Good morning, welcome to AI Joe, the newsletter that’s spicier than an episode of Hot Ones.

Here’s what’s on today’s agenda. 👇️ 

Joe’s Top Pick

• Elon Musk launches xAI 🚀 

Other stories

• Shopify’s new AI assistant 🤖 

• ChatGPT usage is falling 📉 

AI content of the week

• 3 AI demos on This Week in Startups 🖥️

How you can use AI this week

• Use Adobe Firefly to improve your photos 📷️ 

🚨 Breaking News 🚨 Elon Musk is launching a new AI Venture

xAI: The latest venture from Elon Musk

This week Elon announced his new venture, xAI, on Twitter along with an audacious, but vague, goal to “understand reality.”

Along with Elon, xAI boasts an impressive roster of all-star players in AI. The team consists of former employees from DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.

The company will be operated separately from Elon’s other businesses, but its website indicates they’ll work closely with Twitter and Tesla.

On Friday, Musk and his team took to Twitter Spaces, a live audio-sharing platform, to give more detail about the venture. Along with understanding reality, xAI will aim to build AI in a way that is consistent with human values and appropriately factors in the risks to humanity.

You can find the 1 hour and 46-minute recording in the tweet below. 👇️ 

Ultimately, xAI will work towards building an AGI (artificial general intelligence) and plans to be seen as an alternative to Microsoft, Google and OpenAI. Musk believes we are very close to creating an AGI that can solve problems far better than a human.

xAI will leverage Twitter data from all public tweets to train the AI. Elon Musk expressed frustration that other AI companies were “scraping” Twitter data to help train their AIs as well.

Joe’s Takeaway: Anytime you see Google, Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter) putting so much time, and money into the same space, you can guarantee it’s going to be extremely important.

Learn more about Elon Musk’s AI Venture.

Shopify helps e-commerce businesses with new AI assistant 🛍️ 

One of the best things an AI can be right now is an expert. With the right training data, you can teach AI pretty much anything. Shopify knows this and that’s why they built Sidekick.

Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, made the announcement of the upcoming sidekick feature on Twitter this week.

The purpose behind the sidekick is to arm entrepreneurs with an expert they can rely on 24/7. The AI will have intimate knowledge of every Shopify store including things like historical sales, design, click-through rates, and more. This will allow the AI to tailor answers and advice for every store.

Joe’s Takeaway: This is an application of AI we’ll begin to see more frequently. An AI riding shotgun can help humans quickly work through issues by leveraging expertise in a niche. It’s feasible that your bank could give you a financial planning AI, or your healthcare provider could give you an exercise and nutrition AI.

These AIs will perform better than generic prescriptive advice because they have context. In the case of the Shopify AI, it will be more helpful than a YouTube video because it has context about your exact situation.

Learn more about Shopify’s AI Sidekick.

Chat-GPT sees usage decline for the first time ever 📉 

Is this a sign that interest in AI is starting to fade?

According to internet data firm Similarweb, ChatGPT usage fell approximately 9.7% from May to June.

While some are speculating that ChatGPT is already past its prime, others believe this is just a normal seasonal dip. The culprit may be students–with school out for the summer, students likely have either reduced usage or stopped altogether.

The Washington Post, however, believes the reason for the decline is the frequent hallucinations experienced by AIs. Here’s what they had to say. 👇️ 

Most likely the answer falls somewhere in the middle. Students leaving school, vacations and good weather are bound to put pressure on the user base. That said, ChatGPT was one of the hottest topics in the world for months, at some point, it is bound to lose its novelty.

Joe’s Takeaway: A short-term decline in users is not important in the scheme of things. What’s important is whether ChatGPT and other AI tools can become a part of people’s day-to-day. AI must move beyond a novelty into a daily part of billions of lives. This will take time, but I believe it will happen!

Watch 3 AI Demos to see into the future of AI 📺️ 

Jason Calacanis and Sunny Madra discuss and demonstrate 3 interesting AI tools.

1st Tool: VenturusAI

This tool creates an in-depth analysis of business ideas to help entrepreneurs start building a successful business.

2nd Tool: ChatHN

This is one for all the start-up nerds out there 🤓 . This is an AI that is trained specifically to help interface with hacker news. You can ask questions about top stories, trading themes, etc. The takeaway here is that you can easily add a chat app on top of large data sets (like the Hacker News archives).

3rd Tool: AutoGPT

This demo was a bit more technical and not publicly available. Sunny Madra built it and is an example of an AutoGPT. AutoGPTs are multiple AIs that work together to complete tasks. They’re trained to ask intelligent prompts to help the next AI take a step closer to accomplishing a goal. These series of prompts are called “chains of thought.”

Joe’s Takeaway: AI has many different uses beyond just interacting with ChatGPT. Watching content like this (and reading AI Joe) will help you up your game!

How you can use AI this week 📆 

Use Adobe Firefly to change your photos

• Follow this link to access Adobe Firefly

• Click “Explore Firefly”

• Click “Generative Fill”

• Upload an image

• Select the parts you want to remove or change

• Prompt what you want to see

Here’s an image I updated to add a sunset! 👇️ 

This:

Changed to this:

Did you create something? Respond to this email with your creations!!