A few clicks to build your own AI chatbot
The world has changed... again
A whole swath of potential business ideas in the AI space got decimated this week by the King simply deciding to offer those services himself, ruthlessly cutting out all the middle men. OpenAI introduced a host of features that have made a bunch of potential startups obsolete before they even got started.
I had often thought a sort of “AI marketplace” would be neat. A site where people could sell their AI tools. Well, so did OpenAI. The GPT Store is coming later this month. I had also thought that a business where you make people and businesses customised chatbots would be pretty useful. Well, so did OpenAI. Let me show you customised GPTs where you can simply build your own chatbot by uploading a host of PDFs and giving it instructions on how to act.
This being The Future, the way you build one of these is by opening up a conversation with the GPT Builder and talking to it about what you want. I made one that converses in Amharic and another that is built on my articles and is instructed to reply like me. To be honest I can’t see any hint yet that it sounds like me, but I think uploading my childhood diaries might supercharge this one.
There is a GPT that is plugged into Canva (for design projects) and people are building ones that write their LinkedIn posts based on their best performing previous LinkedIn posts… there’s already a whole directory of them… it is getting crazy out there.
But it is still ring-fenced to paying customers who are on the $20 ChatGPT pro plan. This can only serve to leave a huge amount of Internet users and media practitioners behind.
Coding Corner (the gradual process of a journalist learning how to code)
It is OpenAI’s plan for us all to work “without code”. That is the catchphrase of 2023, just as I was beginning to learn how to do it. But coding knowledge is still going to be useful, because it will let you work outside of what these companies want you to do with their tools.
Like with HTML when we used to write our websites just in notepad, but eventually we all moved to services like Squarespace (which I’m ashamed to say I use religiously) but it has made huge chunks of the Internet look the same.
The way for our products and services to stay unique is to embrace the coding.
What AI was used in creating this newsletter?
Besides the picture below, none at all.
In the news…
Two podcast episodes worth listening to about the GPT creating explosion: Newsroom Robots and Hard Fork.
The New Yorker does its meditative thing with a feature on Geoffrey Hinton (the “Godfather of AI”). The article is set on his private island which he bought in 2013, when he was 65-years-old, after selling a three-person startup to Google for $44m.
Amazon unsurprisingly is training their own AI model called Olympus.
What’s new at Develop AI? I went to Ethiopia and spoke about AI to stacks of lovely people from community radio stations.
Community radio stations have always had precarious business models, but by bringing a host of AI tools and processes to their stations I think we could really give them the advantages they need. That is the conclusion I came to last week by being at Radio Days Ethiopia, a truly inspiring event that hosted 76 participants from 35 community radio stations from across the country.
I gave a masterclass with Ruth Bekele on podcasting and how to use the fabulous MethodKit for Podcasts. I also gave a class on AI and journalism. People were very interested (and a little afraid) with regards to what this could mean for the future of journalism (and their jobs). Hopefully I managed to leave people feeling optimistic and curious about how they can use these tools in their work.
A huge thanks to Sofie Gullberg, Fojo’s Programme Manager in Ethiopia, and her team for the interesting chats and organising the event. Thanks to Karolina Luczak Santana, Barbara Gruber and Mikias Sebsibe from DW Akademie for every way that they helped me during the week. It was great to see Professor Franz Krüger there who continues to do phenomenal work in the community radio space all around the world. I look forward to figuring out how to take these stations on the next step towards using all this AI stuff to make better content.
See you next week. All the best,
Join our WhatsApp Community, listen to our AI generated podcast, visit our website, or contact us on X, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok.
Physically we are based in Cape Town, South Africa.
You can email me directly on paul@developai.co.za.
If you aren’t subscribed to this newsletter, click here.