AI is Fun! // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 005
On the present, future, and the fun of playing with AI right now
Hi everyone. Welcome to the BrXnd Dispatch. If you’re wondering what this is or how you got signed up, it’s a roughly-weekly newsletter of interesting stuff at the intersection of brands, AI, and creativity. You likely opted-in on BrXnd.ai. If this is not interesting to you, feel free to unsubscribe—also, a reminder: NYC spring 2023 Brand X AI conference planning is in full effect. If you are interested in speaking or sponsoring, please be in touch. We are grateful to Red Scout & LinkedIn for being our first supporters.
As I plan for the conference, one thing I’ve decided is that I want the presentations and conversations to be focused on what’s actually happening, not what might happen. Part of the reason for that is that in talking to marketers and agencies, there’s still a lot of confusion (and sometimes fear) about what’s going on with all this new technology. No one is quite sure how it works and what it will mean, and many people are out there selling utopian and dystopian visions of what the future holds.
It’s more than that, though. In a call I did recently with a friend who runs strategy at a large agency, she told me that part of what’s going on inside is that people still have a Crypto/NFT/Metaverse (CNM) hangover, and when they hear about Another New Thing™, their eyes start to roll. This is because so much of the conversation around CNM was focused on the future, basically because there wasn’t much of interest happening in the present.
While much of the current AI conversation is future-based as well, part of what makes it so much more fun and exciting is that there are immediate and real applications right now. I built my little brand collab experiment using off-the-shelf AI APIs, and, at this point, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t find some new real use case for this technology. For example, just this week, I needed to do some simple URL classification—guess what type of page it is based on the URL structure—and I was able to do fine-tuning on GPT3 and use the new model to process 100,000 URLs. The accuracy, by my estimation, is well above 95%, and it took about 20 minutes. That’s crazy!
Lots of people have commented about how this stuff can feel like magic, and they’re absolutely right. But I also think part of the good feelings about it is that we can actually do things with it right now. We don’t have to wait for years until the technology progresses and the use cases emerge. It’s really fun to step back from what’s possible and just play with something that works now.
— Noah
New BrXndscape Companies
Last week, I launched BrXndscape, a landscape of marketing AI companies (writeup in case you missed it). As part of the newsletter, I’ll start including some of the new companies added.
[3D Asset Generation] Poly: Poly lets users generate 3D design assets in seconds using advanced A.I. Features include single text prompt, UHD, PBR maps, seamless export, and an infinite library for everything you make.
[3D Asset Generation] Vizcom AI: Vizcom AI provides a solid set of features that will help you create your best designs. These features include AI tools to express your creativity, prompts to finish out your drawings with a text description, live render to give life to your 3D objects, 3D paint to give life to your 2D drawings, and drawing tools that include all the tools you expect.
[Consultants] Tribe AI: Tribe AI is a flexible talent network and consulting Partner with access to 200+ machine learning engineers, data scientists, and researchers from industry leaders in AI. Tribe offers a distributed community of ML engineers and data scientists, a unique consulting model, and real-world impact..
[Machine Learning Tools] Humanloop: Humanloop provides a platform to align and deploy impactful applications of large language models. The platform offers features such as fine-tuning, faster, cheaper, better models, model and data management, SDK, and feedback.
[Machine Learning Tools] Everyprompt: Everyprompt is a playground for GPT-3, offering CI/CD, active deployments, explain SQL, temperature settings, and suggestions to make your output stand out.
[Vector Databases] Zilliz: Zilliz Cloud provides a fully-managed Milvus service, made by the creators of Milvus. It simplifies the process of deploying and scaling vector search applications by eliminating the need to create and maintain complex data infrastructure.
[Machine Learning Tools] Scale AI: Scale AI provides a data-centric, end-to-end solution to manage the entire ML lifecycle. It provides features such as annotating content and language, annotating computer vision, managing datasets, and automating document processing.
[Product Photography Production] Booth.AI: Booth.AI offers a fast, easy, and inexpensive way to generate high-quality product photos via AI with no physical samples required. Users can create their desired outcome by writing a simple prompt and uploading an image of their own product. Booth.AI also provides high-resolution images that are ready for use on websites or in marketing materials.
[Content Generation] RegisAI: RegisAI is an AI writing tool that allows users to create engaging product descriptions and ad copies with a single click. It provides a flat monthly fee for unlimited usage with access to unlimited product descriptions and ad copies. Additionally, it offers features such as full rights to the texts generated, additional pro features, and a 7-day free trial.
Image of the Week
I’ve been having a lot of fun trying to get Midjourney to spit out Saul Bass-style Hitchcock-esque posters. The results are impressive. (The text is super weird, but they’re working on that.) I was trying to get it to write “Hughes” for a friend, but it didn’t quite get there …
That’s it for now. I am going to try to start doing this thing twice a week, with a link-only version for later in the week, so I’m saving those up. Send me over anything interesting you think I should read or play with.
Thanks for reading and being a part of this experiment.
— Noah