🔥 Weekly AI news: Did you miss it?!

👨‍🚀 The most important AI updates at a glance

AI-HOI, AInauts!

Maybe you didn't catch all the news, tools, and hacks about AI last week, or maybe you've only recently joined us. Either way, here's our recap with all the headlines from the newsletter - just one click away!

Click the links to jump right to the article - or read our picks below.

• 🔮 The McKinsey Technology Trend Outlook 2024

• 🚀 How to build your own AI web scraper

• 📰 AI news quickie: The HAIlights from the industry

• 😄 AI-Fun: Everyone, Everything, LLMs

• 🔥 The next level of AI video influencers

• 📊 Analyze complex data quickly with AI

• 🤖 Google's new AI assistant before OpenAI?

→ Selection of the top posts of the last week ←

🔮 The McKinsey Technology Trend Outlook 2024

Gen AI has evolved from a fascinating innovation to a core technology and is making deep inroads into numerous industries. 

Of course, we're not telling you anything new 😊 …

But this is all happening in a wider context: in addition to AI, there are other technologies that are becoming increasingly relevant, such as electrification and renewable energies, which also experienced a significant upswing in 2023 (in China, every second new car sold is already electric or hybrid).

Boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred and the boom in AI is driving innovation in areas such as robotics, mobility and biotechnology.

This is creating synergies that extend far beyond the tech sector!

The new McKinsey report also has a few hard-hitting facts we find exciting - you can find the full 100-page PDF report here:

• AI has experienced exponential growth since 2022. Investments in 2023 have increased six-fold, and queries on Google by 700%.

• The competition between open and closed models and the development of multimodal AIs capable of text, image, video and audio marks a significant innovative advance.

• While OpenAI and Google primarily rely on proprietary solutions, the use and importance of open-source models such as Meta's Llama 3 is growing.

• LLMs are increasingly being integrated into business software to optimize processes. The report shows that 65% of the companies surveyed use Gen AI in at least one business area!

• Real-world implementation is producing impressive results across the board, from customer service to the discovery of new medicines.

• Despite the global interest, there are regional differences in AI adoption. Countries such as India and Japan are developing their own LLMs to meet the specific needs of their markets.

These are the most important details - explore more in the report!

🚀 How to build your own AI web researcher

Today we have an idea for a simple web researcher that finds the latest news on any topic. We can program this using Claude and then run it directly in the terminal.

... and even if "Terminal" may sound complicated at first, it's much simpler than we thought - we promise, just give it a try!

1. Visit Claude.ai and enter this prompt
   (replace the X with your desired theme):

Build a research agent in Python that give me the latest news on topic X.

2. Download the generated file and save it on your computer.

3. Open the terminal and ask Claude how to install it. Follow the instructions and install any scripts/libraries that are requested first.

4. Execute the script. We have entered the command "Python3" in the terminal, then dragged the file into the terminal and hit "Enter".

And boom! You've got fresh, customized news updates.

Of course, this is a super simple solution. You can expand it according to your wishes and ideas and play some ping-pong with Claude. We often use the command "Do it 3x better!" to see what creative ideas the chatbot comes up with.

Conclusion: Your ultimate news researcher 💻

As you can see, with a few simple steps, you can create your own customized tool that provides you with the latest news on your desired topic every day.

A web scraper like this not only keeps you up to date, but can also be customized and at the same time encourages you to experiment.

And by the way: we’ve also received some error messages we didn't understand. But this doesn't matter, the chatbot knows what to do - just ask. Thank you, Claude!

🔥 The next level of AI video influencers

AI influencers have long been of interest to us. Generating credible images is no longer a problem.

But video has always been a challenge, even though AI avatar platforms like HeyGen have really improved massively.

We are also heavy users and pay HeyGen alone almost $1000 every month ...

These avatar platforms only have one problem: avatars are not really AI influencers!

You can either use one of the standard avatars (which any other user can then also use) or you can create an avatar of yourself or other real people.

But the really exciting goal is to bring individual AI influencers or personas created by AI to life with videos.

And a lot is happening here too, as the technology is getting better and better - and much, much cheaper.

Today we want to briefly show you how this can be done. A few examples to start with:

There are now many different ways to create such AI influencer videos. And many tools to do so. But in general, the steps are always similar:

Step 1: Create an image of your AI influencer

Here you can use the well-known, good image generators that are able to create realistic images - such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ...

Or of course the new rising star from Germany, Flux.

There is now also a LoRA that has been specially trained for realistic images. You can try it out for free at fal.ai, for example.

Step 2: Bring your AI influencer to life

Now we need to turn images into videos. Here are two tools that come in handy:

• RunwayML (very good, but expensive)

• KLING AI

Enter your image here and play with the prompt. This may take a few iterations. For us, important words in the prompt were:

Steady camera, talking to the camera, interview etc.

Step 3: Generate the audio

Now that we have our video with the influencer speaking to the camera, all we need is the actual content.

For this, we recommend ElevenLabs, where you can choose from countless voices and languages.

Step 4: Synchronize lips

To make the whole thing perfect, we need to synchronize the lips from our AI influencer video with our text.

You can easily do this with a tool like Synchlabs.

... and your AI influencer video is ready!

So, you've finished your AI influencer video. Sure, it's not 100% perfect yet, and the trained eye will recognize that AI is behind it, especially in the lip sync area.

But it's relatively easy to implement and costs virtually nothing per video.

You can now edit the video with the free CapCut tool, for example, and add captions, B-roll and music.

And since you've read this far, here's another tool that does all the steps from above in one go: Hedra!

It's super simple and inexpensive - and will soon be even better, like all AI tools.

Here is the result of 30 seconds of work. 

📊 Analyze complex data quickly with AI

When it comes to data analysis, we usually lose our self-confidence quite quickly. The whole thing can become a very complex topic …

Nevertheless, almost all of us have to deal with a large amount of data from time to time, which may need to be better understood or from which we want to learn something.

Here are a few examples we’ve encountered:

• Evaluate survey results

• Analyze age structures, gender distributions, etc. of customers

• Analyze the results of advertising campaigns over a long period of time

In the past, you definitely had to be a spreadsheet nerd … but today it's much easier thanks to LLMs. Even if there are still a few catches, because there are no real "hacks" or prompting techniques.

You simply have to upload the data and ask the right questions.

Which language model is best for this?

You can analyze data with all language models if you can upload the file(s) - be it ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini. But each model has its strengths and weaknesses.

We'll spare you the details of our unfruitful attempts. The most important point in general is that you can never really be sure whether the answers to your analyses are correct ...

Language models will never tell you: "I don't know that." They will make things up, and sometimes they miscalculate.

For example, a while ago we analyzed a survey of a few workshop participants. GPT-4o gave us the following answer:

In other words: 161 answered one question with Yes and 70 answered one question with No. The only problem is that there were 376 answers in total ...

Claude, on the other hand, understood the data set correctly and also analyzed it.

In our view, Claude from Anthropic is currently ahead when it comes to data analysis.

But Google Gemini is also getting much better, and is particularly interesting thanks to the huge context window of up to 2 million tokens. Here you can work with really extensive datasets.

Always analyze multiple models at the same time

As you have seen, it therefore makes sense to always analyze data from several providers at the same time.

The easiest and cheapest way for us to access the various models is the Typing Mind tool. You don't even need a subscription, just a one-off purchase.

Here you can then connect all LLMs via API and quickly open several chats.

Visualize data (also interactively)

The last point why Claude is the winner for us are the visualizations.

Sure, ChatGPT can also create graphics and diagrams. OpenAI also released an update in May.

But thanks to Artifacts, Claude can create really interactive dashboards that you can then easily publish online. That's why we love Claude.

For all those who want to delve go even deeper

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. When it gets really serious and a lot of data is involved, it's worth going even deeper.

In addition to a good setup with clear objectives, it is also important to select the right tools and areas of application. In other words: can I analyze the data with LLMs, or do I already need machine learning tools, deep learning tools or predictive analytics tools?

If you are interested in this topic, our friends at HubSpot have written a free e-book on the subject. Really well done and easy to understand.

The short e-book gives you a good brief overview of various tools and basic know-how. You can download it here for free:

Your AInauts, Fabian & Reto

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