AI round-up: Week of July 7
“Whatever. Make me a bicycle, clown!”
Ah, one of my favorite lines from Wedding Crashers.
If you’re not familiar, Vince Vaughn is trying to impress at a wedding he and Owen Wilson crashed. So naturally, he starts doing balloon animals. One bratty kid demands a bicycle; after trying to talk the kid into something easier, the kid yells…you guessed…make me a bicycle clown.
I kind of feel like we’re doing that to AI these days. Make me a list of the lowest-paid teams in baseball. Write me a nasty letter I can send to the cheap owner of a baseball team. What is the longest losing streak in Cleveland baseball history?
You get the point (both of them, hopefully). If you’re being honest with yourself, you do this sometimes. I do. It’s like texting a friend to ask a question, getting the answer and not going back to say thank you. Meanwhile, your friend is like ‘where’d ya go?’.
Are we doing the same thing with AI? And does it matter? Should it? Will it ever matter?
Like I said last edition…I don’t think our brains were meant to process this. So, I posed that question to Claude/Anthropic:
I know we’ve talked about this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting once in a while as the technology changes.
Short edition covering this week and last, as I have hit the summer vacation part of my year. Last week I skipped out for a few days with a group of friends I’ve had since elementary school. Next week I’ll be enjoying some time off with family.
10 stories -- Let’s get to it.
Story 1: “Boy, that escalated quickly.”
We are less than three years removed from the launch of ChatGPT. And are now seeing whole service sectors openly talking about how they favor AI as their entry-level employee of choice. (Source: Accountancy Age)
Story 2: Videos. Yeah, they’re getting scary good.
Within this Metro article on the overall state of just how good generative AI videos are is this amazing idea of turning a picture into a short video clip. (More on this in story 8.)
Story 3: Which workers will AI hurt the most: the young or the experienced?
The answer, Conor Grennan says, is neither. Both. And it doesn’t matter. Because without AI alignment around how it should be/could be used within an organization, every worker could be impacted.
So, what should leaders do right now? I’m guessing his recommendation won’t surprise you…
Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft are partnering with the American Federation of Teachers to form an AI academy designed to bring AI into the classroom.
Story 5: Time to pay the publishers?
Cloudflare, the internet architecture provider (for about 25% of the Internet) is rolling out a pay per crawl program that will block AI companies from scraping their sites. Publishers will be given the option to charge a fee.
Seems like a great move, right? Yes, it is. However, since those AI bots crawl sites for information as it pertains to search…is that limiting how findable you could be? Something to keep an eye on. (The Verge)
Story 6: Meta taking talent. Taking work from agencies. And now taking water.
There were so many stories/headlines to choose from with Meta…but we will go with The New York Times piece on how building data centers to accelerate AI is causing water shortages for nearby residents.
Story 7: Can’t spell ‘financial planner’ without A and I.
I’m starting to realize there are a lot of words you can’t spell without those two letters. Anyway, Anthropic has released Claude for Financial Services (rolls right off the tongue) – a tool designed to court the financial markets by aiding in research, advising and more. (Bloomberg)
Story 8: Veo3 can turn a boring image into a cool video.
Because why not?!?
Ok, this is cool. Check out the TechCrunch read for a sample that is pretty incredible. Question: what uses will you have for this?
Story 9: Claude and Canva – your new design team?
Canva now allows you to create, edit, size, manage (and more) your designs thanks to Claude. You can leverage Canva through Claude and tap directly into both (using paid subscriptions) to essentially create visual components. (The Verge)
Last but not least…this one is big.
Story 10: Turns out Google is drinking publishers’ milkshakes: AI summaries are now live, everywhere.
What’s the worst that could happen? Well, we’re seeing it right in front of our eyes. Search traffic is down. (15% YoY as of June) But zero-click search queries to news sites are up. They went to 56% last May when AI Overviews appeared on the scene. They are now at 65%. Meaning…more people are relying on the AI-generated search results for their news.
Meaning… if you’re not talking about (or with us) about your AEO strategy (v. your SEO strategy)…it’s time. As in right now.
(Seriously. We should talk.)
-Ben
As a reminder, this is a round-up of the biggest stories, often hitting multiple newsletters I receive/review. The sources are many … which I’m happy to read on your behalf. Let me know if there’s one you’d like me to track or have questions about a topic you’re not seeing here.