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Staying on top of the rapid pace of AI developments is crucial, but challenging. To help, these episode summaries provide marketing and business leaders with a concise overview of key topics from the “Artificially Intelligent Marketing” podcast, which is co-hosted by our CEO, Dr Paul Avery.
This summary blog post spans OpenAI platform updates, new products from Google, Adobe and others, misinformation concerns, government AI frameworks, and major investments fuelling progress, and more. For full details on any topic, we encourage listeners to access the complete podcast recordings. Staying informed on AI can bring competitive advantages… These shows offer an educational resource to keep you ahead of the competition and on the cutting edge of modern marketing.
Summaries from episode 35:
GPT Store Goes Live
OpenAI has launched a GPT Store where anyone can access and use publicly shared GPTs. GPTs are custom tools created by users that enhance ChatGPT's capabilities by connecting it to external services and providing custom instructions. The store allows GPT creators to earn revenue share based on usage. Since launch, some creators have seen 100x traffic increases to their sites. The store makes it easy for anyone to find and use GPTs for various use cases.
ChatGPT Teams Launch
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Teams, a secure, business-ready version of ChatGPT. For $30 per user monthly, businesses get higher usage caps, 32k context, and data privacy. This allows companies to use ChatGPT while keeping proprietary data safe. Rapid and easy rollout removes barriers for organisations to leverage ChatGPT for things like analytics, reporting, and content creation.
Midjourney's AI Image Generator
Midjourney has launched version 6 of its AI image generator, showing improved photorealism and new text generation capabilities. This iteration focuses on quality over quantity, with balanced realistic details. Midjourney continues leading innovation in AI art, in fierce competition with rival models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stability.ai’s SDXL.
Bland.ai's Impact
Bland.ai offers real-time AI phone calls at scale for sales and service interactions. It can automatically handle up to 500,000 calls with human voices that sound reasonably authentic. If deployed carefully, these types of tools could significantly impact customer service queue times. However, if misused, expect realistic robocallers at a scale never seen before, driven by AI.
AI in Robotics: Figure 01 and Optimus Gen-2
Advancements in robotics continue, with AI developments helping to improve robot world-understanding and performance. Figure 01 demonstrated video-based robot learning by having a robot make coffee automatically from just observing humans completing the task. Similarly, Tesla revealed Optimus Gen-2 with better balance and speed. These humanoid robots capable of dynamic physical tasks inch closer to commercial viability.
Samsung's Automation Goals
Samsung plans fully automated semiconductor factories using AI and sensing for precision manufacturing. With robots already widespread in industry, capabilities are quickly advancing. Samsung's 2025 timeline indicates the swift pace of intelligent robot adoption.
Chatbot Vulnerabilities
Despite high expectations, AI chatbot deployments remain limited by vulnerabilities like hallucination and prompt engineering attacks. For example, a public Chevrolet chatbot was manipulated into providing falsely low car prices. At this point, the need for extensive safeguarding is resource intensive, hindering rollouts. Solutions overcoming these inherent issues will enable safer, reliable chatbots. But until these issues are fixed, expect the rollout of sales and customer service chatbots to be stunted at best.
Perplexity's Massive Funding
Perplexity, a search engine that uses AI to summarise answers to user queries based on web search results, raised $73 million at a $500 million valuation. With clear, concise responses instead of noisy pages of links, it could disrupt Google. Integrations with GPT-4 and other models power features like personalised travel planning and writing assistance. As an alternative search engine, Perplexity warrants attention. As a chatbot, Perplexity delivers higher quality insights and fewer hallucinations compared to tools like ChatGPT and Claude 2.1 (at least, in our hands).
CES 2024 AI Innovations
CES highlights included AI products like: Wisp voice restoration for disorders, Genesis hearing aids with neural noise reduction, Volkswagen in-car assistants, and Fractional Nanny “effortless parenting” strollers. Beyond marketing hype, the range demonstrates AI’s expanding mainstream reach.
Summaries from episode 39:
UK Government's Generative AI Framework
The UK government has published a 70-page generative AI framework for responsible and effective use of AI in government and public sectors. It is based on 10 core principles focused on understanding capabilities and limitations, lawful and ethical use, security, human oversight, skills development, and more. The guidance aims to set standards and drive AI literacy across government departments. Although focussed on government use, the principles could be applied to any business.
Publicis Groupe's €300 Million AI Investment
Publicis Groupe, the advertising and communications company, has announced a €300 million investment into AI over 3 years. This includes developing an AI platform called Core AI to enhance capabilities in areas like insights, strategy, creative, production and more. The market responded positively with Publicis stock reaching a record high.
Google's Text-to-Video Model: Lumiere
Google Research has developed Lumiere, an advanced text-to-video diffusion model that can transform text and images into realistic AI-generated videos. Key capabilities include full frame rate video generation and enhanced ability to generate natural motion (something that has proven challenging for current models, providing a clear give-away that video has been generated by AI).
Runway Gen-2: Enhancing AI Video Editing
Runway has upgraded its flagship AI video generator, Gen-2, with a new multi-motion brush. This allows users to paint multiple objects in a source image and have them animate independently based on different instructions. This brings more control over which elements animate in the final video.
OpenAI's Model Updates and Cost Reductions
OpenAI has announced updates to its text embeddings models plus optimizations to GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-3.5 Turbo. This includes 50% lower prices for GPT-3.5, making it more affordable, along with accuracy and capability improvements across both models.
ElevenLabs' Major Funding Milestone
ElevenLabs, a leader in voice synthesis and cloning, has raised $80 million in Series B funding. Investors see major potential in voice technology applications across industries including telesales, market research, customer service, content creation, and more. ElevenLabs aims to use the funds to keep innovating amidst growing competition in the voice synthesis market.
AI Website Builders: Reality Check
Martin has been exploring leading AI website builders from Wix, Doric and HubSpot. While promise is high, actual functionality varies greatly depending on depth of AI integration. Small startup Doric impresses for a first attempt, while Wix's offering lacks sophistication. Assessing true capabilities remains challenging and the promise of “prompt to website” builders is yet to be realised in any meaningful way.
MIT's AI and Job Automation Study
An MIT study on AI's potential impact on jobs found only 23% of vision-related tasks can currently be automated economically with AI. While the potential is vast, costs still outweigh benefits for large-scale automation. This counters views that AI will imminently replace human roles across industries.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Series: AI Advancements
Samsung's new Galaxy S24 smartphone leans heavily into AI. Capabilities include live translation, AI-powered photography and video editing suites, and intuitive gesture-based search functions. With other brands also touting on-device AI, competition is heating up.
AI and Political Misinformation: The New Hampshire Incident
A robo-caller imitated President Biden's voice using AI, urging democrats to stay away from voting. As synthetic voice and media generation improves, establishing trust and labelling AI-generated content will grow in importance. Maintaining standards as rates of misinformation accelerate will challenge communicators.
Microsoft Copilot: Office AI Tools Review
Microsoft has released Copilot AI capabilities like chat, document drafting and PowerPoint content generation to Microsoft 365 users of all tiers (these were previously restricted to Enterprise users with 300 licences or more). Priced at $20 per month, the tools aim to save time and effort, though current functionality is not quite as powerful as indicated in initial promotional videos. What’s more, Microsoft Excel AI capabilities are yet to be released (making ChatGPT a better fit for AI-supported data analysis).
Explore AI in Marketing with the "Artificially Intelligent Marketing" Podcast
Discover key insights from Paul and Martin's dynamic podcast episodes in this article, offering a glimpse into how they navigate the intersection of AI and marketing. To dive deeper into the captivating world of AI's impact on marketing strategies, you're encouraged to listen to the full episodes, available here or on your preferred podcast platform. Moreover, an extensive backlog of episodes serves as a rich resource, showcasing AI's transformative role in marketing.
AI Note
As you might expect from a blog post about using AI for marketing, we used AI to help draft this blog post! We began by transcribing the podcast audio using AI (Descript), and then refined the transcript with the help of Claude from Anthropic and GPT-4 (ChatGPT), resulting in clear and concise blog segments. The BioStrata human team then polished these segments for enhanced clarity and readability. To add that extra touch, we used Leanardo to create the featured image for this blog post.
