Another Crazy Week in AI - Here's Your TLDR

Last week was a slower week in the world of AI, which was great because I’m on vacation in Colorado right now. However, this week, things really picked up steam again. It was just announcement after announcement and it was really hard to keep up with while spending a little bit of time here and there checking in from a smart phone. I think I’ve got you covered though.

This week we saw a new chat assistant in Claude 2 that, in my opinion, does a lot of things better than ChatGPT. We saw ChatGPT roll out Code Interpreter to Plus members. There’s a new Stable Diffusion Model. Elon Musk announced X AI. The tool that I’m using to send this email even added a ton of AI features into its platform. AI news has slowed down a bit for summer but this week was an exception for sure.

There’s been a lot and I’m doing my best to stay on top of it so you don’t have to. There's a lot to cover so let's jump into it... Here's your TLDR for the week.

Thank You To This Week’s Sponsor!

Coda AI

Coda is currently hosting an AI at Work Challenge, where you can submit templates that show how Coda AI helps you save time and accomplish more—and have a chance at a $10k grand prize. Within categories like personal productivity or product development, docs can range from helping you write briefs, summarizing meetings, or generating research questions. But hurry! The Challenge ends July 17.

Coda is a doc that combines the flexibility of word processors, the structure of spreadsheets, and the power of apps into one place. They recently announced a free Beta for Coda AI, a new work assistant that’s built for the evolution of work. With Coda AI, you can delegate repetitive tasks, create content at scale, and get insights faster. Get access to Coda AI for free today, and enter the Challenge for a chance to win big.

• Sign up for free access to Coda AI during the Beta

• Join the AI at Work Challenge, ending July 17

🛠️ 5 Amazing Future Tools

1. Claude 2: This week, Anthropic, a Google-backed company, released Claude 2, an improved conversational AI assistant. Claude 2 features longer responses, better reasoning abilities, and increased safety measures compared to the previous version. It has a 100k token limit, meaning that it can have a combined input/output of roughly 75,000 words. Honestly, I’ve personally been finding myself using Claude 2 more than ChatGPT these days. Unfortunately, it’s only available in the US and UK at the moment.
(Free)

2. ChatGPT W/ Code Interpreter: This week, ChatGPT rolled out Code Interpreter to all subscribers of the Plus Plan. Code Interpreter is a pretty massive upgrade. It allows you to upload files like images, videos, code, pdfs, text documents and more and then analyze them for you. It can also write new code and then execute that code for you. There are tons of examples of exciting ways that people are using this all over Twitter and I’m hoping to make a breakdown video of it soon. (In other news, ChatGPT removed the ability to browse the internet but claims it will be back soon.)
(Paid)

3. BeeHiiv AI: BeeHiiv is actually the platform that I use to send this newsletter that you're reading. This week, they rolled out new AI features to make writing emails even easier. It now acts as a writing assistant, spell-checker, language translator, tone editor, and will even generate images for your newsletter, directly from within the editor. This isn't even sponsored by BeeHiiv. It's just the tool that I use and love and I finally get to talk about it in the context of AI.
(Free & Paid Plans)

4. Pika Labs: This is a tool that you're going to start hearing about A LOT more. It's currently in private beta so you need to request access but, once you have access, it's currently free to use (at least while in Beta). This tool allows you to upload an image, add a prompt to that image, and convert the image into a video. You can create an image in a tool like MidJourney or Leonardo, upload it to Pika, and add a prompt that then animates the image. People are going to have a lot of fun with this one!
(Early Access / Free)

5. Epidemic Sound Soundmatch: Do you ever struggle to find the perfect background music track for a video that you created? Epidemic Sound is a pretty well-known source of music and sound effects. However, they just added a new feature where you can upload your video to their platform and it will scan the video to find the perfect backing music. It references existing videos that use Epidemic's songs to understand what types of music work well for specific scenes in videos, and then suggests music that's available within their library. I don't personally add music to most of my videos, but with something this easy, I might start. (This is NOT sponsored by them... I just thought it was a cool feature.)
(Paid)

🗞️ AI News & Articles

1.  Announcing xAI - Elon Musk and a team of top AI researchers from organizations like DeepMind, OpenAI, and Google Research have formed a new company called xAI. Their goal is to understand the true nature of the universe using artificial intelligence. The all-star team has contributed major innovations in AI like the Transformer and adversarial examples. xAI is separate from Elon's X Corp but will collaborate with companies like Twitter and Tesla. They are recruiting engineers and researchers to join them in the Bay Area. You can meet the team and ask questions during their Twitter Spaces chat on July 14th.

2.  The risks of AI are real but manageable - Bill Gates wrote this article with his thoughts on AI… While AI certainly presents risks, history shows we can manage new technologies responsibly. With thoughtful regulations, such as for deepfakes or cybersecurity, we can mitigate hazards while still realizing the benefits. AI itself can aid in thwarting misuse. Job disruption is inevitable but not catastrophic; with proper support, workers can transition as they have with previous innovations. Bias remains an issue, but active research pursues solutions. Teachers have valid concerns but AI may also assist students constructively. With conscientious development and public engagement, AI can profoundly improve our world. But this requires proactive partnership between governments, companies and citizens alike. By addressing challenges openly yet pragmatically, we can steer AI toward an optimistic future.

3. Shutterstock Expands Partnership with OpenAI, Signs New Six-Year Agreement to Provide High-Quality Training Data - This expanded partnership between Shutterstock and OpenAI is a big step for both companies. By providing OpenAI with increased access to its massive content libraries, Shutterstock has cemented its position as a top source of high-quality training data for AI models. In exchange, Shutterstock gains priority access to OpenAI's latest generative AI tech, like DALL-E image generation, which it plans to integrate into its platforms. Together they aim to bring creative AI capabilities to both professional creators and everyday mobile users. While Shutterstock could attempt to fight the emergence of AI art to preserve their business model, they’re choosing to embrace and adapt to the technology instead, which will likely play out well for them in the long-term.

4.  Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Available For Testing In Discord Bot - Stable Diffusion has made their new SDXL 1.0 model available within their Discord community. They recently released SDXL 0.9, which was a big improvement but it was just a warm-up for the full 1.0 version. Anyone can actually access their Discord for free right now and test out the new model in exchange for voting on their favorite images to help train the new model.

Other News:

• Clipdrop Launches Stable Doodle

• Leonardo Adds Prompt Magic v3 + SDXL 0.9 + 2,000 Token Credit

• NotebookLM: Google’s experimental AI-first notebook

• Shopify Announces An AI Sidekick

📺️ Must-Watch Videos

💰️ A Money Idea To Try

An AI-Generated eCommerce Store:

One of today’s featured “must watch” videos is an example of me using AI tools to build an online store. I used AI to pick a name for the store, AI to generate product ideas, AI to generate slogans and images, AI to write product descriptions, and then I listed them all on a Shopify page for sale. I’ve already gotten a handful of sales on the products. Here’s the link to that video again.

Find more AI income ideas at the AI-Income Database here.

📢 Announcements

• (Sponsored) A Banksy got everyday investors 32% returns? - You read that right. Thousands of investors are already smiling all the way to the bank thanks to the fine-art investing platform Masterworks. Masterworks investors have benefitted from 13 sales, with returns including +13.9%, +35.0%, and +27.3%. Now, Future Tools readers can skip the waitlist to join.

  • See important disclosures at masterworks.com/cd

• Still planning to rebrand this newsletter - Over the coming weeks, I’m going to break this newsletter out and it will essentially be “the Matt Wolfe” newsletter. Future Tools will have a separate newsletter, which will focus more on updates to the site and specifically focus on just the latest tools. This newsletter will continue to be what you expect, with news, tools, announcements, videos, and essentially be the TLDR of the week in AI. But I still haven’t landed on a new brand name! I’ve asked AI but they’ve all been pretty lame so far. Anyway… I’m open to ideas! Feel free to reply (although I may not be able to reply to everyone, I DO read the emails when people reply to these newsletters).

• I’m on Threads now - I still love Twitter personally. It’s shown me a lot of love over the past year and I’ve managed to filter out a lot of the negativity. But I am jumping on board the Threads train and will try my best to cross-post what I share on Twitter over to Threads as well. That way, if you’re in the anti-Twitter camp, you can still see a lot of the real-time updates that I share. My Threads link is here.

• Interested in sponsoring this newsletter (with over 125,000 subscribers) or a YouTube video? Reach out to my new management team at [email protected] and let’s make something happen!

• If you’re interested in a Featured Listing on The Future Tools website, details about purchasing a promoted post are available here. I only feature two tools per month to keep the site nice and clean and they sell out fast.

Thanks for checking out this week's Future Tools newsletter!

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow me over on Twitter and/or Threads as well, I like to share news and AI updates as they happen. :)

And don't forget to check out all of the newest tools we've just added on Future Tools!

Finally, if you have any feedback for me or ideas for this newsletter, get in touch! Replying to these emails will get to me and I will read all replies (but may not be able to reply to all). I want to improve this and continue to make it something that you're super excited about each week. So all ideas are welcome!

You rock! See ya next week. :)

Matt Wolfe (FutureTools.io)

P.S. This email was 95% written by a human. Claude checked my grammar for me.