Today in Digital Marketing - Two Steps Forward, No Steps Back. Ever.

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Tuesday, May 14th. Today, battle of the AI. Both Google and OpenAI come out swinging with their latest technology. What does it all mean for marketers? We have full coverage in today's special episode. What a difference 24 hours makes. In the last day, both OpenAI and Google revealed their plans for their respective AI technologies. And it's either exciting or terrifying, depending on which side of the debate you sit. We're devoting our whole episode to those two announcements today. OpenAI was first, so let's start there.

Starting point is 00:00:35 First, despite a ton of speculation, which included double-sourced reports from Reuters, OpenAI did not reveal a search engine. That's obviously good news for Google, which seemed a little trepidatious. Just 45 minutes before OpenAI's big announcement yesterday, Google tried to steal a little thunder by posting a short video tease of their upcoming tech. So no search engine,

Starting point is 00:00:57 but OpenAI did show off three things, an upgraded model, an upgraded mobile app, and a new desktop app. First, GPT-4 will be getting an upgrade to GPT-4-O. That's the letter O, apparently short for OmniModel. OpenAI says it's smarter. It can detect things in images better. It can listen to things.

Starting point is 00:01:17 But most importantly for marketers, I think, is it'll be free. GPT-4 right now costs $20 a month US, and it's solid. It's definitely better than three. I spent a couple of hours today testing this new 4.0 model, and I'm underwhelmed. It still gets confused about word count. It starts to ignore commands and lengthy prompts.

Starting point is 00:01:37 I wasn't able to detect much of an upgrade for some common copywriting-related marketing tasks. I uploaded a photo of a woman in a green dress and asked it for a product description. It wrote, Turn heads in this vibrant green button-up mini dress. The playful ruffled hem adds a flirty touch, while the short sleeves and belted waist

Starting point is 00:01:54 create a flattering silhouette. So basically the same level of intelligence as its GPT-4 predecessor. One area of marketing where it did seem to get smarter was in analysis. I uploaded a CSV of every response we've received from our newsletter survey. It's about 900 rows with data about demographics, job titles, and so on. I removed the email addresses and other identifying information beforehand. It actually did a pretty good job of summarizing the data from, remember,

Starting point is 00:02:22 just rows and cells in a CSV. I told it to visualize the data and I got a bunch of charts. This is something the GPT-4 model can do. But then I said to make the design nicer. And it did. It replaced the colors with more muted tones and added color differences between the bars. Then I gave it what I thought would be impossible. Turn that into a PowerPoint presentation with one chart on each slide, make the slide background blue, use a sans-serif font, and make sure each chart's background is transparent. And in about 10 seconds, it did exactly that, in the form of a downloadable PowerPoint file.

Starting point is 00:02:56 So if your work involves data analysis and what marketing job does in these days, this new model is pretty solid in that department. And most of the announcement time was dedicated to showing off its new mobile app, which comes with a disturbingly realistic voice, one that replies without a delay. And even has a personality, maybe too much personality. Here's one of the demos. And it's hard to think that this is not a script that they've put into their bot. A slightly disheveled software engineer is holding his phone up, and the app is showing him on the front camera. The bot walks right into Uncanny Valley.

Starting point is 00:03:33 Listen, I got some huge news. Oh, do tell. I'm all ears. Well, in a few minutes, I'm going to be interviewing at OpenAI. Have you heard of them? OpenAI? Huh? Sounds vaguely familiar. Kidding, of course. That's incredible. Rocky, what kind of interview? Well, it's for a software engineering role, but I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional? Well, Rocky, you definitely have the I've been coding all night look down, which could actually work in your favor.

Starting point is 00:04:06 Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the bad genie's vibe. Your enthusiasm is what's really going to shine through. I don't have a lot of time, so I'm just going to throw this on. What do you think? He puts on kind of a ridiculous looking fisherman's hat. Rocky, that's quite a statement piece. I mean, you'll definitely stand out, though maybe not in the way you're hoping for an interview.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Okay, I got it. I got it. You can interrupt the bot mid-flow and it'll respond immediately. I think you can see the obvious application here for customer service phone lines. Sure, this one was programmed to be informal, maybe even a little flirty, but that's the prompt they gave it. We'll be able to change that. Hell, we'll probably just upload our brand guidelines and be done with it. Then there was the desktop app on both Mac and Windows. There are a ton of third-party apps out there that use OpenAI's API to get you that functionality, but they almost all cost money. I use the GPT plugin on Raycast.

Starting point is 00:05:06 That's $8 a month for 3.5, GPT 3.5, and it's another $8 more if you want GPT-4. OpenAI did not say what the pricing would be for the 4.0 API, but any pricing would mean that these app developers would have to charge, probably pushing a lot of users to download the free official desktop app. That official app does exist right now, though it's a test build. It's a little hard to find, but when you log in, it just tells you it's not ready yet. For its part, Google had a big IO developer conference today, and here's what's interesting from that. First, of course, the model itself is getting an upgrade that will let it analyze longer documents, code bases, and longer videos and audio clips than before.

Starting point is 00:05:48 The company's main AI, which it calls Gemini, will be able to search, summarize, and draft Gmails using the tech. It'll also be able to handle multi-step tasks like looking for an e-commerce receipt in your archives, finding the receipt, then filling out an online form. They also previewed their version of a talking chatbot called Gemini Live. It's not quite as quick to respond as OpenAI's bot, and it sounds a little more robotic than its eerily human-sounding competitor. Like that one, though, you can interrupt it, ask clarifying questions, and when used on a phone, it can also see and respond to images you show it. Quoting TechCrunch, quote, at first glance, live doesn't seem like a drastic upgrade over existing tech, but Google claims it taps newer technologies from the generative AI field to deliver superior, less error-prone image analysis and combines these techniques with an enhanced speech engine

Starting point is 00:06:42 for more consistent, emotionally expressive, and realistic multi-turn dialogue, unquote. Google will also be putting a small version of the model directly into its Chrome browser. The company says this will let developers power their own simple AI features like a help me write tool and so on. More interestingly, from a marketing perspective, is they'll be letting users search using a video they upload. Users will then ask a question about the video or search they want. It's similar to the image search feature they have. But this kind of media search has already changed the game in SEO.

Starting point is 00:07:15 How much longer before we have to consider exploiting this new tech to try to get up first in the AI's response messages? Again, TechCrunch, quote, first introduced in 2021, the ability to search using both photos and text combined has helped Google's in areas that it typically struggles with. Like when there's a visual component to what you're looking for that's hard to describe or something that can be described in different ways.

Starting point is 00:07:38 For example, you could pull up a photo of a shirt you liked on Google search and then use Google Lens to find the same pattern on a pair of socks. Now, with the added ability to search via video, the company's reacting to how users, particularly young users, engage with the world through their smartphones. They often take videos, not photos, and express themselves creatively using video as well. It makes sense then that they'd also want to use video to search at times,

Starting point is 00:08:05 unquote. So all told, there was a lot of hype, a lot of buzz around AI in the last day. I hope that gives you a bit of a summary. Tomorrow, back with some other stories in the industry, including a lawsuit facing Reddit over disputed clicks and Instagram's big warning about the I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Two Steps Forward, No Steps Back. Ever.

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