🔍 ChatGPT 4 And What It Means For Marketers

Hello marketers, and welcome back,

The formatting of today’s newsletter will be different because A LOT has happened in the past 72 hours in the world of AI.

Let's dive in.

We’ll focus on our Eye on AI section, and I’ll break it down into four sections:

1. GPT 4
2. Google AI Announcement
3. Microsoft AI Announcement (not GPT 4)
4. Midjourney v5 (my personal favorite)

For all the brave souls that have been on Twitter this week, I know your TLs have been bombarded by threads tweeting about all these new AI developments.

All of the AI content out there is even crazier than normal, and, to be honest, most of it sucks.

Luckily for you, I’ve done the painstaking work of separating the signal from the noise - bringing you only value, no fluff.

GPT 4 is HERE!

That’s right, after only 4 months since ChatGPT 3 launched, GPT 4 (they dropped the word chat, still not a great name) is now here. No, it’s not the AI from the movie Her yet, but it does have a lot of great new features.

More Detailed Prompting:

In the live stream, OpenAI showcases a use case of summarizing an article in one sentence where every word starts with the letter G. When would you ever actually do this? No clue. But that’s not why they did it. The point is to show how details of a prompt you can write that GPT 4 understands, which previous models would not have. This gets us closer to giving AI more accurate instructions so it can do complex tasks.

Understanding pictures:

Hands down, the biggest new feature for GPT 4 is the ability to understand photos, given its new AI visual capabilities.

What does that mean?

In the live stream, OpenAI showcased a use case example of a website mockup sketch in a notebook being turned into a fully functional website. The implications for shortening the timeline of website projects are massive.

A similar feature that’s not available yet but will be soon is GPT 4’s ability to understand logical reasoning based on a picture. Check out the screenshot below to see what GPT 4 thinks will happen if you cut the strings.

Notice the prompt didn’t describe the image for it to get this response. I don’t know about you, but this feature truly gives me goosebumps.

Acing Tests:

GPT 4 is acing test left and right. This chart shows the test-taking capabilities of the previous model (ChatGPT 3.5) with GPT 4 (both with its visual ability and without it). It’s official, GPT 4 would have crushed my below-average GPA in high school; that hurts.

Coding:

I’ve written about AI coding tools in past letters, but GPT 4 takes it to the next level, furthering the capabilities of people with little to no coding skills.

For example, this tweet shows Ammaar Reshi, who built the snake game from Nokia phones (no shame if you had one, I did too) using GPT 4 with no coding skills in Javascript, all in 20 minutes.

Google AI announcement

The AI landscape just fundamentally shifted beneath the feet of all the current AI startups.

Google just jumped to the front of the AI line.

On Tuesday, Google announced it would ship generative AI to ALL of its workspace apps. That’s right, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc., all just got supercharged with AI. We knew it was coming, and the companies that were heads down building similar apps independently are surely rushing to think of a plan to pivot.

What does this mean for current AI companies? It’s unclear right now, but one thing is for sure, differentiating AI products just got a lot harder.

Now that Google has pushed its weight around with the distribution of its existing customer base, they’ve made it a heck of a lot harder to compete. The AI companies that have been building over the last few months have to compete with users having similar, if not the exact same, capabilities that will now exist in the apps they’re already on, like Gmail or Docs.

With no competitive moat, distribution wins.

I wrote a thread called The Great Consolidation, where I predicted this would happen. Honestly didn’t think it would happen this quickly.

Microsoft AI announcement (not GPT4)

Microsoft introduces 365 Copilot - bringing AI assistance into Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, Viva, and Power Platform.

The AI distribution continues.

If this feels like Deja Vu, you’re not wrong. 48 hours after the Google announcement, Microsoft says they will be doing the same thing with their suite of apps.

In the newsletter where I published Eye on AI for the first time, I wrote about Notion AI and my thoughts on how AI is a feature, not a stand-alone product. I wrote about how these AI tools will supercharge the value you get from tools you already use, like Notion or Teams (does anyone actually use Teams?).

AI isn’t at the level where it will do all your work for you, but it can be an incredibly useful coworker that’s with you on every app you use. Microsoft knows that to be the case, and that is why they are rolling this feature out to all of their products as a nice little bump in value.

Midjourney v5 is here!

It can finally do hands!

This has been one of the big limitations of Midjourney, and with the introduction of v5, they’ve fixed the problem that we were all frustrated with. Go to Twitter and search “Midjourney v5 hands” and see all the examples.

Yes, those are AI-generated. And yes you should be impressed.

Midjourney v5 brings with it more than just hands. The amazing visuals it was already generating got even better with this new version. Below are a few Twitter threads showcasing v5 images and some that compare prompts between v4 and v5.

1. Nick St. Pierre thread: v4 to v5 prompts
2. Phil Desforges thread: v4 to v5 prompts
3. Photo realistic images
4. Images by category

Some of my favorite images I could find on Twitter using Midjourney v5.

Image credit: AZNAG.AI.ART

Image credit: Jon Finger

Image credit: Nick St. Pierre

With all of these AI breakthroughs, Midjourney v5 is my personal favorite update of the day. As you know from last week's letter I’ve been using Midjourney a lot and loving it. In my opinion, it’s the most exciting thing to me about the AI space.

In a future post I promise to do a Midjourney v5 case study don’t worry.

• GPT 4 launch video
• This past week in AI
• Midjourney… magazine?
• GPT4 passing tests isn’t impressive - my thoughts
• Video made almost entirely by AI
• Google - introducing AI with style
• Midjourney showcase

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I know. That was a lot of AI news.

Do you feel caught up with all the news? If so, good. Enjoy that feeling because it won’t last long. With the pace of AI, I’ll be writing about GPT 100 before the end of the year.

After digesting all this news I feel the exact same way as I do after Thanksgiving dinner, which means only one thing - time for a nap.

See y’all next week,

Vince