10X AI (Issue #1): StableLM, MiniGPT-4, AI Sketching Apps, and a Chupacabra

New Sunday segment on "Why Try AI," a bunch of AI-assisted sketching tools, recent AI announcements, Bing AI hacks, and a vintage text-to-image attempt gone wrong.

Happy Sunday!

After quite a bit of consideration, I decided to introduce a new weekly section to Why Try AI. (Don’t worry: You can easily turn off these Sunday updates if you want to continue only hearing from me once a week.)

Why the new segment?

Because there’s way too much AI stuff to cover. I wanted to make the newsletter more newsletter-y and make it even more useful to those looking for an extra dose of AI.

Your votes on my poll in the “Learn Prompting” post seem to bear this out:

The new “newsy” segment

The new weekly segment is called “10X AI” and will include 10 AI-related entries, split across the following topics:

• New AI developments

• Easy-to-use AI tools (ideally free)

• Try-it-at-home AI tips

• AI fails

All of the new entries will still be about consumer-level, beginner-friendly AI topics rather than broad industry perspectives and business-oriented platforms. Why Try AI very much remains focused on the average Joe and Jane.

The usual Thursday deep dives you all know and tolerate will continue as before.

How to opt in or out

If you prefer Why Try AI just the way it was and don’t want more stuff in your inbox, it’s very easy to opt out. Simply:

1. Go to your Why Try AI subscriber account.

2. Toggle the sections you want to receive (“Why Try AI” every Thursday, “10X AI” every Sunday):

And now, let’s dive right into the 10 AI things of this week.

AI news

Here are this week’s AI developments.

1. Google’s flurry of AI plans

Having launched Bard to unenthused yawns and shrugs, Google’s scrambling to catch up with its rivals in the race for consumer-facing AI.

Enter project Magi: a whole suite of features that should revolutionize the way you search with Google. Guess we’ll believe it when we see it?

2. Stability AI enters the LLM game

Stability AI made DALL-E fade into relative obscurity with their Stable Diffusion text-to-image model in September 2022.

Can they do the same to ChatGPT?

Almost certainly not, but they can absolutely offer an alternative.

Say hello to StableLM, an open-source large language model that can chat, code, etc. The current Alpha release is available in 3-billion-parameter and 7-billion-parameter flavors. Models with 15 billion and 65 billion parameters should soon follow.

Want to try a demo of the 7-billion Alpha version? Here you go.

3. MiniGPT-4 puts multimodality at our fingertips

Remember how OpenAI showcased some pretty jaw-dropping image interpretation capabilities of their new GPT-4 model?

And remember how they then immediately said, “Oh yeah, but, like, you guys can’t actually use this image input feature just yet”?

Good times!

Well, MiniGPT-4 is out, and it pretty much does what we’ve seen GPT-4 do:

Follow the link above the video to learn more about MiniGPT-4 and even try a functioning (but slowwwww) free demo:

AI tools

Here are this week’s AI tools. Today is all about sketching and doodling.

4. Scribble Diffusion

Scribble Diffusion is a way to quickly turn crude sketches into more polished images using text prompts. Simply doodle your subject, add your text input, and press go:

5. Scribble Dibble (iOS only for now)

Scribble Diddle does largely the same thing but is wrapped in a neat iOS interface.

So if you’ve got an iPhone or iPad handy, give it a whirl.

6. DoodleTale

This one’s shamelessly stolen from a recent round-up by Mariam of

AI Brews

.

DoodleTale offers kids a simple interface where they can compose a picture from dozens of predefined creatures and objects, then add their own doodles and colors.

But the actual AI magic kicks in when you click the “story” icon in the bottom right:

After waiting a bit, you’ll get a voice narration of a unique, AI-generated story based on your doodle:

There was more to the story than this static screenshot. In case that wasn’t clear.

The app is a work-in-progress, so you can’t buy story credits (or “licenses”) via the site itself yet.

But I reached out to the app’s developer—MariusS—on Twitter. He’s kindly handing out free licenses for 25 stories if you give him a shout:

So go and grab yours, especially if you have young kids at home. Enjoy!

7. Quick, Draw!

This one’s been around since 2016, well before the current AI craze. It’s a fun way to waste a few moments of your time.

“Quick, Draw!” is a mini-game by Google that has you trying to draw six random objects while AI attempts to guess what they are. Yup, it’s solitaire Pictionary, basically.

Why yes, I am proud of myself. Thanks for asking!

AI tips

Here are this week’s AI tips.

8. “Hack” Bing AI to accept way longer text inputs

Bing AI is currently the best way to access GPT-4 for free. But there’s one tiny issue: The input box is tiny. By default, it only accepts up to 2,000 characters:

…as long as that “anything” is max 2K characters

So forget about feeding Bing Chat long articles to summarize. Unless…you hack it.

Turns out you can override the default “maxlength” setting to increase the input limit.

Here’s an article explaining how to do it, but I’ve also recorded a quick 1-minute guide:

9. Reinvent classic board games with AI

Back in the day, before I discovered the joys of modern board games, I used to make up my own rules for traditional ones like chess. For instance, I’d introduce the randomness of a die and invent new moves and actions to turn chess into a luck-driven, tactical battle simulator.

So imagine my delight when I discovered that Bing AI can basically do that for me:

The full game rules (not playtested) are right here.

My prompt above is just a vague guide.

Pick any old games you have lying around and see what Bing can come up with.

(If you stumble into something especially cool, feel free to share!)

10. AI fail of the week

“Is that a chupacabra in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

Blooper from my most recent “Victorian Families and their strange pets” series

So what do you think?

How do you feel about the new weekly segment? The quick option is to vote here:

I’m even more happy to get detailed feedback and suggestions for improvement. Leave a comment on the site or shoot me an email (reply to this one).

That’s it for now, folks.

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!