Hey all! Every day AI changes the world a little bit more, but don't worry I'm here to keep you in the loop.
I spent the entire day yesterday working on a new product we're releasing at Octane AI soon (except for an hour where I worked on putting new drapes up in the baby room).
The baby gets here any day now!
In the meantime... Here's some new tasty AI tidbits I came across.
π Mattβs AI Highlights
1. Are chatbots the future of online shopping?β
"Conversational commerce" was coined by Chris Messina back in the last AI and chatbot craze of 2015.
The prediction was that people would start to gravitate towards shopping in chatbot conversations with brands instead of shopping while browsing a website. Why search when you could talk?
And it did happen... or at least it started to. I actually started my company Octane AI in 2016 to power these conversational commerce experiences for brands. We started with chatbots, but the AI wasn't good enough, and then we adapted to power conversational product quizzes (now used by thousands of businesses).
But now, 7 years later, AI is leaps and bounds better. Conversational commerce is a hot topic again and this time I think it's going to happen for real.
It's almost a matter of time before you can talk to an intelligent bot for any purpose.
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β2. AI models are starting to look freakishly realβ
You can generate images with tools like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dall-e, and people are using it for all sorts of use cases (product photography, presentations, blog posts, etc).
One of the more interesting use cases is generating fake (digital?) influencers with social media accounts.
Danny Postma, who previously sold his startup to AI unicorn Jasper, has been working on an AI persona called Ailice. Content is generated by AI, the community votes on which images they like the most, and those images are then posted to Ailice's Instagram account.
It is wild.
Excited to see where Danny takes this technology.
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β3. Creators are starting to use astounding AI video softwareβ
Runway, an AI startup with more than $100mil in funding, has been rolling out its new video AI software to creators "Gen-1".
And it looks fascinating.
It allows you to take one video and then apply a new style on top of it simply by telling the AI what it should look like (a prompt).
In this example from Karen Cheng, an innovative AI creator, she takes a computer mouse with bottle caps for wheels and uses the AI to turn it into a car driving down the road.
Basically you can shoot a video that LOOKS like a low budget version of something and then have the AI turn it into something that looks high quality and real. This technology could also be used to change the overall style of a video, maybe you shoot something on your iPhone and then have the AI turn it into anime.
I can't wait to see how people use this.
If you want to experiment yourself, sign up for early access to Runway's Gen-1 here.
Thanks for reading!
Have a question or response? Reply! I'd love to hear from you.
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