The rise of AI sidekicks

Hello folks, email deliverability (rolls eyes) - we’ve been moving to our own email domain so hitting snags as we do so. It should start improving significantly but please;

• if you receive this from [email protected] - add to your contacts + mark not spam,

• or reply to this email and say hey, hi, boo, yo, or anything really :)

it’ll really help (my stress, happiness and the emails of course!) - have a great weekend, Wimbledon finals 🎾

here’s what we have today;

 Our picks 

1/

Shopify announces an AI sidekick. It can pull info from your store as well as do tasks like redesigning your homepage or putting products on sale.

I forgot to mention this yesterday—human error, eek! This is one of the best brandings for AI bots being integrated into an established product. Although this does mean, we’ll see every new AI tool being named sidekick (case in point— today’s tools section)

2/

Stripe is jumping in with a new feature in Stripe Radar - Using natural language to create complex fraud prevention rules. For example, ask it to block orders from emails with .xyz extension and it spits out the rule you need. If you’re using Radar, you can try this feature in Beta.

3/

Open AI and Associated Press sign a deal for Open AI to get the license to AP’s text archive, and AP gets the latest tech from Open AI. It’s different to see where we had Google say, “If it’s on the internet, we’ll use it” and I suspect it’s a first from many.

4/

More sources are saying that Meta will release commercial AI models to catch up with rivals. The new models are going to be on a bigger scale than LLaMA, more open source i.e. it can be used for commercial projects and free for individuals. Their way of monetizing this will likely be

a) Add into their own products (example: IG chatbot)
b) charge enterprises for custom variations.

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 From the community 

• Anthropic is having its first Hackathon on July 29-30th in SF. Build with Claude 2 API and hands-on support from Anthropic’s team.

 Cool Tools  trending product launches from the last 24 hours

• Stable Doodle from Stability AI - A sketch-to-image tool that converts a simple drawing into a dynamic image.

• Patronus AI - Helping companies detect unexpected LLM failures at scale.

• Gladly Sidekick - AI and automation platform to enable personalized self-service for your customers.

• Gigabrain - Search engine for Reddit and other online communities with AI summary of posts and comments.

• Threado AI - The intelligent support sidekick for your community.

• Swap anything – Swap people, clothes, or backgrounds with AI instantly.

• Composable Studio – Enterprise-grade generative studio for Composable API.

• Character Counter – Highlight text beyond a limit you set and use AI to edit.

• AI Collective – Smart frontend for ChatGPT & other AIs.

 From the network 

• Y Combinator - Will Open AI kill all startups?

 Ben’s Bites News  top posts from the last 24 hours

• Clibrain joins the generative AI race with Lince, an LLM optimized for Spanish.

• Nomic raises $17M to improve the explainability and accessibility of AI.

• Snowflake backer Wing closes a $600M fund to invest in AI-focused companies.

• Meta to release commercial AI model in an effort to catch rivals.

• Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models.

• Intercom $250M/year business bet on customer service and leveraging LLMs.

• Patch n' Pack - NaViT, a vision transformer for any aspect ratio and resolution.

• Sam Altman is looking for a venture capitalist to lead Open AI’s second VC fund.

• AI startup Hugging Face is raising fresh VC funds at a $4B valuation.

• Causaly raises $60M for drug discovery and biomedical research.

• Hollywood studios want their AI replicas of actors—for free, forever.

• “I went on a date with my AI girlfriend.”

• Another co-founder of Stability says he was duped into selling stake for $100.

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