Alphabet and Meta clap back

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It’s panning out to be a photo finish. As we reach the end of the year, Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI are each vying for the top spot, and it’s anyone’s guess who might come out ahead.

P.S. We’re rolling out a new Markets & Funding section in the newsletter today, to give you a quick financial snapshot of what’s happening in AI and Tech. Let us know if you’d like us to continue it in the poll at the bottom of today’s newsletter.

Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: OpenAI lets you build a custom o1 and Copilot goes agentic

• Tutorial: How to research and write blog posts with AI

• Alphabet and Meta drop new models

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

MARKETS & FUNDING

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 12:00AM ET.

📈 Markets: An optimistic jobs report led to gains in both the Nasdaq and S&P 500. But unemployment rose to 4.2%, suggesting the Fed could slash interest rates later this month. TSLA is also on a tear, as its share price gets closer to all-time highs.

💰️ Funding: Elon Musk’s xAI closed a $6B funding round that values the startup at close to $50B. The news comes as xAI announced plans to give anyone with an X account access to its Grok chatbot. Meanwhile, AMO Robotics landed $91M to build out its AI-powered recycling program.

TODAY IN AI

1. OpenAI will soon let developers build custom models based off of o1: Programmers are in for a treat early next year. In its latest “12 Days” livestream, OpenAI announced it’s introducing reinforcement fine-tuning for o1 — essentially letting coders build their own spin-off apps with reasoning capabilities.

• The training technique helps models learn new lines of thinking over time, eventually letting them solve problems that never appeared in their training data

• It works by giving models a grade for each of their outputs, incentivizing them to make better decisions the next time around

• Thomson Reuters is already using the approach to develop an AI legal assistant — while the Berkeley Lab is working on a platform that can spot genetic irregularities that lead to rare diseases

2. Microsoft launches feature that lets AI see what’s on your screen: Copilot Pro subscribers are getting their first taste of agentic AI. Microsoft’s new Copilot Vision feature can see what’s on your screen, letting you “talk through the problem you’re facing” alongside an AI assistant. The preview build is only compatible with certain websites for now, but it’ll eventually be able to navigate the internet on its own.

PRESENTED BY TAPLIO

How Our Co-Founder Uses AI To Create Trending Posts on LinkedIn

Superhuman co-founder Awais has 145k+ followers on LinkedIn, partly because he uses a tool called Taplio to create high-performing posts.

To create viral content on LinkedIn, you first need to find which content is performing:

1. Go to the Taplio website and sign up for a free trial

2. Once you're logged in, click on “Viral Content” on the left sidebar

3. Browse trending posts and apply filters to spark your own ideas

Then, it’s time to write + enhance your post with Taplio’s AI assistant:

1. Click “Write A Post” on the left sidebar

2. Write the whole post–or just a line–and click on the purple bolt icon

3. Select from the drop-down menu to automatically generate the rest of the post, improve your writing, and more

Finally, click “Add To Queue” to schedule, and you're done!

(P.S. - Get Taplio for one month for just $1, with the code SH1 at checkout. Valid only for 72h)

THE AI ACADEMY

How to research and write blog posts with AI in 2 mins

• Go to Superhuman Sidekik and sign up with your account.

• Now click on Blog Generator and write in your prompt.

Sample prompt: ‘Write a newsletter story about Amazon’s new AI model’

• Select the word count and style of your blog and click on Generate.

• You’ll get your customized blog ready. You can see all sources by clicking on the Search Sources button.

• Copy your text to use it. You can clear it and restart it to generate another blog post. Or select another style and click on Regenerate.

The best thing about Sidekik is that it searches the internet to find sources and write the stories for you instead of you having to manually do the research, which can often take hours.

FROM THE FRONTIER

A big day for model releases

The hits just keep on coming. A day after OpenAI released the full version of o1, Meta and Alphabet countered with their own state-of-the-art models.

First up, Llama can now do more with less: Version 3.3 performs as well as its 405B predecessor, but with only 70B parameters under the hood. That “makes it even more accessible to the entire open source community,” head of GenAI Ahmad Al-Dahle said. The new model could help developers use as much as 24 times less GPU load.

Alphabet isn’t missing out on the fun: In time for its foundation model’s first anniversary, the tech giant dropped yet another experimental version of Gemini. It immediately jumped to the top of the Chatbot Arena, which pits the industry’s top LLMs against each other. In fact, it swept the board, either beating or tying rivals like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 in every category, from coding to math to creative writing.

As the year draws to a close, the question remains: Will OpenAI really give its rivals the final word?

PRESENTED BY BAMBOOHR

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🎧 Signal Boost: ElevenLabs is expanding its new podcasting tool, GenFM, to not only let you create AI-generated podcasts with uploaded documents but also publish and monetize them.

🔍 Advanced Search: Unreleased code suggests Alphabet’s search function could soon go multimodal on Androids, letting you upload images or use your voice to ask questions.

♾️ Infinite Options: Text-to-image platform Leonardo AI unveiled a new feature that lets you pick from a “nearly endless” stream of generations based on a single prompt, then refine them on the fly.

🎥 Cinematic Sync: Meta is teaming up with Avatar director James Cameron’s startup Lightstorm Vision to bring more interactive experiences — including concerts, games, and live sports — to its mixed-reality Quest headset.

☔ Dashed Hopes: A US appellate court ruled that TikTok is still on the hook to either sell its US division or shutter it altogether. Next, the media platform will likely try bringing its case before the Supreme Court.

👽 Out Of This World: A startup called Light Field Lab launched a new display that can project 10B pixels per square meter, helping companies build more immersive holographic experiences. The startup’s latest demo, a collaboration with the SETI Institute, takes you inside a fictionalized replica of Area 51.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ PracticeRun: Practice screening interviews with the most advanced real-time speech-to-speech AI.

✅ Waveloom: Simplify your AI stack from models to infrastructure with a visual, scalable, easy-to-use platform.

✅ Rewritify: An AI writer that humanizes AI-generated text into natural, authentic content.

✅ Zencoder: An agent that empowers developers to ship products faster by deeply understanding your code base and automating multi-step tasks.

✅ Accento: Generate engaging LinkedIn posts, schedule your content, and grow your professional network effortlessly.

^{* indicates a promoted tool, if any}

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Web Development

Prompt: I’m making a website for a small business [Business description]. I need ideas on how to structure the website using WordPress.

_{Source: WriteSonic}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Midjourney Quiz

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team