GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 18th issue of Evolving Internet Insights.

Idea we’ve been thinking about: What happens when we all have personalized chatbots?

Thanks for reading!

Liang and Dan 🙌

🌰 In a Nutshell

• OpenAI teases its ecosystem strategy at Dev Day: users able to build chatbots, a chatbot store, custom enterprise chatbots, etc.

• Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok, an AI chatbot that is as good as OpenAI’s GPT3.5

• Instagram users can now customize their own AI-powered chatbot friend.

• AI’s potential impact on the global economy: ~$17 to $26 Trillion

💾 Byte-sized Stories

This week’s top stories with our insights on top.

1. OpenAI Teases Its Ecosystem Strategy At Dev Day 🤓

⚡️ TL;DR: OpenAI hosted its first conference for developers (“Dev Day”) and announced various new products and improvements. Some of the highlights:

• GPT4 Turbo: an improved version of GPT4 that touts a 100,000 word context window (number of words that GPT can handle in one user session), which is ~4x greater than GPT4’s current capability.

• Custom Enterprise Bots: enterprise customers can build internal GPTs on top of their own proprietary knowledge base.

• GPT Store: creators can customize, publish and monetize their own version of ChatGPT bots in a GPT Store.

• Copyright Shield: OpenAI will protect businesses using its AI products from copyright claims.

• Users Created Chatbots: users can create their own custom chatbots using ChatGPT.

⚡️ So What: OpenAI announcements focus on launching and fortifying a healthy ecosystem to bolster long-term use and engagement with its technologies. For example, by creating a solution for enterprises to build their own custom chatbots based on their own proprietary data, OpenAI is giving enterprise clients a way to deploy AI purpose-built for their unique needs. Similarly, by introducing a GPT store, OpenAI is hoping to incentivize creators and developers alike to discover new use cases.

⚡️ Zoom Out: ChatGPT was the fastest app to reach 100M monthly active users (MAUs). During Dev Day, the company touted that ChatGPT now has 100M weekly active users (WAUs), which is a sign that the engagement and retention for ChatGPT is increasing. Yes, we were blown away by this stat too! 🌬️

With all the announcements from its Dev Day, OpenAI is clearly building up their moat and defensibility by capturing both the demand- and supply-sides of the marketplace for AI. If successful, OpenAI can become the de facto platform and solution for those looking to implement AI.

Read More Here, Here, Here

2. Elon Musk’s xAI Launches Grok, an AI Chatbot 🧌

⚡️ TL;DR: Elon Musk’s new company, xAI, launched “Grok,” their first AI chatbot. Grok is powered by xAI’s own LLM called Grok-1. Grok has surpassed GPT3.5 in some benchmarks but xAI said it still lags behind OpenAI’s flagship GPT4 model. Grok is in early testing and will be available to premium subscribers of X (f.k.a. Twitter).

⚡️ So What: One of the key advantages for Grok is that it has “real time knowledge of the world via the X platform.” Some estimates say X generates 500M X/Tweets per day! In a world where LLM competition is fierce (à la OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc), having a treasure trove of (growing) data sets ends up being a huge competitive advantage. As we’ve said before, data is the new oil.

⚡️ Zoom Out: Recently, it was reported that X/Twitter is worth ~$19B, a Black Friday-sized discount to the $44B price tag that Musk paid for the company around this time last year. For Musk, the value of X/Twitter might be to help him bolster his position in the AI race versus accruing value as a standalone platform. One of the advantages of having a portfolio of companies is that it’s easy to have them build on top of each other and collaborate strategically.

Read More Here, Here

P.S. Our next Brainfood Issue will deep dive into Quora’s Poe Platform and their “app store” ecosystem strategy.

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3. Instagram Is Developing “AI Friends” 👯

⚡️ TL;DR: Instagram is developing an “AI friend” feature to allow users to customize their own chatbot they can chat with. This product is very similar to what Meta, Instagram’s parent company, rolled out recently (a development we covered in ⚡Insights 13). Some things users will be able to do: 

• Chat with their AI friend by asking them questions and brainstorm ideas.

• Customize their AI friend by selecting the chatbot’s gender, age, ethnicity, and personality type.

• Define their AI friend’s interests to further inform its personality.

⚡️ So What: Meta continues to double down on generative (gen) AI. In addition to launching and open sourcing its series of Llama foundation models, the company is also building AI-powered, consumer-focused features for its suite of social media applications. As one of the leading Big Tech companies, Meta has the resources to invest heavily throughout the AI stack, all the way from infrastructure to consumer applications. Meta is hoping that their consumer-focused investments will solve its engagement and user churn problems seen on some of its social media apps.

⚡️ Zoom Out: Like most new technologies, AI is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is great that users for Instagram’s new AI friend feature might find a relatable companion to talk to. But on the other hand, since gen AI technologies are still relatively new, it is unclear what the long term consequences would be on individuals and larger society if using AI for companionship becomes mainstream.

Read More Here, Here

📊 Let’s Get Graphic

One visual we couldn’t stop thinking about.

AI’s Potential Impact on the Global Economy: ~$17 to $26 Trillion

⚡️ Takeaway: According to a study by McKinsey, AI’s impact on the global economy could be as high as ~$26 trillion. Gen AI technologies like ChatGPT will have as much as $4.4 trillion in economic impact from new use cases, with further benefits enabled from increased worker productivity gains from using gen AI.

Zooming out, no matter how you slice and dice it, we are talking about trillions of dollars of impact to the economy, which implies every industry will be disrupted by gen AI.

As we’ve covered before, the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to jump in since gen AI use cases are rapidly evolving with new use cases being discovered daily.

🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Some deeper dives to help you get smarter on emerging tech.

1. Will Generative AI Transform Business?: detailed report highlighting the impacts of generative AI on business, with both a macro and micro view.

2. Artificial intelligence Transparency Index: researchers at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence rate the transparency of 10 foundational AI models.

3. Business Schools Grapple With How to Teach AI: article highlighting how business schools are revamping their curriculums in light of the rise of gen AI technologies.

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