Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Good Afternoon, welcome back to the Digital Roundup, offering the lowdown on the latest Digital Marketing news and insights.
This week, Elon Musk announced a company to discover the secrets of the universe- while also blocking any links to Threads on Twitter. Google also launched an AI-powered note-taking assistant.
Let’s get into it!
xAI: The key to unlocking the secrets of the universe
Elon Musk announced via Twitter this week that he’s forming xAI, a new AI company.
xAI‘s mission statement is to “understand the true nature of the universe”. Musk also mentioned a “truthGPT” in a tweet, perhaps xAI will release a ‘truthful’ chatGPT alternative.
So what is xAI?
Well, xAI’s website states that it’s an independent company from X Corp, however, he plans for xAI to work with other companies Musk is involved with. These companies include Teska and X (Twitter).
xAI’s team is well-staffed with AI experts from big companies such as Deep Mind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and Google Research. The experts he’s hired have all helped to discover optimisation methods and breakthrough AI systems such as GPT-4.
What’s trending on Twitter about xAI?
The staff at xAI, as well as Musk’s fans on Twitter all shared excitement about the possibilities coming from xAI.
xAI’s cofounder, Greg Yang, encouraged theorists and mathematicians to reach out to him via DMs.
Yang had previously worked at Microsoft Research for more than five years, but left in May for the “next adventure”.
One of xAI’s first tweets asked an interesting question:
“What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?”
Over 12,000 users replied to the tweet, including Musk:
Musk’s future with AI
Intelligency will definitely be keeping an eye on xAI to see if they develop a product more powerful and relevant than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
More information about xAI will be shared today in a Twitter Spaces conversation, where users will also be able to meet the team.
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see.
NotebookLM- the AI note-taking assistant from Google
This week, Google revealed NotebookLM, an ai-driven notebook, which was previously discussed at Google’s I/O event this year as Project Tailwind.
NotebookLM is Google Labs’ approach to note-taking software, and it’s powered by a robust language model. It’s Google’s solution to students and academic workers being overloaded with ideas and facts from a vast amount of sources online.
Forming connections between these facts and ideas can be time-consuming, so Google wanted a tool which can assist users in making the connections quicker using their preferred sources.
An AI-driven assistant
NotebookLM combines the potential of various language models and user content in order to deliver quick and important insights to users.
Think of NotebookLM as a virtual research assistant, it can summarise facts, explain a complex idea, and also help you form new connections from the information in your sources.
Here’s a screenshot of what the interface will look like:
NotebookLM will function differently from other chatbots such as ChatGPT or Bard. This is because users can “ground” the AI in the notes or sources it uses.
As of now, you can incorporate NotebookLM into a Google doc of your choice.
The features of NotebookLM
The features of NotebookLM include:
- Summary Generation– Once a Google doc has been added, it can generate an overview, key topics, and questions.
- Questions- Users can ask specific questions about uploaded materials.
- Idea generation- More than just Q&A, it can help users generate creative ideas.
- Hallucination free- Each Ai response is accompanied by source citations so you can fact-check.
If you want to sign up for NotebookLM, there’s a waitlist you can add yourself to.
Twitter blocks Threads links
Twitter is blocking links to its new rival from Meta, Threads. The reports started to surface on Monday that Twitter was intentionally blocking links to Meta’s latest social networking app. Although some users stated that select links work, the majority do not.
Unfortunately, this means that it will be harder for users to track down tweets and conversations about Threads.
Why Twitter has done this
Threads launched on the 5th of July, and has now broken records, becoming the fastest-growing social media app in history. It also regularly trends on its rival, Twitter.
Social media marketers and experts believe that Twitter is blocking Threads links in order to try and keep users on the platform, rather than letting them move to its rival.
People’s reactions
Andy Baio, an American technologist, was one of the first to notice the block. He used a search query using the “url:threads.net”, which didn’t serve any results.
Here’s the Threads post which Baio made:
When press outlets have asked Twitter for a response about why they’re doing it, they got this response back:
Musk has addressed the tense rivalry between him and Mark Zuckerberg with a simple tweet “Zuck is a cuck”, and proceeded to state in another tweet that he and Zuckerberg should have “a literal d*ck measuring contest”.
There’s a comparison between Threads and Twitter’s traffic levels if you want to see how they’re comparing.
