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Welcome back, Superhuman
Google’s new release shows us the power of a small but mighty model. Plus, a new AI pendant wants to be your hype man, life coach, and close friend all at once. Can it break the wearables curse?
Today’s Insights
AI consultancies are here to stay
An AI device designed for friendship
Tutorial: Using AuraSR to upscale images
5 new AI tools to boost your productivity
Google introduces Gemma 2 2B
AI-Generated Images: Back to school
NEXT IN AI
Why business is booming for AI consultancies
If you had to guess, which AI company do you think brings in the most revenue each quarter? OpenAI, Midjourney, or Anthropic would all be fair guesses. But it turns out consulting firms might be the biggest winners of the AI boom.
Consulting heavyweight Accenture secured an estimated $3.6 billion in GenAI contracts and agreements this past year. Compare that to OpenAI, which brought in slightly less revenue — and is expected to lose about $5 billion this year alone.
Why are consulting firms winning the AI race? For one, businesses are overwhelmed by the number of AI products available. Do you go with a closed or open source model? How do you integrate proprietary stats to get the most out of your data? And how do you comply with regulations and ensure safety and security? Those decisions can cripple a company that’s not already well-versed in LLMs — and hiring an AI strategist can often be the most practical solution.
A changing landscape:
Even traditional consultancies are starting to pivot to AI
By 2026, generative AI projects are expected to make up 40% of revenue for Boston Consulting Group — one of the Big Three strategy firms
Those services are growing more niche by the day, as businesses of all stripes start to recognize the importance of incorporating AI into their workflow
Some experts believe that service businesses that leverage both AI and humans to deliver outcomes to customers are poised to come out on top.
As the market grows, new firms are entering the space and catering to emerging niches. For instance, a new consulting firm called FutureSight was recently launched by serial entrepreneur Hassan Bhatti*, who has built two enterprise AI companies. His team has worked at or with companies like Snowflake, Microsoft, and Meta.
“Traditional consulting firms bring a lot of benefits, but they may not be the best fit for every company. We believe many companies want to work directly with domain experts and practitioners in AI to reap the benefits of Gen AI within their companies, and that’s where we can be most helpful,” Bhatti explained. He added that there are “a lot of lucrative opportunities for companies that can couple software and services in this AI era.”
*Disclosure: Hassan Bhatti is also a founding member of Superhuman AI
PRESENTED BY GUIDDE
How to make remote training videos instantly with AI
Need to make a How-To, onboarding, or customer education video ASAP–with no budget?
Click the browser icon to record your task, or upload a PDF/video
Guidde automatically creates a professional How-To video
Edit the narration (100+ voices), choose from 35 languages, or blur out sensitive information
Share it everywhere your team or customers are
Guidde also tracks engagement analytics to know when users stop watching, so you can optimize and keep your video up to date.
AI & DEVICES
An AI device designed for friendship
Source: Friend
It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. A video for a new AI wearable, Friend, opens with a woman hiking alone through the wilderness. Except, we learn she’s not actually alone. Her AI companion, a glowing pendant attached to her necklace, has been with her the entire time.
The clip, accompanied by an eerie synth soundtrack, envisions a future where we spend as much time interacting with AI models as we do real-life humans. While that reality might seem far off, the Friend pendant might just be society’s first step in that direction.
Here’s how it works: The Claude 3.5-powered device “experiences” everything you do, then sends you messages related to what’s going on in your life. You can also touch or hold it to ask questions or seek advice (i.e. helping you prep for an awkward conversation or deconstructing your favorite TV show). “When connected via Bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts,” the startup’s website reads. “We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”
A different approach to wearables: For his part, founder Avi Schiffmann claims the wearable is different than its rivals. While most AI tools are geared toward productivity — helping you complete tasks more efficiently — Friend is designed to simply keep you company.
How’s the internet reacting? Many were left wondering whether Friend was ‘Black Mirror' IRL…and whether AI had finally gone too far. Also worth noting, AI gadgets are already off to a rocky start. Critics offered scathing reviews of Rabbit's R1 and Humane's AI pin. Whether Friend can live up to already astronomical expectations remains to be seen. Especially now that Schiffmann spent most of the company’s funds on buying the domain name.
THE AI ACADEMY
How to upscale your images using AuraSR
Go to Fal AI’s website and click on Model Gallery to access all models.
Now select AuraSR from the list.
Upload your blurry image and click on run button at the bottom.
Wait for a few seconds and your image will be upscaled to HD quality.
You can preview or download the image to share it with others.
Want to master AI and future-proof your skills? Access 100+ courses and tutorials at our AI Academy
PRESENTED BY SPINACH
How to Automate Project Management with AI
Backed by Zoom, Atlassian, and Y Combinator, Spinach AI automates meeting tasks to save you hours each week:
Create a free Spinach account.
Connect your work calendar and select the meetings you want Spinach to help with
Spinach will join the meeting
Once the meeting ends, Spinach will instantly share notes, assign action items, and draft tickets/tasks to add to your board
NEW LLM ON THE BLOCK
More parameters, more problems? Gemma 2 2B thinks so.
Source: Google
Bigger isn’t always better. DeepMind just introduced Gemma 2 2B, a compact AI model that's proving just that. With just 2.6 billion parameters, it outperforms much larger counterparts, like GPT-3.5 and Mixtral-8x7B, in the LMSYS chatbot arena rankings. It also beats the previous version (Gemma 1 2B) by more than 10% in benchmarks.
Gemma 2 2B’s release wasn’t the only update to the Gemma family. Here are other newcomers, according to an official blog post:
ShieldGemma – a suite of safety content classifier models, built upon Gemma 2, to filter the input and outputs of AI models and keep the user safe.
Gemma Scope – a new model interpretability tool that offers unparalleled insight into our models' inner workings.
As an open-source model, Gemma 2 2B is available for developers to experiment with immediately. Worth noting, Gemma 2 2B “produces outsized results by learning from larger models through distillation.” This aligns with a growing trend towards more efficient AI models, addressing concerns about the computational requirements and environmental impact of LLMs.
It suggests a future where AI development may focus more on optimization and efficiency rather than sheer size.
PRODUCTIVITY
5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity
✅ Fastmind: Build a custom chatbot in your website, using one line of code and live data.
✅ BuildItForMe: An AI copilot that can craft a brand-new website — or maintain an existing one.
✅ Semantic Health*: Recapture millions in missed hospital revenue by “spell-checking” DRG claims for data and revenue integrity (3x faster, 50% more yield). Read this case study
✅ Simply Draw: Receive detailed AI feedback to enhance your drawing skills at your own pace, even with the most challenging illustrations.
✅ Lingoedit: An AI-powered translation editor that enables you to effortlessly overcome language barriers.
PS: Want more? Check out our Top 100 AI Tools.
* indicates a promoted tool, if any
AI & TECH NEWS
Everything else you need to know today
A new video shows Neura’s humanoid robot ironing a shirt on its own. Source: Neura
Cloud Doubt: A new report showed that Microsoft’s AI cloud services saw a dip in sales last quarter, sending a ripple through tech stocks.
Altman Approves: OpenAI endorsed a trio of newly introduced bills, including one that would create an AI Safety Institute charged with writing guidelines for tech companies.
Blog Buddy: The website creation platform Wix is getting several new AI tools, including one that can generate SEO-friendly blog posts and images.
AI Investigator: The Android “circle to search” feature — which lets you circle an image with your figure in order to find out more information about it — can now help you find the origins of a picture, including whether it’s fake.
😁 One Fun Thing: A new video shows Neura’s 4NE-1 humanoid robot performing a variety of household chores, from ironing a shirt to chopping cucumbers. The German startup is collaborating with Nvidia to build some of the “first cognitive robots” capable of performing multiple tasks.
🧠 Brain Food: MIT researchers have found a new way to detect when LLMs are fibbing. They asked a smaller model to take the “temperature” of a larger LLM. The novel method could one day help engineers spot when models are overconfident about incorrect predictions.
PROMPT OF THE DAY
Public Speaking Coach
Prompt: I want you to act as a public speaking coach. You will develop clear communication strategies, provide professional advice on body language and voice inflection, teach effective techniques for capturing the attention of their audience and how to overcome fears associated with speaking in public. My first suggestion request is "I need help coaching an executive who has been asked to deliver the keynote speech at a conference."
Source: promptgpt
AI-GENERATED IMAGES
Classroom BTS
Source: @damarkuswolf on Midjourney
Midjourney Prompt: students in a modern classroom, interacting with a large screen displaying AI interfaces, hq studio photography,
--ar 16:9 --v 6 --stylize 50Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us
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