Sunday Signal #22

ChatGPT Hits the App Store, Spotify AI Plugins & A16z's $50M Investment

Hey friends 👋 ,

Welcome, AI companions to this week’s Sunday Signal. It’s been an eventful week, with lots of announcements (including big news from both OpenAI & Google). Fortunately, I sift through over 500 pieces of AI-related content every week and send the best straight to your inbox. Today, I’m using the weekend as an opportunity to dive into ChatGPT plugins, read on to find out how you can too.

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⛏ 5 News Nuggets

Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) / CNBC

  • 🔗 Link: ChatGPT is now available on iOS. The app is free to use and allows users to sync their chat history across devices. It incorporates Whisper, OpenAI's speech recognition system, enabling voice input. Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus on iOS gain exclusive access to the capabilities of GPT-4, early access to features, and faster response times. Whilst it’s initially only available in the US, a larger rollout to more countries (and Android) is expected later this year.

  • 🔗 Link: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress on May 16, 2023, about the need for government regulation of Artificial Intelligence. He said that government intervention is necessary to mitigate the risks of AI, such as bias, discrimination, and job displacement. Altman's testimony is a call for Congress to take action to regulate AI and ensure that it is used for good.

  • 🔗 Link: Google has added $115B in value after it unveiled new AI tools at its annual developer conference last week. Google’s AI tools include a new language model that can generate realistic text, an image recognition system that can identify objects in photos, and a machine learning platform that can be used to build custom AI applications.

  • 🔗 Link: Zoom has partnered with Anthropic to release Zoom IQ—a new AI smart companion. It can summarise chat threads, organise ideas, draft content, and create meeting agendas.

  • 🔗 Link: Amazon is planning to update its search function with an AI-powered conversational experience. This new feature would allow users to ask questions about products and receive answers in natural language. For example, a user could ask "What is the best laptop for under $500?" and the AI would respond with a list of relevant products. 

😎 4 Cool Creations

UI / Playlist AI

  • 🔗 Link: Brett Bauman has created a ChatGPT plugin for your Spotify account which acts as a copilot for playlist creation. In the demo example, you see Bauman requesting an “Ambient Coding Playlist” which GPT then creates and adds to his Spotify account.

  • 🔗 Link: FutureFinderAI is an AI-powered education consultant that helps students make confident decisions about their future. The platform uses machine learning to analyse a student's academic background, interests, and career goals to recommend personalised college and course options.

  • 🔗 Link: Dora AI lets you generate fully editable websites from just a line of text. The future of website creation is getting seriously exciting as barriers to entry are removed.

  • 🔗 Link: Segmentle is a numbers game generated entirely by AI that expands in difficulty as you progress—check it out if you have some time to spare.

🔦 3 Startup Spotlights

Founder (Munjal Shah) / A16z

  • 🔗 Link: Hippocratic raises $50M in seed funding to hire and train language models for medical use cases. The latest round was led by General Catalyst & A16z, and will be used to build AI models for the healthcare industry. The company plans to use the funds to hire and train more engineers and scientists, as well as to develop new healthcare applications for its models. The founder—Munjal Shah—believes he can revolutionise healthcare by making it more efficient, accurate and personalised.

  • 🔗 Link: Together, an open-source generative AI startup, raised $20M in a seed round led by Lux Capital. The company plans to use the funding to build a cloud platform for running, training, and fine-tuning open-source models. Together's co-founders believe that open-source generative AI has the potential to democratise AI and make it more accessible to everyone.

  • 🔗 Link: Union AI, a Bellevue, Washington-based open-source startup, raised $19M in a Series A round led by NEA and Nava Ventures. The company's cloud-native automation platform—Union—helps businesses build and orchestrate their AI and data workflows. Union is designed to simplify the building and deploying AI models and make it easier for businesses to manage their AI and data assets. 

🐥 2 Top Tweets

MIT CSAIL / Twitter

  • 🔗 Link: MIT release a video of a robot dog navigating numerous complex environments using NVM (Neural Volumetric Memory). The researchers revealed the new approach uses multiple cameras to recreate the 3D environment—which is in strict defiance of past approaches (one camera integrated with optical flow). In the demo, you can see the dog walking upstairs, crossing perilous steps, and running through a forest. Robocopdog inbound?

  • 🔗 Link: OpenAI has unveiled an exciting update for ChatGPT Plus users by granting them web browsing access and 70+ plugins. Try asking the WolframAlpha plugin to draw a picture of a cat 👀.

😮 1 Media Marvel

Magazine Demo / Midjourney

  • 🔗 Link: Midjourney is launching a monthly magazine to showcase the creativity of the Midjourney community. The magazine will feature interviews with artists and the best prompts to create your own images. You’ll also see a recreation of Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory". Perhaps we’re moving back to print after all?

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— Alex