized lesson exploring Copilot 365.

• 7 of the best new AI tools

• 6 interesting posts from around the web

• to-do’s

Alright, let’s get to it!

 🔎 Trends & news

• At the end of last week, Anthropic’s co-founder Dario Amodei put his thoughts on the potential upsides of AI in a 15,000-word essay. Dario talks about the radical changes and how they can be achieved practically in 5 areas:

  • Biology and physical health

  • Neuroscience and mental health

  • Economic development and poverty

  • Peace and governance

  • Work and meaning

  You should make time to read it and take notes.

• Adobe announced a ton of generative AI features at Adobe Max. Photoshop got Distraction Removal to eliminate unwanted elements in one click, while Premiere Pro’s Generative Extend helps fill in small gaps (~2 secs) in footage. Their latest experiment is Project Concept, a tool for rapidly exploring creative directions using Firefly AI models.

• If you’re on Twitter, you must have seen this prompt doing rounds: “From all of our interactions, what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself.” It’s all good when treated as fun, but don’t take ChatGPT’s responses seriously. It’s effectively a hallucination, and as useful as a horoscope reading. Simon explains it better.

• Some users in the US are getting access to SearchGPT integrated version of ChatGPT. Expect this to launch soon.

👀 ICYMI: New stuff we’ve launched

On popular request, we have added another Microsoft Copilot 365 course with a focus on advanced features (and it’s also free). It includes a recap of Microsoft Copilot 365 (even the recently added features), plus 5 tutorials on

• Using Microsoft Copilot Chat as a central hub for everything happening at your company.

• Quickly creating reports and presentations, using existing source files in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

• Creating branded PowerPoint presentations using a shared design template.

• Collaborating on content in Loop and Whiteboard with Copilot (that you can share with others in your company).

• Creating a custom AI chatbot within your Microsoft 365 workspace grounded in your knowledge docs.

We also have a new tutorial for tinkerers on how to create AI summaries of websites with Firecrawl & Replit.

🍽️ Snack ‘n’ skill

Learn how to create a Copilot agent with a knowledge source

Imagine having an AI assistant that knows your company inside out. With Microsoft Copilot agents, you can create custom chatbots tailored to your specific knowledge sources.

Step 1. Configure your Copilot agent

Start with the "Website Q&A" template in Copilot Studio. Add your public website or SharePoint site as a knowledge source for the agent to reference.

Step 2. Design, test, and refine

• Customize your agent's icon and description

• Test the agent with sample questions to gauge its accuracy

• Set specific topics and actions for more targeted responses

• Iterate based on test results to improve performance

Step 3. Publish and deploy your agent

• Click "Publish" to set your agent live and choose a deployment channel (e.g., Microsoft Teams).

• Add the agent to your chosen platform and simply start chatting (within Teams in this case)!

Tip: While current knowledge sources are limited to public websites and SharePoint, keep an eye out for future updates that may allow more diverse sources like OneDrive folders.

This walkthrough is a condensed version of this tutorial. It's part of our Learn Advanced Copilot 365 features course. Check it out to become a Copilot power user!

⚙️ Top new tools

• AssemblyAI*: Speech-to-Text API trained on 12.5M hours of multilingual data.

• Handinger - Extract data from the internet, easy and cheap.

• Swarm - A lightweight, multi-agent framework from OpenAI (experimental).

• Quizzio - Transform study material into quizzes.

• Dezbor - Create stunning dashboards easily.

• Sendsheets – Send personalized emails from Google Sheets.

• Height 2.0 - The autonomous project management tool.

More tools here →
*sponsored

 📜 Interesting posts

• Behind the scenes with NotebookLM’s senior PM Raiza Martin.

• How to build a real-time image generator with Flux and Together AI.

• Binary IQ - A bottleneck to getting LLM-based agents to work.

• Metaverse and AI are changing the face of contemporary design.

• From gaming to generative AI - 25 years of Nvidia’s GPUs.

• Five new thinking styles for working with thinking machines.

📌 To-dos

Let us know if you have any tutorials or courses you want us to create—we’re always open to ideas.

That wraps things up for today! See you again on Thursday. 👋

Ben