The AI agent showdown begins

Read time: under 4 minutes

Remember, remember the beginning of November. Microsoft is telling its clients (and the world) to mark their calendars for the arrival of customizable AI agents, which could transform how we do work.

🎧️ New podcast: How 2 college students built a 7-figure AI app. Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: Blade Runner, Apple, and an API

• Microsoft Unveils Autonomous AI Agents

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Soundscapes

TODAY IN AI

More trouble for Perplexity: After getting the book thrown at them by the NYTimes, AI search startup Perplexity has now been accused by News Corp (which owns WSJ and NY Post) of copyright infringement and reproducing content without permission.

No running from this: “Blade Runner 2049” production company Alcon Entertainment sued Elon Musk for allegedly using AI-generated imagery resembling scenes from the film to promote Tesla's new robotaxi, despite being denied permission to do so.

Musk’s API is here: In better news for Musk, his startup xAI has finally released an API for its flagship Grok generative AI model, which powers various features on X. Many had been waiting for the release since August, and some users claim the API is currently quite basic and appears to only have a single model available “grok-beta.”

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🎧️ DECODING THE FUTURE

How 2 college students built a 7 figure app

Alec Nguyen is the co-founder and CEO of Afforai, an AI-powered reference manager for academics. He started Afforai as a college project and grew it to $700,000 in revenue within three months of monetization. Previously, Alec worked as a student tutor in economics, data science, and computer science.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• How Alec turned a student project into a successful startup

• The journey from MVP to product-market fit

• Strategies for successful product launches and growth hacking

• The challenges of being an international student founder

• Insights on bootstrapping vs. raising venture capital

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

FROM THE FRONTIER

Build Your Own AI: Microsoft introduces autonomous agents in Copilot Studio

Microsoft has made a bold move in the AI race by unveiling its new AI agents designed to work autonomously and scale teams without needing explicit human input. Jared Spataro, CMO for Microsoft’s AI at Work wants us to “think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world.” These particular ones aim to complete tasks autonomously in areas including sales, service, finance, and supply chain operations.

The best part: users can build their own autonomous agents in Copilot Studio starting in November. Microsoft’s move – which could set a new standard in AI for businesses and individuals - comes days before competitor Salesforce is set to launch its own version of autonomous AI tech for sales and service, Agentforce.

PRESENTED BY METAVIEW

Collaborate with AI to generate and refine interview questions

Metaview has launched hiring studio — a free suite of copilots to help 10x the productivity of recruiting teams. With hiring studio, Metaview has fine-tuned an LLM to:

• Collaborate with AI to design interview questions tailored to your recruiting.

• Automatically create a rubric for what to look for in an excellent, good, or bad answer.

• Listen to sample candidate answers in formats like STAR.

• Export or share the questions with the rest of your team.

Check it out here and try it

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Got Leftovers?

Prompt: I have <how much of leftover> leftover <type of food> from <meal or occasion>, and I’m not sure what to do with it. Please suggest some ideas or recipes to help me use them and reduce food waste.

_{Source: Upbase}

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Feta: An AI platform that helps product and engineering teams run efficient meetings and document discussions for actionable insights.

✅ Focus Buddy: An AI co-pilot that stays on call with you to manage your to-do list, help avoid procrastination, and find the behavioral patterns that are holding you back.

✅ Patterned AI: Generate unique patterns for your product with the help of AI.

✅ Convo: An AI-moderated and analyzed qualitative user research platform that gives the depth of interviews at the scale of surveys.

✅ Strella: A research platform that uses AI-moderated interviews and instant synthesis, powering smarter and faster decisions.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🔮 In a daze: New AI-enhanced messaging app Daze is all the rage with Gen-Z and already has 48 million views and 156,000 waitlist sign-ups ahead of its November 4th launch.

📚️ Book Bans: Penguin Random House is adding a warning to its books' copyright pages, stating that their content can’t be used to train AI systems.

💼 AI Analyst: A new study from the MIT Technology Review shows that 94% of business leaders now rely on generative AI to help develop new software.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Soundscapes

Midjourney Prompt: Resonant soundscapes uplift your spirit calm your mind restore your balance, --ar 2:3 --style raw --sref 4244977961::2 2459642466 531168650 --personalize y9z82im --v 6.1

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Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team