Meta's AI Studio Launch, GitHub Models, and Canva Acquires Leonardo AI

Hello and welcome to the weekly recap!

Are you already testing AI Studio? If not, I think you should at least give it a try. I think it's one of the most interesting products launched recently (And it also turned me from Zuckerberg’s hater to a fan, but more on that below.)

Anyway, let's discuss the important release from Meta and then some other news. There's quite a bit of it, by the way.

Check out our post, where we took a look at SearchGPT's early results and impressions, and compared OpenAI's search engine with Perplexity:

This Creators’ AI Edition:

Featured Materials 🎟️
News of the week 🌍
Useful tools ⚒️
Weekly Guides 📕
AI Meme of the Week 🤡
AI Tweet of the Week 🐦
(Bonus) Materials 🎁

# Featured Material 🎟️

Meta Rolls Out Its AI Studio in The US

Right now, AI Studio is available only in the US.

Nearly a year after its announcement, Meta opened access to its platform for creating custom chatbots: AI Studio. Built with Llama 3.1, it lets users generate AI characters for caption creation, post formatting, meme generation, and many other tasks. The company calls it “a place for people to create, share, and discover AIs to chat with.”

Even without tech skills.

Freedom of Creation

With the release of AI Studio, the company continues to promote openness and accessibility for everyone. You can create your own characters on AI Studio's website or directly in the Instagram app. If you're an enthusiast, you can build your own chatbot from scratch. And if you just want to have fun or practice, use the templates and tips provided by the developers.

For beginners, Meta also has a detailed guide to building your own AI.

The goals and objectives of custom chatbots built on AI Studio can also be almost anything. It can be an AI for work to help you with important tasks, a virtual friend telling jokes, or a digital version of yourself. In the process, you can customize the chatbot's name, personality, tone of communication, avatar, and slogan.

Interestingly, you can also choose how the virtual character will be distributed. You can make it private and use it yourself or share it with your followers and friends. AI Studio supports integration with Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

The chatbot can be used on any of these platforms.

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Meta also noted that AI Studio will be valuable for bloggers, creators, and entrepreneurs. An online retailer can set up an AI to answer questions about products, while an Influencer can create its own virtual copy to quickly answer common questions in DMs. That sounds useful.

To give a better idea of what AI Studio can do, Meta offers a look at a few of the already-created characters:

Eat Like You Live There!: Created by chef Marc Murphy, this AI offers personalized tips for embracing local dining customs while you’re traveling
What Lens Bro: Photographer and videographer Angel Barclay created an AI that offers tips on finding the perfect lens for your shot
Flip Pawsitive Affirmation Dog: Actor and pet advocate Rocky Kanaka’s AI-powered dog gives you positive affirmations tailored to you
Sammy The Stress Ball: Meme creator Assistants vs. Agents created an AI character that helps you get through your stressful workday

Okay, I have a confession to make.

I'm kind of a Mark Zuckerberg hater. Facebook and Instagram are the platforms I dislike the most. I can't stand their interface, the experience they provide, and in general their concept. I also dislike WhatsApp and only use it for work. Well the idea of Metaverse as executed by Meta doesn't seem promising to me.

But Meta's AI gives me a completely different impression. In recent interviews, Mark speaks more and more often about openness and accessibility. And judging by AI Studio, the Meta founder supports these ideas not only in words.

That's cool and I hope Meta succeeds in this endeavor.

# News Of The Week 🌍

GitHub Launches Models to Help Developers Experiment with AI

Meta is committed to making AI more accessible, and GitHub isn't lagging behind. The platform has announced the launch of GitHub Models, a new platform allowing engineers to create new AI-powered applications. With the release, users can access various models, including Llama 3.1, GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, and Mistral Large 2. All AI parameters and capabilities can be tested right in GitHub.

Here’s a demo video:

GitHub Models aims to make AI application development as easy as possible. And the list of tools offered is really big. You can read more about them here.

Canva Acquires Leonardo AI to Improve Magic Studio

Canva has acquired startup Leonardo.ai to expand the capabilities of AI tools on its Magic Studio platform. The deal will give the company access to a line of user-customizable text-to-image and text-to-video generators. Leonardo will continue to operate as usual: the new owner promises not to restrict the startup.

With Leonardo.Ai’s incredible foundational model, and team of 120 high-caliber researchers, engineers, and designers, this acquisition bolsters our ability to supercharge our growing suite of AI products while investing in continued research and innovation to unlock the future of visual AI.

There is a feeling that Canva doen’t really like the pace of Adobe's development in the field of AI. The acquisition is quite capable of balancing the forces.

X (ex-Twitter) Secretly Trains Grok on its Users' Data

According to a report @EasyBakedOven on X , Twitter that has activated a default setting for everyone that gives them permission to use your data to train Grok. Also, the social media platform quietly rolled out the default enabled feature the other day and is using your data to train Grok. The author also added that you can't disable data collection through the mobile app, but the option is available through the website.

It's pretty funny to see this news against the backdrop of Elon Musk's recent announcement. A couple weeks ago, he said that X was preparing to launch the world's most powerful learning cluster, which will be used to turn Grok into the most powerful AI across the board by December this year.

Sharing is caring! Refer someone who recently started a learning journey in AI. Make them more productive and earn rewards!

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Microsoft Now Calls OpenAI Its Competitor

From love to hate, there's only one step. Or from partner to competitor. After years of collaboration and a $13 billion investment in OpenAI (according to Bloomberg), Microsoft has labeled the startup a "competitor." In its SEC filing, the company listed OpenAI as being on the same list as Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta. Specifically, Microsoft called the ChatGPT developer a competitor in developing search engines.

It's actually pretty obvious that Microsoft is trying to shrug off any ties to OpenAI to avoid problems with the FTC and other antitrust regulators. Nevertheless, it is amusing to see how quickly things change in our world.

OpenAI Releases ChatGPT’s Hyperrealistic Voice to Some Users

On Tuesday, OpenAI began rolling out ChatGPT's enhanced voice mode, giving users the first access to hyper-realistic audio responses GPT-4o. An alpha version will be available to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users today, and OpenAI says the feature will be gradually rolled out to all Plus users in the fall of 2024.

Hopefully, OpenAI managed to solve all the problems related to the claims from Scarlett Johansson. In case you forgot, you could hear several AI voices in the demo, including Sky, who sounded much like the actress.

We wrote about it in this post.

Useful Tools ⚒️

Kathy – Your autonomous AI competitor analyst

Clarity – A meeting recorder for founder-led sales

EduWiz.AI – Write magical paperwork in seconds

toby – Live speech translation on any video call with little delay

CopyFrog.AI – AI-powered content creation platform

I would call CopyFrog a junior copywriter with basic text and visual content skills. You can use it to create descriptions, blog posts, and generate images. It also offers customizable templates, real-time editing, and integration with various digital marketing tools. Give it a try if you want to save some brainstorming time.