The art of prompt engineering 🎨

ALSO: Automate your calendar with AI

Read time: under 4 minutes

Welcome back, Superhuman

The AI industry has a new math prodigy, but it’s not from the usual tech hotspots. Find out why international models are starting to catch up to their Silicon Valley peers. Plus, learn how to automate your calendar with AI.

Today’s Insights

  • International AI startups are making their mark

  • Tutorial: Automate your calendar with AI

  • A platform that can help you craft the perfect prompt

  • Everything else you should know today

  • 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

  • AI-Generated Images: Food design

NEXT IN AI

International AI firms are catching up to their Silicon Valley peers

If the world’s top AI models sat down to take a math test together, you might expect GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet to walk away with the best grade. Instead, an unassuming student — Alibaba’s Qwen2-Math — has just surprised the class valedictorians, snatching the top score

The 72B parameter version of Qwen2-Math, developed by China’s e-commerce giant, scored an 84% on the MATH benchmark, which tests LLMs on 12,500 competition-level math problems. Alibaba says it beats state-of-the-art LLMs, including Meta’s latest Llama model. 

Qwen2-Math proves international LLMs are getting more sophisticated, especially when it comes to specialized tasks. It means that US-based companies now have to outpace not only their Silicon Valley rivals — but also emerging AI startups worldwide.

Other recent AI innovations abroad:

  • Researchers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University developed the world’s first AI chip that’s powered entirely by light; it’s said to be more than 1,000 times more efficient than Nvidia’s industry-leading H100 GPU

  • LG just released Exaone 3.0, South Korea’s first open-source model; it features natural language processing, which startups can use to develop their own customer service or virtual assistant platforms in both English and Korean 

While those advancements are exciting, it can still be hard to access LLMs developed abroad: Things like data regulations and technical compatibility issues can make using foreign models an energy-intensive process. To bridge this gap, companies like Snowflake are working on new tools that help startups seamlessly switch between different models — no matter which country they were developed in.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to automate your Calendar using AI

  • Go to Reclaim AI’s website and sign in with your Google account. It will automatically get synchronized with your calendar.

  • Now select some habits from the list that are relevant to you.

  • Select how much buffer time you need between each meeting.

  • Click on Planner on the left and Reclaim AI will optimize your entire calendar and events to give you the most effective schedule.

  • You can add habits, tasks, buffer time, sync calendars, auto-schedule meetings, and much more.

AI & PROMPT ENGINEERING

Character AI wants to make prompting more accessible

Source: Character AI

Nowhere has the old adage “you get out what you put in” been more true than in the field of AI. LLMs are powerful platforms, but they’re worthless if you don’t know how to use them — a little like stepping behind the wheel of a Lamborghini but only reaching a top speed of 25 mph.

An entire subfield has sprung up alongside the AI industry to address that predicament. Prompt engineering involves crafting the perfect query to get the most accurate, comprehensive response. Character AI recently developed a platform called Prompt Poet that aims to make the process more accessible. (And now that Google has licensed Character’s AI tools, it’ll be able to put the tool to use as well.)

Here’s how it works:

  • Prompt Poet combines two technologies called YAML and Jinja2, which organize data into templates that can be further customized across different variables

  • It can automatically cut out unnecessary data to make the process faster and more energy-efficient

  • Instead of having to come up with a new prompt each time, you can create a base prompt, then easily tweak it to match your needs

  • For example, if you’re developing a customer service chatbot, you can program it to react differently depending on whether it’s interacting with a new or returning client

It can take hours to come up with a good prompt — or even longer for more complicated tasks, like building an app or analyzing sales data. Prompt engineering had until recently been an elaborate science, only understood by a select few insiders. Prompt Poet is one step toward more accessible AI platforms that help even non-experts perform complicated tasks.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

Source: DALL-E 3

  • Glean’s Gain: Glean, which builds AI-powered search platforms for companies, appears set to raise $250M in a Series D funding round that values the startup at $4.5B.

  • Cable Saver: Verizon is introducing an AI system that can analyze millions of dig requests to alert construction workers and homeowners when they’re at risk of accidentally damaging its fiber internet lines.

  • Gaining Steam: AI search engine Perplexity answered 250 million queries in July, compared with 500 million across the entire year of 2023 — a figure that illustrates the platform’s growing popularity.

  • Art for All: All ChatGPT users will now have the chance to generate up to two images per day with DALL-E 3, a tool that was previously only accessible to paid subscribers.

🧠 Brain Food: An international team of AI researchers has developed an LLM called ChatMusician that can interpret “humanity’s creative language.” As the name suggests, the model is an expert at understanding and generating musical notation, melodies, and scales.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

âś… Minvo: AI-powered video editing and social media intelligence for podcasts, live streams, and more.

âś… Napkin: Turn your text into visuals to quickly and effectively share your ideas.

âś… Bardeen: An AI agent that effortlessly does your repetitive work with a simple prompt.

âś… MinusX: A Chrome Extension that acts as an AI data scientist and operates your analytics apps for you.

âś… Spreadsite: Turn spreadsheets into interactive dashboards with AI — no coding required.

PS: Want more? Check out our Top 100 AI Tools.

* indicates a promoted tool, if any

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Welcome email series

Prompt: Develop a comprehensive welcome email series for new customers, spanning multiple emails. Ensure each email provides unique value, such as a guide to using [your product or service], explaining [your exclusive offers], and a personal touch to build a lasting connection.

You can adapt the prompt to your specific needs.

Source: Sendboard

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Food Design

Source: Inspired by @regettajos on Midjourney

Midjourney Prompt: minimalist photo of [insert food here, like cheeseburger] ingredients flying, flat yellow background
--ar 3:4 --v 6.1

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team

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