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- The Sunday recap✨
Howdy, wizards.
⏪ I’m back with the Sunday recap – the executive summary version of What’s brewing in AI that quickly shows you the most important things that happened in AI this week.
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Here’s what brewed in AI this week.
THE SUNDAY RECAP — NEWS
THE LINKS YOU ENGAGED MOST WITH THIS WEEK
Anthropic launched a Mac & Windows desktop app for Claude. It sets the stage for future computer use capabilities, which lets Claude interact with your computer similar to a human – no launch date on that yet, though! The desktop app is available for free on their website.
They've also added two more features for Claude: Dictation on mobile (totally under-appreciated feature) and the ability to understand images within PDFs (on all devices).
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.
→ Read the full newsletter here
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a16z just mapped out the market for AI for parenting.
Raising kids is a big challenge, and while help is very much valued by parents, most families can’t afford the type of human help available (fertility specialists, sleep consultants, night nurses and nannies, you name it). AI is becoming a way to access 24/7, affordable support and guidance.
Here’s a couple of interesting players in each category:
Fertility & pregnancy: Soula (an AI assistant for female wellbeing) and Ava (AI-powered fertility tracking wearable)
Newborns and babies: nanit (AI-powered baby monitor that tracks sleep, breathing motion, & growth), nanniAI (“baby cry AI translator”), cradlewise (Intelligent bassinet and crib with a video and breath monitor).
Family & household management: ollie, Maple, Ario and duckbill. These are kind of like combined meal planning, shopping, to-do apps, powered by AI, that can analyse your family’s habits and make recommendations;
The thought of using AI to make parenting easier is very intriguing. Not sure any of these companies have truly found product market fit yet, but for those that eventually find it, the potential is huge.
→ For a more details and more companies to check out, read the full newsletter here or check out the original thesis/thread here.
Anthropic invited 200+ programmers for a hackathon this weekend together with venture cap firm Menlo ventures.
Here’s the winning ideas:
1st place: Using Claude with computer use to operate a robotic arm; trained by just uploading the instruction manual. Could potentially save a lot of costs on developing custom robotic behaviour across industries.
2nd place: Developing an “anti-captcha” that detects when Claude with computer use is being used to solve a verification puzzle. This one was my favourite, it targets a very important upcoming need in a world where AI can use a computer like a human.
3rd place: Improving PRDs via a multi-agent collaborative debate. It’s an agent that, in 1 minute, shows PRDs to different AI personas (UX lead, data scientist, finance manager and more), holds a debate between them to surface improvement suggestions, before aggregating the answers into complete requirements. Has the potential to bring powerful insights for product managers quickly.
→ Read the full newsletter here
DARIO’S PICKS
Sam Altman posted a tweet that they’ve acquired the domain chat.com, which now goes to ChatGPT when you visit.
The domain was acquired earlier this year by Dharmesh Shah – co-founder of Hubspot for a whooping $15.5 million. The sales price was undisclosed, but Shah left a prompt that lets the o1 model reason through what might’ve been the price. The prompt indicates he didn’t profit much from the sale, as he is friends with Sam Altman, is already “set”, but probably got OpenAI shares instead.
Leaving a prompt when you can't disclose the info is so 2024. Dharmesh Shah probably made little cash profit on the transaction itself, but instead got some strategic access to OpenAI. As for Sam Altman (aka mr money bags) he now got what is likely the simplest possible domain name for ChatGPT.
→ Read the full newsletter here
DARIO’S PICKS
Leading AI companies are racing to nuclear power for their data centers; Google’s efficient new reactors, Microsoft’s Three Mile Island plant and Amazon’s $650 million project in Pennsylvania.
Meta was about to join the party. The were close to a deal with a nuclear power plant operator, which would have made them the first company with nuclear-powered AI, but their plans got derailed by an unexpected player: a rare species of bees found at their chosen site.
Meta is now reportedly exploring other options.
Environment > Tech. We can live without Meta, but not without bees 🐝
→ Read the full newsletter here
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THE SUNDAY RECAP — REAL-WORLD USE CASES
MY BREAKDOWN OF THE MOST IMPACTFUL REAL-WORLD USE CASES OF AI
This week, I’ve broke down some new customer case studies from Anthropic, looking at how they used Claude and what they achieved.
🔧 Use case | 📈 Results |
|---|---|
Inscribe used Claude to automate fraud review and risk analysis. | Reduced fraud review time from 30 minutes to 90 seconds, and increasing loan application processing capacity by 70x. |
BlueFlame AI uses Claude to give small investment teams enterprise-grade analytical capabilities, allowing them to analyze a lot of document sets and get insights without needing in-house technical expertise. | Reduced document analysis time from 4+ hours to minutes and automated comparison of hundreds of companies simultaneously. |
Braintrust, an AI-powered recruitment platform, uses Claude for efficient talent matching. They use Claude 3.5 Sonnet in key features like AIR (AI Recruiter), which conducts initial screening interviews, and a job description generator that helps clients create compelling job postings. | 25% increase in job applicants for clients, and 50% of clients use their AI-generated job descriptions. |
Tabnine, AI coding assistant, uses Claude to improve developer productivity. Using Claude in Amazon Bedrock, Tabnine assists on common coding tasks like completions, debugging, test generation, refactoring, and code migration. | 20% increase in free-to-paid user conversions and 20-30% decrease in monthly customer churn. |
→ Read the full newsletter here
THAT’S ALL FOLKS!
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