👨‍🚀 Musk vs. Altman - Grok vs. ChatGPT: The big fight

Hello AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter! Today we've got a bit of everything: we're creating PDF invoices with chatbots, looking at a simple way to set up useful AI agents and we have an interesting update about AI avatar fans.

Here's what we have in store for you:

• 🥊 Musk vs Altman - Grok vs ChatGPT: The big fight

• 🔒 Why AI agents don't work in companies

• 🤳 AI avatar videos with emotions based on only one image

Here we go!

This issue is brought to you by:

🥊 Musk vs. Altman - Grok vs. ChatGPT: The big fight

What would our newsletter be without ChatGPT and Grok, or rather the rivals behind them: Sam Altman and Elon Musk. There are new lawsuits and gossip every week. But that's not what we wanted to talk about today…

The two have long been fighting for supremacy not only in terms of AI, but both also want to position themselves as the "app for everything".

Sam Altman is getting at it with fast paced innovation at ChatGPT and his company/app World App.

Elon Musk is doing it by merging xAI’s Grok with his social network X and soon wants to offer payments in the app.

Also interesting: According to SimilarWeb, ChatGPT had more page views than X for the first time - and OpenAI is also considering launching a social network.

Grok vs. ChatGPT: Let’s create a PDF

However, we are less interested in the gossip around the AI apps, but more in the functions that help us being more productive in our day-to-day work.

We wanted to create PDFs with AI, and Grok has recently been upgraded with this feature. Let's put it to test!

In Grok, we just provide dummy invoice data and want an invoice PDF as the result.

And lo and behold, a few seconds later we get a neatly formatted PDF with all the information in a beautiful invoice design!

What's super cool is that the PDF is rendered and displayed directly in Grok.

With ChatGPT, it was a bit more back and forth, some errors were produced.

The design also had a bunch of minor errors. Another disadvantage: you always have to download the PDFs to look at them. Not a biggie, but annoying.

But a big advantage with ChatGPT: It was able to add a logo, which Grok refused to do.

Our take: ChatGPT is the all-rounder, Grok is catching up

ChatGPT is and remains the most versatile AI app. It is a good choice for 80% of use cases. However, it is sometimes a little slow and error-prone.

The others are catching up here. The speed of development at Grok is extremely impressive, and we are pleasantly surprised at how well it works.

We'll keep you up to date and let you know as soon as you need to switch from ChatGPT to Grok 😁.

🔒Why AI agents don't work in companies

Do you already use AI agents in your company? Or are you still struggling with the complexity of building them?

And if your company is already relying on AI agents, most often it is not in the production environment.

Why is that?

There are, of course, many reasons. But something that we see again and again in our daily work with companies:

There are countless silos of data within a wide variety of software programs, outdated tools and fragmented processes!

This makes it either incredibly complex or almost impossible to set up AI agents - or the agents don't have all the information and capabilities to be truly useful.

In addition to outdated tools, many companies also work with a wide range of software tools that have a feature overlap, which of course increases costs.

How can this be solved?

In our opinion, the best and easiest way is to rely on tools that think AI-first and make AI features such as agents available to customers. And this applies to both SMEs and corporations.

Every company needs a tool for sales, marketing teams and support. Why not use one that has declared AI features as a top priority?

HubSpot is such a tool for marketing, sales and customer support.

HubSpot has been a partner of ours for over a year now. We have been following the whole development closely for a while and they continue to be one of the fastest in rolling out new valuable AI features.

Example: Four AI agents that work immediately

For example, HubSpot has developed four AI agents for its customers, which are directly integrated into the system. They are easy to set up and solve bottlenecks in teams.

The Customer Agent
Digital customer advisor, available 24/7. Answers questions, provides personalized information (e.g. order status) and performs simple actions such as password resets. Uses multiple channels and recognizes knowledge gaps in the company.

The Knowledge Base Agent
Automatically creates help articles from support tickets. Works together with the Customer Agent: If the customer agent identifies a knowledge gap, the knowledge agent creates suitable content by analyzing internal data. This makes hidden knowledge systematically usable.

The Content Agent
Supports marketing with content production. Creates target group-specific content such as landing pages, blog posts or case studies based on company information. Saves time and resources.

The Prospecting Agent
Revolutionizes lead research. Analyzes data, news and customer signals to provide sales teams with actionable insights and personalized outreach.

The genius of these agents is that they are fully integrated. Not only do they have domain-specific knowledge, but they can also trigger actions directly.

This really makes work more efficient!

Take a look at the agents live

Well, that sounds interesting, but what exactly does it look like in practice?

P.S. We find it fascinating to see how different providers implement the topic of AI. Many simply write "AI" on the packaging, but with HubSpot it is integrated throughout - and can also be implemented and used well by smaller companies.

🤳 AI avatar videos with emotions based on just one image

Finally, a quick update on AI video avatars.

HeyGen has unveiled the new Avatar IV model - and it's really fun!

The cool thing about Avatar IV is that it doesn't just create an avatar video from a single image (including perfect lip-sync). Many others can do that too.

HeyGen synchronizes your words or your script. For example, if you upload an audio file of yourself with the script you want the avatar to present, the AI also interprets the sound, rhythm and emotions.

And the avatar's facial expressions and speech are controlled based on this! This makes the videos look much more authentic and better than other picture-to-avatar videos. You can find many examples in the X thread above.

Here's how you can try it out

1. The whole thing is super simple. All you need is a HeyGen account.

2. Then select the new Avatar IV in the dashboard.

3. Upload your image. Write a script or upload a voice file. Select your voice and off you go!

The only restriction: videos can be a maximum of 30 seconds long.

Fun fact: As you can see from the screenshot above, we wanted to challenge the model and find out what it does when there are two people in the picture.

Answer: Both are animated with the same text. In other words: it is best to use only photos of individuals for the time being. 😉 

We made it! But no need to be sad. The AInauts will be back soon, with new stuff for you.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

P.S.: Follow us on social media - it motivates us to keep going 😁!
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