Top 50 AI products, Character.ai grows fast, AI for business is accelerating

In Focus

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AI for business – is this the tipping point?

The recent launch of ChatGPT Enterprise brought long-awaited privacy and collaboration features to ChatGPT for businesses. With leading AI products rapidly becoming more business-friendly, increasing adoption from established companies seem inevitable.

Some of this week’s news affirms we are moving from hype to reality:

• Anthropic just announced a collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to bring Claude to more businesses. Knowledge management, market research and business analysis were mentioned as promising areas for the collaboration.
• Last week, EY launched their own AI platform EY.ai (following 1.4$ billion investment) leveraging, among other technologies, GPT-3 and GPT-4 through Azure.
• BCG simultaneously dropped a study where they tested the effect of AI on worker productivity. The experiment involved 758 consultants at the company, and found that consultants using GPT-4 were significantly more productive; using AI, workers completed 12.2% more tasks, 25.1% more quickly and with 40% higher quality than when not using AI.

Prestigious firms adopting AI has a strong signalling effect to the market. Combined with empirical evidence of real results, I think we’re about to see a huge increase in the number of companies integrating AI into their workflows, as well as workers becoming more productive. Of course, not all industries will be equally changed, but most knowledge-based work is likely to see a transformative impact.

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Dario’s Picks

I.

a16z has ranked and analysed the top 50 AI products by monthly visits.

Some interesting insights:

• The top 5 products are ChatGPT, Character.ai, Bard, Poe and Quillbot.
• General assistants (like ChatGPT) is by far the biggest category of products, but AI Companions (like character.ai) are the fastest growing.
• 80% of websites on the list are less than a year old.
• Only 10% of companies on the list are owned by big tech companies.
• 48% are completely bootstrapped with no outside funding.
• Companies on the list fall into 3 categories: (1) companies that have trained their own proprietary model, (2) fine-tuned an existing model, and (3) built a consumer UI on top of an existing model. (1) is the most costly and most often VC-backed.

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II.

Character.ai, a companion-oriented AI platform, is catching up to ChatGPT in the US. Only in terms of mobile usage, though; ChatGPT is still way bigger when looking at web visits.

Character.ai is very popular among teens and young adults, which have praised the platform for helping them work through problems and make them feel less alone. While ChatGPT seems to be all about productivity, Character.ai is used more for companionship, entertainment and erotic role play (although the company say they don’t allow this). There’s a petition with 127,000 signatures on Change.org to remove the platform’s NSFW filters, and a Reddit channel named CharacterAI_NSFW with 50,000+ members. If you want to get a better idea of how the platform works, I suggest striking up a conversation with a few of the platform’s 18 million bots.

Here’s some of the most popular characters:

• ‍Text-adventure game (40 million messages exchanged)‍
• Psychologist (39 million messages exchanged)‍
• Elon Musk (18 million messages exchanged)

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III.

Perplexity (a popular alternative to ChatGPT) released their new feature, Collections. It allow users to categorise their threads, and share their collections with others.

This feature has strong similarities to the shareable templates OpenAI recently introduced for ChatGPT Enterprise. Perplexity is including Collections on their free plan (which is pretty awesome), and will get users more familiar with the concept of storing, reusing and managing their prompts and conversations.

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ChatGPT plugins

• There’s now 1,037 ChatGPT plugins, of which 23 were launched in the past 7 days.

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• New category on whatplugin:

‍📊 Data Analysis - 32 plugins

I’ve gathered all plugins related to analysing and visualising data in one place; there’s lots of options for connecting ChatGPT to databases, Google sheets and Google Analytics.

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• Notable launches:

BeeBee.AI - Delivers key insights on financial reports and earnings calls for everyday investors.

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• Categories with most new launches:

Web Content Access - 45 plugins (5 new)

Automation & Integration - 35 plugins (3 new)

Audio & Music - 22 plugins (3 new)

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AI Bytes & Resources

• Heygen’s video translation tool was hyped on social media this week, and it looks pretty neat. Check out this demo, or try it for yourself. (Unfortunately, the platform apparently has so many videos queuing now that you won’t get your result for days…unless you upgrade.)
• Coca Cola Launches AI Generated Soda. Another article claims it “tastes like marketing”, and I’m not surprised…
• Google is now promoting search generative experience in traditional search results. The popup reads "Search with an AI-powered boost, try out a new generative AI experiment from Google."
• Adobe released several powerful new AI features to Premiere Pro and After Effects.
• Another group of writers is suing OpenAI over copyright claims.
• Amazon now requires authors to disclose AI-generated content.

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