Google Assistant gets AI superpowers

Dario’s Picks

I.

Assistant with Bard

Google Assistant and Bard are merging. Soon, you’ll get the capabilities of Bard – including extensions like Gmail and Maps – right inside Google Assistant.

This also means Google Assistant is going multimodal. Users will now see icons of a microphone, a keyboard and a camera, showing the ways in which the user can interact.

Google is rolling out the new assistant to early testers now, but a full launch is still months away.

Amazon is set to supercharge Alexa with AI, and Apple is reportedly working on doing the same for Siri.

II.

Arc browser’s innovative AI features

Browsers are increasingly getting AI features, but Arc is doing it distinctly different from others.

5 AI-features were just launched, called “Arc Max”:

1. Ask ChatGPT: Lets you use ChatGPT directly in the Arc Command Line.
2. Tidy Tab Titles: Renames tabs which makes it easier to find your pinned tabs.
3. Tidy Downloads: Renames your downloads using names that actually describe the file.
4. 5 Second Previews: Gives you a short summary & preview of the page behind any link when pressing Shift.
5. Ask on Page: Lets you se ask questions about the page you are on when using Command-F.

III.

Canva Magic Studio

Canva, a massively popular design platform, is integrating AI in all parts of its products, and it’s pretty amazing. They’ve recently added a host of AI features, including partnering with Runway for video.

New features include AI-generated templates, making individual image objects editable, make complex image edits using text prompts, add AI-powered animations to design, and more.  Check out this hand-on demo by thebemusedstudio.

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IIII.

Rewind Pendant

A new wearable that captures everything you say and hear. It transcribes, encrypts and stores it locally on your phone. You can then ask their AI about anything you’ve said or heard.

Cool and creepy all at once!

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In Focus

What’s next for AI in the coming months

I recommend checking out this article by Ethan Mollick about what the near-future of will look like – a 10-15 minute read.

Here’s the key points:

• 10 months into the “AI revolution”, GPT-4 remains the gold standard of LLMs, but Google’s imminent launch of Gemini is likely to change that.
• Google and OpenAI have recently been focused on multimodal capabilities:
• Vision: ChatGPT can now do things like perform medical diagnoses from MRI images, write an insurance report from a picture of a damaged car, operate a machine based on a picture of the instruction manual, and more. (Beware that results won’t necessarily be accurate, though).
• Voice: Talking to an AI brings not just the convenience of speaking & listening vs writing & reading, but along with it, the convincing illusion of talking to a real human. If you want to test this right now, go ahead and download Pi to your phone, and try having a voice conversation with it.
• Connection: Giving the AI more context through connection to other sources of data, such as real-time internet access or, potentially more powerfully, your own data.
• AIs will soon be able to talk, see, know about us, do research, create images. These features are already built and working.
• What happens next depends on our agency and decisions, it will not be imposed on us by machines. It’s up to us to figure out how to use the new technology for good, rather than harm.
• The implications of our current AIs is ultimately unknowable, not only to us, but also to the companies that has developed them.

Google and OpenAI and Microsoft do not know the implications of AI for YOUR job or YOUR company or YOUR education, or even all the ways in which the systems they are building will ultimately be used, for good or bad.

Ethan Mollick, The shape of the shadow of The Thing, 3 Oct 2023

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ChatGPT plugins

There’s now 1,105 ChatGPT plugins, of which 31 were launched in the past 7 days.

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Notable launches:

• CoinMarketCap - Provides the user with the latest crypto data from CoinMarketCap.
• Factiverse - Fact-checks the user's conversations and finds credible sources from the web in real-time.

Categories with most new launches:

• Marketing and SEO - 61 plugins (4 new)
• Audio & Music - 28 plugins (4 new)
• Online Learning - 46 plugins (3 new)

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Bytes

• Meta will pay big money to content creators it collaborates with to create AI chatbots
• US Warns EU’s landmark AI policy will only benefit big tech
• Adobe Is coming out with a next-gen AI photo editing engine
• People are figuring out ways to generate inappropriate images with Meta's new AI stickers
• The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week
• LinkedIn adding AI to a lot of its products: Reimagining hiring and learning with the power of AI
• How an AI deepfake ad of MrBeast ended up on TikTok
• AI will surpass human intelligence in a decade, says Japan's leading businessman
• JPMorgan’s Dimon Predicts 3.5-Day Work Week for Next Generation Thanks to AI
• Anthropic in talks to raise $2 billion from Google and others just days after Amazon investment (paywalled)