Key employees, including cofounder, depart OpenAI

Read time: under 4 minutes

OpenAI’s lead seems to be evaporating quickly, as several key players head for the exit door and pressure mounts from all sides. We’ll also take a look at how leading AI products are solving the “blank page problem” successfully.

Today’s Insights

• Several key key figures depart OpenAI

• Successful AI products help users overcome the blank page

• Prompt: Generate roadmap ideas

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Perfume Packages

NEXT IN AI

Several key figures depart OpenAI, as pressure mounts

In a new plot twist at what is arguably the most important company in AI, several key figures are heading for the exit door:

• Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, is taking a sabbatical until the end of the year.

• Product leader Peter Deng is also leaving the company.

• Perhaps most worryingly for the company, cofounder John Schulman is heading to rival Anthropic.

This exodus follows a string of high-profile departures earlier this year:

• Cofounder Andrej Karpathy left in February.

• Jan Leike, who was leading the safety team, departed in May.

• Most notably, cofounder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever also left in May.

The departures come at an uncomfortable time for the company. OpenAI’s GPT-4o recently lost top spot on several key LLM benchmarks to rivals. The ChatGPT maker is also finding its business model under pressure from Meta's open-source AI strategy.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Early testers are raving about OpenAI's new voice feature, which could be the major technological leap for AI products.

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BUILDING WITH AI

Successful AI products are helping users overcome the blank page problem

The list of what makes an AI product successful is too long to cover in one email. But many of the most successful AI startups that have emerged in the current Gen AI wave have one thing in common: They help users solve the “blank page problem.“

Staring contest: The blank page problem refers to the anxiety and mental block many people face when starting a new project. You know what you want to do — you just don’t know how to begin. What should the title be? What should I write in the first line? You get the gist.

Many users face the same problem with AI apps. Sure, ChatGPT is amazing, but how do you actually create something with it? This is why ChatGPT — and many other AI apps — give you a list of things you can create with the app as soon as you log in (see picture above).

Zero to Hero: Helping users overcome the blank page and get to that ‘aha’ moment instantly is a major factor behind why other breakout AI apps like Gamma have succeeded. Gamma is an AI-powered presentation builder that has acquired over 20 million users in past year — an impressive feat.

Gamma succeeds because it doesn’t make new users figure out how to use the app. Instead of learning how to design slides or write entire presentations, Gamma simply lets new users create high quality presentations with a simple prompt (see image above).

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Generating Roadmap ideas

Prompt: I’m working for a product that’s [insert info about your product here, including possible competitors]. The product strategy is to [insert xyz here]. Give me a list of roadmap ideas aligned with this strategy.

EX: I’m working for a product that’s a direct competitor of Gong - the revenue intelligence tool. The product strategy is to become a data-driven sales insights platform by building a conversation bot on top of all the sales call recordings. This will allow sales managers to query the bot for information like “Who is closing the most this quarter and what insights can you give me from their calls?” or “Who is handling objections around [X] the best?”. Give me a list of roadmap ideas aligned with this strategy.

You can adapt the prompt to your specific needs.

_{Source: Aatir Abdul Rauf Substack}

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What’s the best LLM for RAG?

The latest LLM Hallucination Index ranks 22 of the leading models on performance across 3 different RAG tasks, evaluating for correctness of responses and propensity to hallucinate.

See which model ranks #1 (and why larger is not always better).

AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Chip Nemesis: California-based chip startup Groq raised $640M in a Series D funding round. The Nvidia competitor now has a $2.8B valuation.

• Change of Heart: After withdrawing a similar complaint earlier this year, Elon Musk filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing it has abandoned its original commitment to transparency. 

• Sounds Familiar: Meta is reportedly in talks with celebrities like Judi Dench and Awkwafina to license their voices for a new digital assistant called MetaAI.

• Back to the Drawing Board: Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chips are getting hit with a three-month delay due to a recently discovered design flaw.

🧠 Brain Food: The Emerging Technology Observatory found that Alphabet and Microsoft have more highly-cited AI research papers than any other tech companies. Chinese firms Baidu and Tencent, meanwhile, are in the lead when it comes to AI-related patents.

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AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Perfume Packages

Midjourney Prompts: 

A small crescent moon floating in the blue sky, a black square card-shaped perfume bottle resting on a stack of beige marble slabs, with flowers and grass growing on the sides and front.
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A photorealistic image taken with an a7m4 camera, featuring a simple and moody scene with a brown background similar in color to the wooden floor, soft studio lighting, three boxes stacked on top of each other, and a candle placed on the top box.
--ar 5:7 --v 6 --personalize wk7h11b

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🧞Your wish is my command

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team

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