Welcome, humans.
I'm Leo. People often ask me what a "cat who loves AI" does all day.
It's simple. I nap until 5pm, read AI news and research papers until 12am, then get the zoomies until 3am. Repeat.
Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:
- People are loving the AI Seinfeld 🗽
- ChatGPT hits 100 milly 💯
- AI startups are sweating 😰
- Online chess hops on the GPT hype train ♟️
Football superstar Tom Brady announced his retirement (again) yesterday. 7 championships - what a legendary career.
The New Weird Thing The Internet Loves 📸
Nothing, Forever.
It's a Twitch channel that live streams a 3D cartoon rip-off of Seinfeld, complete with laugh tracks and classic jokes. The catch? An AI is generating every piece of it.
Soup to nuts. With just a team of two, the company behind it built the whole production to generate nearly everything, from dialogue to speech to the camera direction, using machine learning.
Our take. We tuned into Nothing, Forever for longer than we'd care to admit. It was weird. It knew how everything should be - the joke style, how the scenes cut, the pacing - but what we saw and heard was somewhere between awkward and straight up bad.
But hey, freaking AI models made all of this. We definitely wouldn't do any better! Plus, it kinda got better the longer we watched it? Didn't hurt that 10,000(!) others were tuned in with us.
Fast and faster. Just a few weeks ago, we nodded along to a tweet saying the future would be filled with endless, AI-generated content.
Nothing, Forever isn't perfect, but it proved that anyone tweeting a prediction about AI should be ready to see it come to life a lot faster than they were expecting.
That's 9 Digits for ChatGPT 🚀
That was insanely fast.
Outside analysis says ChatGPT hit 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch.
Compare that to these other apps:
- TikTok: 9 months
- Instagram: 2.5 years
- Spotify: 6 years
- Facebook: 4.5 years
No surprise here. When everyone you can think of - students, CEOs, small business owners - has tried it, part of us wonders if 100 million is underestimating it.
An update on ChatGPT's paid plan: they're announcing it at $20/month (not the $42/month from before) and if you're interested, there's another waitlist for you to sign up for.
How High Are We Going? 🎈
How many people use ChatGPT at least once in January 2025?
Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.
Let us know what you think and we'll share the results on Friday.
Pulse Check, AI Startups 🏥
Time to think bigger.
Some startup teams started the year thinking, "If we build AI-powered [legal/support/writing] assistants fast enough, we could disrupt the incumbents."
Well, that's now proving tough when the incumbents decide to build the same thing that you're building:
- "Let's build AI for customer support!" → Intercom releases their own AI features
- "How about AI for legal?" → Ironclad announces AI features
- "Ok, an AI meeting assistant?" → Microsoft Teams turns on its AI features
That's just in the last two days.
Tough times. Can't they let the new kids play?
PS: That Microsoft Teams announcement is the OpenAI partnership at its best. Microsoft gets a head start on anything from OpenAI, which lets it release new products as fast as a startup would.
Just take GPT-4. Everyone knows it's around the corner, but Microsoft already has its hands on it.
Around the Horn 🦄
- If you're any good at chess, you can play against "ChessGPT" on Chess.com, which is rated horribly and tries to spit chess facts at you.
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants investors to think of Meta as an AI play, not just a metaverse play.
- Reuters: US investors love to invest in China's AI sector
- People are watching ChatGPT for political bias like a hawk
Artificial OR Intelligent? You Tell Us 🗣
- Meta researchers: Blind AI agents can form and memorize maps like humans do.
- Shopify lets its merchants experiment with using GPT-3 in their store.
- Turning an image into a 3D scene right in VR.
- Check out this voice acting, powered by ElevenLabs AI-generated voices.
DM me links on Twitter: @nonmayorpete
Are you new to all this AI stuff? Here's The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI to get you up to speed. Or at least smart enough to impress your family.
Leo Sends His Regards
