Daily Digest: Attack or Defend

PLUS: GPT corner and some tips.

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Daily Digest #283

Hello folks, I’ve added a short GPT corner today. Feel it’s better to keep them separate from tools/startups. What do you think about the frequency for covering GPTs: daily or just once/twice a week? p.s. we released our first version of our Ben’s Bites GPT - ask about AI news directly in ChatGPT (you need to be on the plus plan)

Here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. The artificial intelligence talent war between OpenAI and Google is intensifying as OpenAI tries to lure top AI researchers from Google with multimillion-dollar pay packages. OpenAI plans to triple its valuation to over $80 billion through an employee share sale, so it is telling researchers who join now they can benefit from the upcoming value increase.🍿Our Summary (also below)

  2. Character AI is looking to raise again. It allows people to create virtual characters and chat with them, which is highly popular among younger audiences. The tea is that Google wants to get a piece for themselves.🍿Our Summary (also below)

It’s Attack or Defend for Google: Invest in other options, launch better products and keep its researchers close by.

TOP TOOLS

  • GPT4v app by Taishi - Let AI voiceover your video.

  • Custom Sandboxes by E2B - Spawn a sandbox with a predefined environment.

  • Multi-Modal RAG by LlamaIndex - Let LLMs read and see your knowledge sources.

  • GPUrich - Our AI agents find GPUs at the price you want.

  • PlaiDay - Personalized text to video with cinematic quality.

  • Image AI search - Search ecommerce products by an image.

  • Chatg.pt - Free ChatGPT link shortener with analytics.

GPT Corner
WHO’S HIRING IN AI
NEWS

Unclassifieds - short, sponsored links

QUICK BITES

The artificial intelligence talent war between OpenAI and Google is intensifying as OpenAI tries to lure top AI researchers from Google with multimillion dollar pay packages. OpenAI plans to triple its valuation to over $80 billion through an employee share sale, so it is telling researchers who join now they can benefit from the upcoming increase.

What is going on here?

OpenAI is aggressively recruiting top AI talent from Google with heavy paychecks.

What does this mean?

In the “Game of AI Thrones”, you need many houses to support you. The GPU house is often talked about but Open AI is (and has been) looking at the talent house. It is offering senior researchers from Google pay packages worth around $5-10 million in stock compensation. The rumour is that OpenAI is guaranteeing them huge paydays if they get in before OpenAI's valuation spikes from $27 billion to over $80 billion.

Why should I care?

Open AI already includes many top researchers who were previously at Google. The transformer architecture was created by researchers at Google. Open AI has been “attracting” talent like a super magnet and if this move ends up shifting more researchers to their side, it’ll be a hard game for Google to keep pace.

EDUCATION

OpenAI launched GPTs last Tuesday. These are custom chatbots you can create without any coding, inside ChatGPT. More about what GPTs are →

This is possibly the start of a new app store moment. GPTs like chatbot experiences might become a norm and you should try building them now. Here are some thoughts on getting started with building GPTs.

Where is the opportunity?

Let’s keep API actions aside for a while and think about the powers GPTs have. It has:

  • Custom Instructions

  • Vision

  • Web-browsing

  • DallE-3

  • Code-interpreter

  • Document retrieval

The most basic GPTs combine custom instructions with one of the other powers. Everyone has their eyes fixated on document retrieval, but there are other amazing ideas.

This could be building a colour palette creator with Code Interpreter. Or a GPT that can organize screenshots with Vision or a GPT that can create images in a consistent style with DallE-3.

The next level is combining multiple of them and stress-testing the GPT on its usage of relevant powers. One idea that you can explore here is combining different documents with different powers in a single GPT.

On mobile, there’s an extra power of voice inputs/outputs but I’d only suggest going there if you have a clear use case/solution. Tinkering is harder because you can only create on the web but test only on mobile for voice.

How to think about API actions?

Using API actions to fetch your content isn’t very user-friendly. The call takes more time than browsing manually in most cases. Instead, you want to give the GPT a collection of your content as a document.

The secret of API actions will be “affecting the other app”. Like the Zapier demo from OpenAI where the GPT added an event to your calendar. Think of this prompt for finding use cases: “I wish I could just say this and it got done automatically.”

Right now you can only access GPTs with API on the web and the voice mode only on mobile, but whenever OpenAI extends any of that, you’ll be in the prime position.

Some hacks and tips

Here are some hacks/tips to get more traction, improve GPTs or build faster.

Hack: Don’t just use the builder. Use an external ChatGPT thread to build. The GPT builder has no room for exploring your thoughts, every command updates the GPT’s behaviour.

Tip: Don’t upload sensitive info just yet. The users can ask for these files and their contents (as they are supposed to). You can try adding instructions to make it harder but there are ways around them.

Hack: Introduce hotkeys for complex GPTs. Especially if the use case falls in the productivity category.

Tip: Add humour/sarcasm/style to how your GPT responds. Boring responses get less (way less) attention.

Hack: Structure your prompts. Make them testable so you can iterate better on what command is driving GPT behaviour in the right or the wrong direction.

Tip: GPTs don’t have inherent user-specific memory. They are same-for-all websites with chat interfaces. So building GPTs that need to act uniquely for each of your users is harder. You might not want to try those cases if you’re just starting to tinker.

Hack: For the same reason as above, they can easily replace those single-use websites with 100 ad pop-ups. Copy those for a quick start.

QUICK BITES

Character AI is looking to raise again. It allows people to create virtual characters and chat with them, which is highly popular among younger audiences. The tea is that Google wants to get a piece for themselves.

What is going on here?

Google wants to invest many hundred millions into Character.AI

What does this mean?

The current round is supposed to value Character AI at $5B. It last raised $150M in March 2023 at a $1B valuation with a16z leading the round.

Character AI was founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. They are already using Google Cloud and TPUs for training their models and this will get Google more skin in the AI characters/personas game.

Why should I care?

Characters are an AI use case that business AI tools gloss over. Meta is going heavy in that direction with their celebrity-inspired AI avatars and in some form, OpenAI’s newly launched GPTs could also capture some part of that market. Character AI is the leader right now and Google might be trying to use it in their favour.

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