🧙🏼 Perplexity for elections

Happy Monday, wizards.

AI watching us work is coming soon to a workplace near you. Here's Ethan Mollick trying it out with Claude 3.5, watching a construction site video (hallucinations included).

And here’s what’s brewing in AI today.

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1. Perplexity launches an election hub

Perplexity just rolled out an "election hub" - a dedicated space for election updates. It's built on Democracy Works' Elections API and pulls data directly from The Associated Press.

Users can ask anything from practical voting questions (like poll locations and ID requirements), to tracking election results and deep-diving into candidates' policies and endorsements. Perplexity is positioning it as an "entry point to understand key issues."

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Like any AI system, this needs to be watched carefully for hallucinations, especially given the topic – but I think it’s refreshing to see AI companies taking concrete steps toward serving more reliable answers and making it easier to stay informed. The key here is that they're not only letting AI go wild in interpreting election issues – they're pulling from a base of established, authoritative sources.

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2. Supercharged Amazon Alexa might be around the corner

Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy dropped a hint during their Q3 earnings call: they're "rearchitecting the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models" and will share it with customers "in the near future" (but didn’t give a specific launch date).

Announcements about this LLM-powered Alexa first came a year ago, but haven’t materialised so far.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The “new” assistants (ChatGPT et al) are racing ahead while the OGs Siri and Alexa are playing catch-up.

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3. Claude gets a desktop app & PDF image understanding

Anthropic’s Claude is coming closer to where most of us do our work: the desktop. While currently similar to the web experience – the desktop app really sets the stage for upcoming computer use capabilities, which lets Claude interact with your computer similar to a human – no launch date on that yet, though! The desktop app for Claude (both Mac and Windows) is available for free on their website.

They've also added two more features for Claude:

• Dictation on mobile (totally under-appreciated feature)

• The ability to understand images within PDFs (on all devices)

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ With desktop apps becoming table stakes for AI assistants—ChatGPT and Perplexity have already launched theirs—i’m not surprised to see Claude join the party. I think the most consequential of these updates is actually the image understanding for PDFs; many folks are using Claude to summarise information and this just takes the experience up a whole notch. There's also an ungodly number of PDF reader apps out there that could tap into this feature through Claude's API.

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