😺 RIP prompt engineering

PLUS: huge new Midjourney update

Welcome, humans.

We’re not Royal Family drama followers, but the story is weird… amidst furious “Where’s Kate Middleton?!” speculation, the family releases a terribly edited image and Kate herself apparently says “haha, sorry, just playing with some new tools!”

She’s learning AI, just like the rest of us! Let her have her fun!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Anthropic’s “metaprompt” spells the end of prompt engineering.
Midjourney’s new release unlocks major AI media use cases.
Elon Musk will open source his chatbot Grok this week.
The AI data analysis tool we’ve been using lately.

It was nice knowing ya, prompt engineering…

In early 2023 (read: peak ChatGPT hype days), the World Economic Forum declared “prompt engineer” as the #1 job of the future.

Our take? It’s overrated. And dare we say, one AI company is proving us right.

Anthropic has released a “metaprompt” helper, a prompt that generates prompts for you.

No more prompt frameworks, no prompt “tricks.” Just a one-line description of what you want it to do and the prompt does the rest.

Tell your friend that’s been collecting LinkedIn endorsements for prompt engineering that it might be a good time to stop…

Here’s what you should know about the metaprompt:

You’ll need an Anthropic API key. Create one here.
The metaprompt page has the rest of the instructions at the top.
This metaprompt is optimized for Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.

ChatGPT and Gemini users: OpenAI and Google have not created a similar tool. For ChatGPT, you could try a GPT like Prompt Perfect, but note these are all created by the community.

Our prediction: The only people who need to know how to prompt are the people building tools. For the rest of us, just ask AI ;)

PS: Anyone still wanting pre-baked prompts to copy and paste can also check out Anthropic’s new prompt library.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Never manually update your CRM again.

"I love updating our CRM,"...said no sales rep EVER!

At The Neuron, we've automated significant portions of our sales process using AI.

Here’s how you can, too:

Attention auto-updates your CRM based on sales calls and other customer interactions—say goodbye to manually entering MEDDIC, BANT, or any other data into your Salesforce, Hubspot, or Pipedrive…

This AI wizard can:

Log crucial data in your CRM.
Write follow-up emails.
Autoscore deals with AI.

Plus, it delivers insights that have pulled in an extra $250k in ARR per rep.

Start automating your CRM with Attention today!

Midjourney releases consistent characters.

Generating humans with AI is like meeting the love of your life on an NYC subway: if you don’t talk to them right then and there, you might never see them again.

Til now, getting an AI image generator to spit out the exact same human in two generated images was near impossible (or at least, required some technical magic).

Midjourney just fixed that, releasing new features that allow you to generate the same characters across multiple images.

It’s an underhyped update that unlocks some major use cases:

AI ad campaigns that feature the same model
building storyboards using the same character
AI influencers and digital personalities

As with most updates to AI images, we point you to our friend Nick St. Pierre for examples and how-to’s.

Around the Horn.

5 of 45 Pulitzer Prize finalists used AI in their work.
Elon Musk announced that Grok (his AI company’s chatbot) will be open sourced this week.
Midjourney called out competitor Stability AI for scraping their images.
Government-commissioned report showed many top AI researchers are concerned about extinction-level AI risk.

Treat To Try.

Data analysis in ChatGPT is technically possible, but we’ve found it needs careful taming and a whole lot of patience. Most times we end up waiting 3 minutes for it to generate a bunch of useless graphs.

Which is why we went hunting for something a little more tailormade.

Here’s Julius AI, used by the business schools at both Harvard and Rice. Upload whatever you have (spreadsheets, CSVs, PDFs, etc.), chat with your data and generate data visualizations on the fly.

Tuesday Ticker.

Here are the results from last week’s poll:

V. chose Claude (free): “Even with all the ChatGPT hype, I have always preferred Claude. ChatGPT-4 (and previous iterations) just never did it for me. My second (far distant) choice was Bing”
F. chose ChatGPT-4: “I keep trying other chatbots but ChatGPT4 still seems to be the best. I use it for many tasks, the most important to me being coding”
M.A. chose Bing: “I'm a college librarian, and our institution's Microsoft accounts allow us Copilot with commercial data protection. Since data security is important to me (for reasons both personal and professional), I prefer any option that offers me some measure of protection there.”

We know there’s a wide range of comfort using AI among people reading The Neuron. Let’s talk prompting: