Issue #30: AI 2024 predictions, Gen AI video, AI Agents, and more

Good morning.

Seeing the AI boom of 2023, there’s no doubt that 2024 will only get crazier.

If you thought AI was “slowing down” or the hype was over (which it is) and that was it…

You need to mentally prepare yourself for what’s coming this year.

In a good way.

Believe me, huge opportunities, amazing tools, and only good vibes.

Too many people are stuck in the AI doom loop, or are selling you things with AI fear.

Ignore the doomers. Throw away the pessimism.

Embrace AI optimism.

I don’t believe millions will lose their jobs because of AI. In fact, I’ve been clear for years:

AI will create new jobs, markets, businesses, and opportunities—more than you’ll know what to do with.

You’ll need to use it responsibly and for good things.

And sure, there are always malicious actors pulling tricks.

But not everyone is. And there are more people making and doing amazing things every day.

AI is like a wormhole into the future, a door opening that wasn’t there before (and the good news is you’re not flying in a Boeing airplane!)

Speaking of this year and the future, I’m experimenting with a slightly different newsletter format this week, and most likely in the coming weeks.

Let’s get into it.

In today’s issue:

• 2024 AI predictions and AI marketing.

• 2023 was the year of LLMs (insane developments).

• Generative AI video is blowing up.

• AI Agents are having a moment and will be “the thing” in 2024.

• Gemini gets integrated with NotebookLM (and it’s actually good).

• Pre-sales for upcoming training (from yours truly).

Let’s dive in.

BIONIC JUICE

Recently, Superhuman (The world’s largest AI newsletter boasting over 500k subscribers) released a newsletter that contained their top 5 predictions for AI in 2024.

If you’re not a subscriber, it’s worth trying it out as it’s a pretty good newsletter for straight-up AI news.

As I’m looking into the future, I’m going to take each one and break it down into why it could give you a marketing edge.

Let’s start with this: 

AI-generated video is one of the most powerful AI breakthroughs for marketing I’m seeing at the moment.

This AI video ability will be useful to create and optimize VSLs, short-form organic, and paid ads all around.

I also see this being applied to team meetings as well in ways that could help your team understand things by quickly turning ideas into viewable plans in the same call.

We’ve touched on this already, so it’s nothing new, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

A few weeks ago I mentioned how researchers are using ChatGPT. And it’s only a matter of time before it isn’t a skill but a necessity for most jobs.

Even in, or perhaps especially for fast food restaurants: Using AI to correctly stock food based on recent sales is something AI could perform perfectly compared to a manager who can simply write the wrong number or predict wrongly based on their gut.

Using AI for writing copy or optimizing web pages is something that can save your marketing team hours a day, and is an essential skill you can teach or require for your employees to be more efficient.

It’s no secret that most college and high school students have ChatGPT on their phone for one reason (to do their homework).

Beyond that, like in the text above, these AI features will be implemented into smartphones, so rather than opening the ChatGPT app, you could potentially just snap a picture and have AI already built into your phone.

Why is this useful for marketing?

Think of what mistakes and hidden features AI could catch if it monitored your screen all the time.

For example when you see an ad on Instagram AI could sense what demographic they’re targeting, what elements they’re using to target that, and how well the ad is performing.

All without having to research a thing.

As with any industry, as technology advances all of the above-stated things will happen, but with AI it isn’t the same product.

AI will continue to get more powerful and cheaper at the same time, which is only more of a kick-in-the-butt to get to using it sooner rather than after your competition has.

Again, we’ve touched on this one as well, and as a marketer, it’s simply important to not get wrapped up in this.

Stick to finding the best product to use in the best way, and you’ll be successful in 2024.

One thing I want to quickly mention is that I’ve spent a lot of time with Mixtral 8x7B, a model from French startup Mistral.

I’ve put it through a ringer of testing, as I hope to make it my go-to model for client work.

And it delivers the goods.

It’s one of the best models for copywriting and content writing I’ve used (and often better than Claude 2 or even GPT-4 for some tasks). 

The model is a so-called “Mixture of Experts” model (SMoE) with open weights. 

(If you want an in-depth explanation, read this).

In simple terms, you get “better” output because instead of outputs being combined through, for example, averaging, you get optimal output from one of the “expert” models.

Think of this way:

Would you rather ask a specific question of someone who has generic knowledge and can give you an average answer…

Or ask a group of experts, and the expert who knows, answers with a more specific answer?

You’d (hopefully) want the right expert to speak up and give you an answer.

That’s what a “Mixture of Experts” model is.

GPT-4 is (most likely, I think it’s all but confirmed), a “Mixture of Experts” model. And it’s why it’s so good.

An open source “Mixture of Experts” model, widely available, is a very good thing.

With a new powerful model and an overly fair amount of funding, is France seriously getting into the AI race?

Europe as a whole is going the wrong way on regulation (to the point where I likely will not work with companies in Europe because of it).

But a team in France is releasing this model, so maybe there’s hope? 

Mixtral matches or outperforms models like LLaMA 2 and GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks while running 6x faster. 

It significantly improves on past Mistral multilingual and scientific reasoning abilities in areas like math and code generation, helping scholars and developers.

Mistral also introduced La Plateforme, which provides API access to hosted versions of Mixtral and its other models to quickly build apps, perfect for my marketers out there looking to build custom versions and apps of their own.

LATEST DISCOVERIES

2023 was the year of LLM breakthrough.

And many people and companies found how extremely powerful they can be when used the right way.

What I mean by this is: 

In the past 24-36 months, companies everywhere realized they could take a GIANT corpus of text, run it through a pile of GPUs, and use it to create a fascinating new kind of software (like GPT-4 and all other LLMs like it).

Aside from easy things like answering questions, summarizing documents, translating from one language to another, extracting information, and even improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing team.

Simon Wilson recently went into depth on this subject in his blog, and I’d suggest you check it out.

While 2023 was the year of the LLM—in 2024, video will crack open in ways that most people aren’t ready for.

What you can do already is mesmerizing. 

Next on the list is this timeline of AI-generated video from 2023.

Coming from zero AI video models that did this publicly at the beginning of the year, to nearly a hundred or more by the end, 2024 should hold a lot of new powerful models that will be useful for marketing. 

You can already create video ads and any kind of short-form video you want with just a prompt (or an image, or other asset).

Another huge advance in 2024 will be AI Agents that work.

They’ve been around since early 2023 but for most people, they were hard to get to work and do what you wanted.

It’s only getting easier.

You’ve seen AI agents everywhere, and Olivia Moore perfectly describes the average experience with one in 2023 with her thread above.

And they’re usually just tedious tasks that aren’t complicated but would take a lot of your time.

Most agents are still in a kind of beta phase, and usually bug out from time to time at the moment.

But many work great, and can run themselves 90-100% of the time.

And looking into 2024 will fully launch out of “beta.”

Soon, I’m opening up the pre-sale on my training on how to use AI Agents inside your business (for marketing, in particular).

You can compare different AI models including Mistral’s here if you’d like.

Last thing on the list for today is Google’s upgrade to their NotebookLM app with their new AI model, Gemini.

And it’s available without a waitlist. 

I’ve been testing it for a few weeks and I’m honestly impressed.

First off, if you’re outside of the US you can’t use this app, so get a VPN before you proceed.

NotebookLM can summarize inputs like Google docs in a few short steps when you ask it to summarize, and take notes on the docs you input. Use it with excel and google sheets to summarize campaign performance metrics.

You can ask questions to NotebookLM as well. When it answers, it automatically shares citations from your sources so you can quickly jump from a citation to the source. 

Say you’re summarizing a sheet full of metrics. If you ask it what campaign performed the best, it’ll reference that spot in the sheet so you can skip directly to it.

I see a ton of marketing and business use cases for this AI tool. It provides easy access to these capabilities without you needing another 3rd party tool or putting together your own RAG/Vector Search/Bot-like configuration.

Speaking of 3rd party tools so you don’t have to build your own: 

Tidio is an AI-powered chatbot platform that focuses on conversion rate optimization (CRO) through interactive customer engagements on websites. 

I’m not a huge fan of website bots. I think they’re a repeat of the 2016 bot mania that went nowhere—only now because “AI” is involved, people think they’re a great idea again.

But I tried Tidio for a few things and it wasn’t as bad as other bots—and that’s high-praise coming from me. 

It's designed to assist in improving web conversions and generating leads, which is particularly useful for marketers like you, if you’re trying to increase customer interaction and reduce churn rates.

And while there’s no shortage of apps promising to repurpose videos, Opus Clip is one of the few worth your time. In my tests, it’s pretty decent at transforming long videos into short, engaging clips with just a single click. 

A key feature is its ability to not only shorten videos but also customize them for various social media platforms. 

It can turn long videos into high-quality viral clips, which are ideal for sharing on popular platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.

That’s it for this week.

Talk again real soon,
Sam Woods
Editor