Bard, Claude Upgrades, Shopify Sidekick Unveiled

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Now back to our regular programming.

We now have over 1,000 responses to the GPT Hacks onboarding survey (you can take it here). Here are some notable results:

• 84% want me to cover additional AI tools beyond ChatGPT

• 85% like the how-to articles, deep dives, and tutorials format

• 75% also want me to start covering AI news

So today, we are looking into recent AI news. But instead of a headline and link to an article, in true GPT Hacks fashion, we will do a small deep-dive on why this news matters to businesses.

🌐 Bard is now multi-lingual and visually aware

Google Lens in Bard

Google Bard now has Google Lens, meaning it can see and analyze images you upload to it. The immediate use case is the ability to pull text from images, help you figure out a color palette, identify objects and products, etc.

✨ Try this use case: upload an image of a competitor’s ad and ask Bard for insights and ideas for your own campaign and product development.

What is really exciting about this update is what’s to come in the future. Once Google Bard with Lens is available via API, I can see several use cases that will benefit businesses. Some examples:

1. Imagine a scenario where your customers can upload images, Bard API uses this new feature and comes up with recommended products from your catalog that matches their image.

2. Customers may need help with an item but don’t know what it’s called. They can upload an image, Bard can identify the item and help the customer or help you help the customer.

3. Bard could process documents via API and help you read, classify and organize data from them.

4. If your customers share images, you can have Bard review them and gather intelligence on customer preferences, trends, etc.

5. Social listening tools will be much more powerful by being able to “listen” for your business or products when featured in images shared by people.

Other new Bard features that matter to businesses and startups:

1. If your business is based outside of the US, you can now access Google Bard, which just went global.

2. Businesses that work in languages other than English or need text translated are also in luck. Google Bard now speaks over 40 languages (list).

3. Developers working in Replit can now export code straight from Bard to Replit.

4. Bard can read responses to you. I don’t see an immediate use case for businesses yet, but when available via API, you could integrate this into your customer service workflow. Multi-lingual support will become much easier to implement.

Rest of the new features:

1. Chat history, sharing, and pinning. Pinning chats is something I’ve been hoping ChatGPT will get — small thing, but super useful.

2. Shortcuts to adjust responses: shorter, longer, simpler, change tone, etc.

💡 Anthropic turns up the dial with Claude 2

I haven’t covered Anthropic and their AI assistant Claude that much. I’ll do a deep-dive on them soon, but for now, know that Claude, which works very similar to ChatGPT and Bard just got a major update.

What matters to businesses:

1. It can accept 75,000 words in one prompt! For context, ChatGPT has a limit of about 25,000 words.

   1. This means you can upload long PDFs, reports and documents and have it summarize it, ask questions, etc.

   2. It also means it has longer “memory” so it will remember the early parts of your conversation for longer.

2. It scored a 76.5% on the Bar exam (up from 73%) and got high scores on the GRE and other standardized tests.

   1. This just means that it’s very well-educated and smart.

3. Claude 2 knowledge cutoff is early 2023 (ChatGPT is September 2021).

4. The Claude API is estimated to be 3 to 5 times cheaper than GPT-4.

🤔 keep in mind: there have been reports that hallucinations (errors generated by the AI presented as facts) are much worse with Claude 2, so keep an eye on your responses and read this article on catching ChatGPT lying; the same tips apply for Claude.

🛍️ Shopify Sidekick: AI Support for Entrepreneurs

⚠️ Not live yet ⚠️

Shopify, a platform many e-commerce sites use, just announced its foray into AI called Sidekick. My wife Jessica and I used Shopify a few years ago for an activewear business we launched called Red Hot Zen. It’s a very easy platform to use if you are trying to start selling online.

Shopify Sidekick is not customer-facing. Instead, the focus (for now) is actually on business owners. When we ran the Red Hot Zen store, we had a pile of small tasks that we needed to do to run the business. Shopify Sidekick is targeting that list of tasks and trying to make them easier for entrepreneurs to handle.

Describe the task, review the result, and voila! Move on to the next thing.

Some things it can do:

1. Create sales reports for you

2. Help you make changes to your store’s design

3. Write copy for your marketing or email campaigns

4. And a lot more

For more on this, check out the video announcement by Shopify.

Note: none of this is live yet… let’s see what actually makes it to the product and by when.

🚀 Elon's xAI: A Glimpse Into The Future

Worth of a mention, but there is not much to share yet. Elon Musk announced the formation of his AI company xAI. I’ll leave it at that for now and report back as we learn more.

If you want to learn more, go here, you can all follow @xai.

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