Two Steps Forward, No Steps Back. Ever.

Google and Open AI showcase huge jumps in their AI technology. But what does it mean for marketers’ day-to-day work?

Today's News

Open AI’s Announcements

The Rumored Search Engine Did Not Appear

GPT “4o”

The Mobile App

The Desktop App

Google’s Announcements

Gmail Getting AI

Gemini Live

AI in Chrome

Video Search

Wrap-Up

We’re devoting our whole issue to that today. OpenAI was first, so let’s start there.

Open AI’s Announcements

The Rumored Search Engine Did Not Appear

First, despite a ton of speculation — which included double-sourced reports from Reuters — OpenAI did not reveal a search engine.

That’s obviously good news for Google, which seemed a little trepidatious. Just 45 minutes before OpenAI’s big announcement yesterday, Google tried to steal a little thunder by posting a short video tease of their upcoming tech.

One more day until #GoogleIO! We’re feeling 🤩. See you tomorrow for the latest news about AI, Search and more.

— Google (@Google)
May 13, 2024

So, no search engine, but OpenAI did show off three things: An upgraded model, an upgraded mobile app, and a new desktop app.

GPT “4o”

GPT4 will be getting an upgrade to GPT4o — the “o” apparently short for “omnimodel.”

OpenAI says it’s smarter, can detect things in images, it can listen to things.

But most importantly for most marketers, I think, is it will be free. GPT4 right now costs $20 a month and it’s pretty solid — definitely better than 3.

I spent a couple of hours today testing this new 4o model, and I’m underwhelmed. It gets still confused about word count, it starts to ignore commands in lengthy prompts.

I wasn’t able to detect much of an upgrade for some common copywriting-related marketing tasks. I uploaded a photo of a woman wearing a green dress and asked it for a product description. It wrote:

Basically the same level of intelligence as its GPT4 predecessor.

One area of marketing where it did seem to get smarter was in analysis. I uploaded a CSV of every response we’ve received from our newsletter survey. It’s about 900 rows, with data about demographics, job titles, and so on. I removed the email addresses and other identifying information from it beforehand.

And it actually did quite a good job at summarizing the data.

I told it to visualize the data, and I got a bunch of charts. This is something the GPT4 model can do.

But then I said to make the design nicer. And it did — replaced the colors with more muted tones and added color differences between the bars.

Then I gave it what I thought would be impossible. Turn that into a PowerPoint presentation, with one chart on each slide, make the slide background blue, use a sans-serif font, and make sure each chart’s background is transparent.

And in about 10 seconds, it did exactly that.

So, if your work involves data analysis and presentation — and what marketing job doesn’t — this new model is pretty solid in that department.

The Mobile App

Most of the announcement time was dedicated to showing off its new mobile app, which comes with a disturbingly realistic voice — one that replies without a delay, and even has a personality. Maybe too much personality.

Here’s one of the demos — and it’s hard to think that this is not a script they’ve put into their bot. A slightly disheveled software engineer is holding his phone up, and the app is showing him on the front camera.

And the bot walks right into the “uncanny valley.”

Go to the 11 min 58 second mark in this video:

You can interrupt it mid-flow and it’ll respond immediately.

I think you can see the obvious application here for customer service phone lines. Sure, this one was programmed to be informal, maybe even a little flirty, but that’s the prompt they gave it. We’ll be able to change that. Hell, we’ll probably just upload our brand guidelines and be done with it.

The Desktop App

Then there was the desktop app — on both Mac and Windows.

There are a ton of third-party apps out there that use OpenAI’s API to get you that functionality, but they almost all cost money. I use the GPT plugin on Raycast. That’s $8 a month for GPT3.5. It’s another $8 more if you want GPT4.

OpenAI did not say what the pricing would be for the 4o API, but any pricing would mean these app developers would have to charge, probably pushing a lot of users to download the free official desktop app.

The app does exist right now, though it’s a test build and a little hard to find. But when you log in, it just tells you it’s not ready yet.

Google’s Announcements

For its part, Google had its big I/O developer conference today, and here’s what’s interesting from that.

First, of course, the model itself is getting an upgrade that will let it analyze longer documents, codebases, and longer videos and audio clips than before.

Gmail Getting AI

The company’s main AI, which it calls Gemini, will be able to search, summarize, and draft emails using the tech.

It will also be able to handle multi-step tasks like looking for an ecommerce receipt in your archives, find the receipt, and fill out an online form.

Gemini Live

They also previewed their version of a talking chatbot, called Gemini Live. It’s not quite as quick to respond as OpenAI’s bot, and it sounds a little bit more robotic than its eerily human-sounding competitor.

Like that one, though, you can interrupt it, ask clarifying questions, and when used on a phone can also see and respond to images you show it.

AI in Chrome

Google also going to be putting a small version of the model directly into its Chrome browser. The company says this will let developers power their own simple AI features — things like a “help me write” tool, and so on.

Video Search

More interesting from a marketing perspective, is they’ll be letting users search using a video they upload. Users will then ask it a question about the video or the search they want. It’s similar to the image-search feature they have.

This kind of media search has already changed the game in SEO — how much longer before we have to consider exploiting this new tech to try to get up first in the AI’s response messages?

Wrap-Up

All told there was a lot of hype, a lot of buzz around AI in the last day. I hope this gives you a bit of a summary.

Tomorrow, back with some other stories in the industry — including a lawsuit facing Reddit over disputed clicks, and Instagram’s big warning about the Reels you’re uploading: Make them too long, and you’ll kneecap your reach.

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