- What's brewing in AI
- Posts
- The Sunday recap✨
Howdy, wizards.
⏪ I’m back with the Sunday recap, a distillation of only the most impactful things that happened in the world of AI this week.
🤷🏻♂️ Don’t need the Sunday recap? You can update your subscriber preferences at the end of this email to pick what emails you’d like to receive.
Let’s dive right into it.
THE SUNDAY RECAP — NEWS
THE LINKS YOU ENGAGED MOST WITH THIS WEEK
1. ChatGPT’s new features: web search, chat history, AVM on desktop
OpenAI went on a shipping-spree this week, launching several amazing new features.
ChatGPT just got a way better web search. We’re talking up-to-date answers with relevant sources cited. It allows you to search the web by chatting, and remembers the context when you ask follow-up questions. AI search is unlikely to overtake Google search anytime soon though; it still hallucinates and is overconfident when faced with ambiguity. This might change over time, though – one thing OpenAI says they’re working on to improve the search feature is leveraging the o1-models reasoning capabilities. → Read the full newsletter here.
ChatGPT now has searchable chat history. OpenAI announced one of its most requested ChatGPT features: the ability to search through your chat history. Uses local indexing and is quite fast. It’s available in the upper left corner of your ChatGPT interface, next to where you click to start a new chat. fingers crossed for some folders to organize chats next. → Read the full newsletter here.
ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode is now available on desktop. OpenAI announced that Advanced Voice Mode has now arrived to the ChatGPT desktop app. It works as a floating window on your screen, so you can interact with other apps while using it. Tested it for a bit and really like it but – the real power from this will be when it is combined with vision + computer use-type capabilities. → Read the full newsletter here.
TOGETHER WITH PODPITCH
Want to become more well known in your field? It's now up to YOU whether or not you want to build an audience.
Thousands of professionals are doing it the easy way – and it really works.
The secret is appearing on dozens of podcasts that your audience already loves.
You could manually write a few emails yourself to podcast hosts…
Or you could automate thousands of personalized emails going out weekly, pitching yourself as the PERFECT next podcast guest.
With PodPitch.com...
Log in with your email
Paste in info about yourself
Click "automate"
Hundreds (or thousands) of emails pitching yourself as the perfect next guest will start sending out automatically to podcast hosts.
Founders big and small (like Angie from Angie's List!) are already using PodPitch instead of expensive PR Agencies.
Get your FREE personalized demo at PodPitch.com/Brew! Get free Starbucks if you don't love the demo.
Source: Reddit / DALL-E
Key execs from OpenAI did an AMA on Reddit this week, including Sam Altman (CEO) and 4 others. They just spilled a lot of tea about their strategic priorities. Some key insights:
👀 Sam Altman believes AGI is achievable with current hardware. He also confirmed they have some “very good releases” coming later this year, but no new model that will be called GPT-5, though – the team is prioritising o1 and its successors.
A underutilized use case is uploading personal knowledge (course notes, travel recommendations, etc) to a custom GPT for others to use.
Sam Altman seems generally positive about applications of ChatGPT as a therapist. His favourite ChatGPT use case? Stories of people using ChatGPT to find causes of a debilitating disease.
Best way to get AI skills? Use it for everything.
Q: “What did Ilya see?” A: “the transcendent future”.
→ A bunch of more insights in the full newsletter here
Perplexity is transforming the way they show answers to sports-related queries, giving their user interface AI superpowers. When prompted with questions about sports, Perplexity will give you a sexy dashboard with game summaries, stats, and comparisons across players and teams. So far it’s only NFL that’s supported but NBA, EPL, La Liga, Champions League and more are coming soon.
→ Read the full newsletter here
Meta is reportedly also developing a search engine that does “conversational answers” to queries, similar to Google’s AI overviews and now also ChatGPT Search. The goal is to reduce its reliance on Google and Microsoft for providing these answers to its users through it’s Meta AI chatbot. No launch date yet. With Google and OpenAI recently expanding their AI search capabilities, it’s no wonder Meta—with its AI infra, distribution and financial means to be doing crawling at that scale—is also jumping into the search game.
→ Read the full newsletter here
Wharton and GBK collective just published a detailed report on how businesses are adopting Gen AI, based on a longitudinal study of over 800 senior leaders. Weekly Gen AI usage was at 72% in 2024 (up from 37% in 2023), and is especially used in departments like Marketing and HR. Gen AI shines in tasks like data analysis and contract drafting, but is still far from a game-changer for all business functions. Check out the report here: Executive summary | Full report
→ Read the full newsletter here
THE SUNDAY RECAP — REAL-WORLD USE CASES
MY BREAKDOWN OF THE MOST IMPACTFUL REAL-WORLD USE CASES OF AI
This week, I’ve taken a look at how SaaS companies are using AI models to power up their workflows and products. From making their product more useful to customers to super-empowering their non-technical teams internally – SaaS companies are embracing AI across their operations.
Here’s 4 fresh examples:
Microsoft utilizes Copilot and the new autonomous agents internally across sales, customer support, marketing, and HR departments. Sales use Copilot to power insights and automate routine tasks, achieving 20% more deals. Customer support resolves cases nearly 12% faster, marketing saw a 21.5% increase in conversion rates with a custom agent assisting buyers, and HR improved answer accuracy by 42% with an employee self-service agent.
Notion uses Claude to improve its product, offering AI features like Q&A, autofill, and writing assistance. The features have saved Remote.com 10 minutes per search across 300 queries daily and dbt Labs, it eliminated the need for additional AI tools saving over $35k annually.
Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for digital creators, uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet to enable customer support teams to fix issues with code and contribute to product development. This has led to a 300% increase in feature shipping, faster feature deployment, and reduced context switching for engineers. Claude assists them in writing code, locating files, and resolving customer issues.
Zoom collaborates with Perplexity to enhance its AI Companion by integrating multiple AI models, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, to provide richer insights during Zoom calls. The AI Companion 2.0 understands user workflows and tracking tasks, in addition to meeting summaries.
→ Read the full newsletter here
RECOMMENDED
Love Hacker News but don’t have the time to read it every day?
THAT’S ALL FOLKS!
 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Want to get in front of 13,000 AI enthusiasts? Work with me. This newsletter is written & curated by Dario Chincha. |
What's your verdict on today's email? |
Affiliate disclosure: To cover the cost of my email software and the time I spend writing this newsletter, I sometimes link to products and other newsletters. Please assume these are affiliate links. If you choose to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a product through any of my links then THANK YOU – it will make it possible for me to continue to do this.