Sunday Rundown #57: Figma AI & Mr. Potato Head
Sunday Bonus #17: Create interactive courses with Claude 3.5 Sonnet (for free)
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:
Sunday Rundown (free): I go through this week’s AI news and share an AI fail for your entertainment.
Sunday Bonus (paid): I offer my paid subscribers a goodie in the form of a guide, an AI tip, a walkthrough of a tool, etc.
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
Here are this week’s AI developments.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
Anthropic introduced Projects, letting Pro and Team users create organized workspaces with knowledge files and chats in one place.
Video startup Captions introduced a feature called AI Edit that can automatically add style, custom graphics, B-rolls, transitions, and more to your videos.
Character.ai users can now have Character Calls: voice calls with their preferred AI conversation partners.
ElevenLabs launched a Reader App that lets you listen to any text on the go.
Figma expanded its suite of AI features beyond last year’s Jambot to include AI-powered search, AI text and image editing, and more.
Google announced new releases including access to the 2-million token version of Gemini Pro 1.5 for developers, Gemma 2 in Google AI Studio, and more.
Meta AI open-sourced Meta LLM Compiler to help developers work more effectively with code optimization.
OpenAI launched a ChatGPT desktop app for MacOS that lets users chat about their files, screenshots, or anything on the screen.
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
OpenAI will likely only release its new Voice Mode (with real-time responses) later this fall to Plus users.
📖 AI resources
Helpful stuff that teaches you about AI:
“New AI tools for Google Workspace for Education” - an overview from Google about their AI-powered education tools.
“The Last 6 Decades of AI - and What Comes Next” - a TED talk by Ray Kurzweil
🔀 AI random
Other notable AI stories of the week:
Anthropic is adapting and expanding its AI offerings to government users.
OpenAI revealed a string of acquisitions, including a search and analytics database provider Rockset and collaboration platform Multi.
OpenAI also developed CriticGPT that can help trainers spot mistakes during the RLHF step of LLM training.
Stability AI has a new CEO, Prem Akkaraju, and secures additional funds from investors.
TIME magazine partnered up with two AI players: ElevenLabs and OpenAI.
🤦♂️ 10. AI fail of the week
Welcome to the future of double-monocles and french-fry heads (final version)
Anything to share?
Sadly, Substack doesn’t allow free subscribers to comment on posts with paid sections, but I am always open to your feedback. You can message me here:
💰 Sunday Bonus #17: Turn any material into an interactive course with Claude 3.5 Sonnet
One of the promises of generative AI is to help us better absorb new information and understand complex concepts.
If you’re like me, you’ve already tried the usual suspects:
“Explain this like I’m five.”
“Summarize this post.”
“Give me 5 key takeaways from this article.”
The problem with those is that they turn text into…even more text.
I like to get as hands-on as possible when learning new concepts.
That’s why, after some tinkering, I’ve come up with a way to get Claude to generate a simple interactive course out of whatever material you throw at it.
Claude’s new “Artifacts” window is seemingly made for just this task. Also, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free, so anyone can use this approach.
Below, I break the process down, share my initial one-shot prompt, and suggest some troubleshooting steps if Claude doesn’t get it right on the first try. (Claude’s free conversation length limit doesn’t allow for too many back-and-forth interactions, but I show you an easy way to work around this.)
Let’s roll!