📦️ AI assists eBay sellers

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Another crazy AI-fueled week in the books. Hope everyone enjoys the weekend!

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 📦️ AI assists eBay sellers

• 🔨 Retool’s new AI tools

• 📝 Mindtrip Memo

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

📦️ AI assists eBay sellers

eBay is revolutionizing the selling game with a groundbreaking AI tool that turns a single photo into a complete product listing.

This tool:

• Automates title and description creation

• Offers product details

• Suggests categories, prices, and shipping costs.

It's part of eBay's mission to streamline selling through AI, complementing AI-generated product descriptions and photo background removal.

Designed to combat the "cold start" challenge new eBay sellers face, the tool makes listing effortless and fun. Sellers no longer need to enter heaps of information - the AI has your back.

However, not everyone is thrilled with eBay's AI-driven direction.

• Longtime sellers have voiced concerns about the quality of the AI-generated descriptions, citing inaccuracies and verbosity. 

• There are worries about the photo recognition component, given the potential for biases in computer vision algorithms.

  With a disclaimer, eBay acknowledges the AI's potential inaccuracies, but sellers still question its use cases.

Overall: While the AI seems to receive some backlash from the OG users, eBay continues to move full steam ahead, aiming to transform the selling experience through AI innovation.

Read more: TechCrunch

🔨 Retool’s new AI tools

Retool, the versatile app-building platform, is making waves by diving into the AI world. Their new tools feature a hosted vector store - essentially allowing users to add context to massive language models.

While many businesses are eager to integrate AI into their apps, the true value lies in analyzing internal data efficiently. Copy-pasting data into queries can be costly and limited, and training models with all production data isn't practical.

The key to customizing data for large language models is vectorization, a technique adopted by tech giants like Google and Microsoft.

However, Retool's CEO, David Hsu, believes the challenge lies in keeping data fresh and synced with other platforms, such as Salesforce. That’s what Retool Vectors aims to solve.

In addition to vector storage, Retool offers AI-powered actions for tasks like:

• Generate Code

• Generate Text

• Generate Summaries

• Extract Labels

• Create Charts

Overall: This move promises to accelerate AI integration in businesses, reducing manual work and enhancing customer-facing capabilities while maintaining safety. Retool's AI wizardry is set to transform app building as we know it.

Read more: TechCrunch

📝 Mindtrip Memo

Let’s change things and do this one Investment Memo style!

Company: Mindtrip, an AI-powered travel planning and booking platform

Amount Raised: $7 million in seed funding from Costanoa Ventures.

Problem:

• Travel planning is complex and fragmented in the modern self-service era.

• On online booking platforms, travelers often find themselves piecing together flights, accommodations, activities, and dining reservations from various sources.

• This fragmented approach can be time-consuming, overwhelming, and lacks the personalized touch that traditional travel agents used to provide.

Solution:

• Mindtrip leverages AI to offer a comprehensive and streamlined travel planning experience.

• Their solution is an AI-driven travel assistant that utilizes natural language processing to understand user queries and provide personalized responses.

• Mindtrip's AI answers questions and integrates data from various sources to offer detailed information on destinations, availability, and even the ability to book restaurants and activities.

• It acts as a one-stop platform where travelers can plan and organize their entire trip from start to finish.

• This approach simplifies the travel planning process, making it faster, more efficient, and user-friendly while offering a personalized touch that caters to individual preferences and needs.

Big Competition:

• TripAdvisor AI

• Booking.com

Read more: TechCrunch

🤑 AI Fundraising News

Former Google AI leader lands $100M Series A raise for 'biological software' startup to discover new therapies and vaccines by creating mRNA molecules.

Arduino, an open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects, has raised an additional $22 million in funding.

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

1. Softbank Group backs former Argo AI founders on new self-driving truck startup.

2. Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot gets a paid plan for heavy users.

3. Google says AI-generated political ads must include clear disclaimers.

4. Pinterest unveils AI body type tech to increase representation.

5. Facebook trains its AI on your data. Opting out may be futile.

6. IBM rolls out new generative AI features and models.

7. New survey shows the emotional toll of AI anxiety employee monitoring.

🐦️ Tweet of the day

Another cool AI tool 🔧 

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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