😺 The future of AI is here

PLUS: our #1 AI tool of the week

Welcome, humans.

In the spirit of casual Friday, I’ll be using more acronyms than usual today. ifykyk. 🕶

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

Amazon is trying to build autonomous agents.
ElevenLabs launches British & Irish AI voices.
Meta plans to charge bigger companies for LLaMA.
DoorDash is testing a chatbot for ordering!

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WTF Is An “AI Agent” & Why Is Amazon Building One?

We’ve got the inside scoop on the future of AI.

All of our smartest hacker friends are trying to build autonomous agents.

WTF does that even mean?!

Well, ChatGPT can handle a single task, like “code a website.” But then you need a human to take action with the code.

Autonomous agents, on the other hand, multitask all at once:

code a website → publish it → debug it → add code….and voila!

Despite a few brave attempts (AutoGPT, Multi-On, & others), we haven’t seen anything actually useful yet besides simpler ones like Code Interpreter.

Now Amazon is taking a stab at agents. Yesterday they announced that agents would be integrated inside Bedrock, their service that lets businesses access AI models like Claude and SDXL.

The goal is to give businesses agents that can answer questions about their data and execute tasks.

Why it matters: We’re early, but this is the first legit recognition that agents are the next big thing.

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AI Voices Are Improving & Becoming More Diverse 🇬🇧🇸🇪🇮🇹

AI voices are getting good. Like, really good. So good that you've probably heard an AI voice and thought it was a real voice this week.

Spooky, right?

But they’re only getting better. ElevenLabs is one of those AI tools that lets you create a voiceover for any content of your choice. Today they added:

serene to intense voices (aka whispering to screaming).
more accents: British, Irish, Swedish, Italian … Blimey!

And these voices can be used for videos, games, audiobooks, chatbots, podcasts, and more. Play.ht is another tool that gets our thumbs-up.

BTW: One reason we like ElevenLabs (despite its name, obviously) is that they partner with voice actors to create a variety of new AI voices. Then they compensate the actors. If you’ve got a unique voice that the world deserves to hear, give them a shout!

Around the Horn 🦄

Stack Overflow launches OverflowAI as ChatGPT eats its traffic.
How to automate transcribing and summarizing meetings with Whisper and GPT-4.
ChatGPT for Android is now available in 12 more countries.
Meta will charge larger companies like Amazon and Google for reselling its AI model LLaMA-2.
Intel plans to “build AI into every platform [they] build.”
OpenAI has no plans to offer its models outside of OpenAI and Microsoft.