The AI-ification of search
Plus ChatGPT's latest and greatest new model, OpenAI's leadership drama, a cool PDF guide for inclusive AI, and the big social updates you should know.
I was traveling last week and unfortunately (or fortunately?) decided to put the computer, phone, and wearable tech down to be with family. Digital detox was in full force. Hope you don’t mind ❤️
To make up for it, I’ve got a super-loaded edition for you today bc the internet never sleeps when people, tech, social are involved.
lfg 🍯
In this edition:
🗣️ OpenAI’s GPT-4 Omni
🚀 Google I/O’s AI push into everything
🌐 The AI-ification of search
🧩 OpenAI’s superalignment exit
👸🏽 A cool AI guide from Dove
🌍 IG creator marketplace expands
👁️ Threads adds view counts
❌ Twitter redirects domains to X
🌊 TikTok tests 60-min uploads
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AI & Creator Tools
We’ve had two major AI events over the last week: OpenAI’s spring update and Google’s I/O. Here’s what you need to know:
OpenAI announces GPT-4 Omni (GPT-4o)
OpenAI released its latest model GPT-4 Omni, which makes ChatGPT more human than ever with realistic voice capabilities (sounding suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson) while handling text, vision, and audio all at once. As OpenAI’s new flagship model, GPT-4o provides “GPT-4 level intelligence but is much faster.” So basically, it’s your new go-to.
CTO Mira Murati hyped up its speed and enhanced abilities, noting that free users get access too while paid users get more capacity. GPT-4o can sing, translate languages, recognize objects in live videos, and chat with you (and itself) through completely multi-modal context.
Text: Answering questions and crafting creative content
Images: Analyzing scenes, objects, and emotions
Audio: Understanding and responding to spoken language
Microsoft’s Copilot in Windows 11 and Bing are also getting a boost from GPT-4o with better answers, voice, and computer vision support.
Google I/O and the AI-ification of search
With impeccable and totally not suspicious timing, Google’s annual developer conference followed OpenAI’s update and unsurprisingly, it also revolved around AI. CEO Sundar Pichai even enlightened us all to the fact that “AI” was used 121 times by presenters.
The big updates focused on what Pichai calls “the Gemini era,” which basically means the Gemini models are getting a heavy integration treatment across Google's products and services. Hopefully this means it will soon be able to do actually useful things like summarize emails and docs (finally!).
Google also collaborated with Donald Glover and Wyclef Jean to promote its new video model called Veo. (We probably would have taken Wyclef’s content in a different direction, but I digress.) Veo seems pretty on-par with other generative video tools in the market.
But when you read between the lines, the big takeaway from I/O wasn’t the two-hour diatribe on AI and how it’s changing the Google experience for users.
The iceberg ahead for marketers is that AI is taking over search.
As Garbage Day noted, there’s a lot of drama happening in the SEO world right now (especially if you look at how Reddit is keeping score). Google's search overhaul, which will soon include AI-generated summaries for search queries, comes as critics are already picking apart the degraded search experience. Meanwhile, competition is heating up from Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership, and startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Brave have entered the arena, edging into Google’s market share.
By AI-ifying search, Google basically “shoves the famous 10 blue links it used to provide on results pages further into the rearview,” Wired noted. “First ads and info boxes began to take priority at the top of Google’s pages; now, AI-generated overviews and categories will take up a good chunk of search real estate. And web publishers and content creators are nervous about these changes—rightfully.”
It makes sense that web creators and publishers are anxious as AI takes over the search results. As Casey Newton noted in Platformer, “Google will now do the googling for you, and everyone who benefited from humans doing the googling will very soon need to come up with a Plan B.”
OpenAI’s super-misalignment
Trouble in paradise at Sama’s house. Also last week, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and exec Jan Leike left the company, citing “safety culture taking a backseat to shiny products.” The reason: AI alignment — or lack thereof. ICYMI, “alignment” means making sure AI shares our human goals. Without it, we all perish. Sutskever and Leike headed up OpenAI’s superalignment team which formed in 2023 but without them, there isn’t really a committee. In typical fashion, Sama took to 𝕏 to break the news of Ilya’s departure.
Remember last November’s OpenAI soap opera? Sam Altman got booted, employees revolted, and he was back with more power in less than a week. Now, Altman’s under fire for prioritizing commercial ventures over safety concerns. His response to Leike’s exit? A promise to do better, detailed in a joint post with President Greg Brockman. Bottom line: OpenAI’s top brass is bailing for reasons we keep hearing about: acceleration > safety.
Oh and there’s this…
Resource alert: Dove’s guide to inclusive AI images
Dove Beauty is out with a new campaign that taps into AI while aiming to "Keep Beauty Real" and educate consumers on how AI sees beauty. It’s a fantastic resource and worth grabbing if you can. There’s an entire "Real Beauty Prompt Playbook" with 72-pages of tips for creating AI-generated images that depict realistic and varied beauty standards, challenging narrow conventions, like this glossary:
Download it here.
Social News & Trends
🌎 IG Creator Marketplace goes (more) global. Instagram is finally letting more brands slide into creators' DMs around the world. The platform just unlocked its Creator Marketplace in 10 new markets (incl. Korea, Germany, Spain) which means brands can better scope out local talent and creators in these regions can access Meta partnerships more easily.
👀 Viewcounts come to Threads. Keeping up with the 𝕏’s has never looked so Meta. Threads just announced its rolling out view counts on Threads, meaning you’ll be able to see how many times people have viewed your posts.
🚫 Twitter is dead (again). Twitter has officially changed its domain from twitter.com to x.com, marking a final straw in the end of an era. The move aligns with Elon’s long-standing vision of creating an "everything app" called X, offering services beyond just social networking. The domain change won’t effect your existing content or links — they’ll now just be redirected to x.com.
🌊 TikTok goes deeper into longform. TikTok is now letting some users upload videos up to 60 minutes long, up from the previous 10-minute limit. This means longer content on TikTok, possibly challenging YouTube in some areas. It will likely draw in more creators who love TikTok and love the longform format, but haven’t found the path with TikTok’s short-form standard. This is a potential opportunity.
Sauce Snippets
Stray news, memes, and trends from the internet ✨
Apple surprisingly fumbled their latest ad spot, which looks like TikTok sludge content
TikTok now has an official media buying certification
How the Met Gala brought District 12 back into focus
Scarlett Johansson refused to be the voice actor for GPT-4o but Sam Altman found a voice actor with similar voice anyway
This trend on TikTok is how your email finds me
Some people shitpost on 𝕏, others go straight to LinkedIn
Why gen-z became eurovision’s biggest fans