Sunday Signal #17

AutoGPT Transforms Generative AI, Opus Challenges Fiverr & InfoGrid Raises $90M

Hey friends 👋 ,

Happy Sunday everyone. This week’s all about the next step in generative AI—If you’re unsure what I’m talking about…read on. New here? This is Sunday Signal where I filter > 500 pieces of AI-related content and deliver them straight to your inbox. I’m just back from a morning market trip here in London, so without further ado let’s get into this week’s best AI news.

🤖 AI Summary

This week’s newsletter, summarised with humour, by ChatGPT in 3 sentences:

AutoGPT uses GPT-4 & GPT-3.5 to build apps, write podcasts, and create a do-anything-machine. AI-powered spending has increased by 400%, with chatbots performing more human-like operations. Alibaba and Quora have both launched generative AI chatbots, while Stanford has released a gloomy report on the state of AI. Cool Creations include OpusPro, Gamma, LibrarianAI, and Trickle. Infogrid raises $90M, CryptoGPT raises $10M, and VC firm Betaworks announces $500K in program funding to 10 AI startups. Finally, Max Tegmark appeals to halt AI progress for 6 months on the Lex Fridman podcast.

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⛏ 5 News Nuggets

Agent Smith / The Matrix

  • 🔗 Link: AutoGPT explodes onto the scene— employing both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 to iterate its own prompts, enhance them, and execute them towards a final objective. The software's capabilities are exemplified by its ability to construct applications, produce complete podcast episodes, and operate the do-anything-machine, which, as the name suggests, can… do anything. AutoGPT is presently accessible as an open-source tool, meaning you and I can use it with enough technical know-how. Are we on the verge of entering our own Matrix?

  • 🔗 Link: AI-powered spending goes up by 400%. Apptopia reports a 1480% YoY increase in chatbot apps— with in-app spending reaching almost $3M in March alone. The rise in popularity is due to increased Chatbot sophistication, and UI improvements. Big tech has been reaping the benefits of such uptake, with Bing reporting a 1000% increase in daily downloads since integrating OpenAI tech.

  • 🔗 Link: Alibaba launches ChatGPT competitor—Tongyi Qianwen. The new generative AI chatbot will be able to write emails, draft business proposals and will be integrated across the company’s internal messaging apps—available in both Chinese & English. The chatbot race is really starting to heat up, who do you think will come out on top?

  • 🔗 Link: Quora releases Poe as a direct competitor to ChatGPT. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo has been working relentlessly on the chatbot for months now—with a penultimate focus on easy UI. The program has the ability to generate chatbots for you, so you have a personal AI assistant that can teach you how to speak Spanish, do a backflip or….. write a newsletter.

  • 🔗 Link: Stanford releases 386-page paper on the state of AI. The paper details: the shift from academia to industry, the disproportionately low increase in AI-related jobs, and the significant increase in energy footprint. Warning—the paper’s pretty gloomy but still worth a read.

😎 4 Cool Creations

OpusPro Demo / OpusPro Website

  • 🔗 Link: Turn hours of video footage into viral clips with OpusPro. The application has face-tracking, keyword generators and most impressively—generates clips based on clip vitality scores. This one’s going to save content creators hours but perhaps reduce the Fiverr job market too. What side will you be on?

  • 🔗 Link: Gamma produces beautiful presentations, enhances writing and perfects documents using AI. The CEO describes it as a combination of Notion & Canva, plus they have in-built analytics. I’m personally hyped about our progress in these areas—no tedious presentations, or slide decks anymore.

  • 🔗 Link: LibrarianAI suggests tailored book recommendations based on your 3 favourite books. I was suggested Born To Run by Christopher McDougall, can you guess what my inputs were?

  • 🔗 Link: Trickle generates prompts so you don’t have to. With access to over 200 prompts, you’ll never have to worry about engineering the perfect prompt again.

🔦 3 Startup Spotlights

Infogrid CEO - Will Cowell De Gruchy / Finerva

  • 🔗 Link: InfoGrid announces $90M in Series B funding. The AI-powered, sustainability-focused, smart building platform raised funding from Spark, Original Capital and many others to expand its vast dataset, and to serve its global blue-chip customer base with an expanded sales team. Infogrid’s primary focus is to develop safer, cleaner working environments using a combination of AI & analytics.

  • 🔗 Link: CryptoGPT raises $10M in Series A funding led by DFW Labs. The Layer 2 blockchain application has higher-speed transaction throughput, and lower gas fees, than Ethereum—and uses AI to encrypt data at the source. CryptoGPT has now reached a valuation of $250M—capturing market share from both crypto & AI.

  • 🔗 Link: VC firm Betaworks announces $500K in program funding to 10 lucky startups. The new camp is underwritten by Mozilla and provides access to AI firms such as Hugging Face & Stability AI—with the ultimate goal of supporting AI startups that “augment the way humans behave, create, play, work and think”. With Amazon’s announcement last week, we’re starting to see a huge uptick in AI startup funding, what will you apply for?

🐥 2 Top Tweets

Weather2020 Forecast / Analytics Insight

  • 🔗 Link: Weather2020 utilises generative AI to make long-term weather predictions spanning months and even years into the future. The Machine Learning software employs advanced algorithms to analyse historical weather patterns and detects recurring patterns and trends. Weather2020 provides reliable forecasts of specific weather phenomena using statistical analysis and periodicity. Personally, I’ll be fleeing the annual London heat wave for cooler pastures.

  • 🔗 Link: A robot that automatically sorts trash in office environments. The robot uses RL (Re-inforced Learning) to develop an understanding, over time, of how to effectively sort & recycle. The robot already seems better than myself at recycling, what’s that all about?

😮 1 Media Marvel

Max Tegmark / Lex Fridman Podcast

  • 🔗 Link: Max Tegmark has been featured on the Lex Fridman podcast to present a compelling argument in favour of pausing AI development for a period of six months. He references the recent letter of appeal that Elon Musk has co-signed, advocating for the temporary cessation of AI progress to enable its proper security in light of recent advancements.

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— Alex