🛒 Shopify’s Sidekick

PLUS: AI helps scientists to eavesdrop on endangered dolphins

Author

Haroon Choudery
July 28, 2023

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Happy Friday, fellow humans. 👋

TGIF. No, seriously. Thank God.

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🧵 In today's edition:

  • 🖼️ Stability AI unleashes Stable Diffusion XL 1.0

  • 🛟 Stack Overflows with AI

  • 🛒 Shopify’s Sidekick

  • 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🖼️ Stability AI unleashes Stable Diffusion XL 1.0

Stability AI is taking no prisoners.

After launching two open-source LLMs last week, they have released the most advanced image-generating model yet, Stable Diffusion XL 1.0.

And yes, this is an open model too.

Here are the major upgrades:

  • It’s the biggest open-access image model built, composed of a 3.5B parameter base model and a 6.6B parameter refiner

  • It’s capable of “advanced” text generation and legibility

  • It supports:

    • Inpainting - reconstructing missing parts of an image

    • Outpainting - extending existing images

    • “Image-to-image” - using an image and text prompts to create detailed variations of that image

But like most image generation models, Stable Diffusion XL also has an ethical Achilles heel.

Being trained on millions of images from the web means that deepfakes and biased content are big possibilities, despite Stability AI’s efforts to filter out unsafe data.

Overall: Stability AI is steadfast in its mission to inspire global creativity while being safe and ethical.

Only time will tell if they can actually pull it off.

Read more: TechCrunch

🛟 Stack Overflows with AI

Over the past couple of days, this picture has been circulating on Twitter, showing a ~50% decline in Stack Overflow’s page views over the past couple of years.

One of the biggest reasons for this decline (among other things) are LLMs like Github CoPilot and ChatGPT, which have made it 10x easier to debug and generate code.

But SO has a solution - a roadmap to integrate AI into its public Q&A platform, Teams product, and new IDE integrations.

The overarching goal? To leverage AI to enhance search, knowledge sharing, and developer productivity.

Key features include:

  1. Conversational semantic search, which will focus on giving users more intelligent responses based on their queries

  2. Enterprise knowledge, which will allow new engineers/teammates to understand a company’s tech stack and read documentation filled with accurate, up-to-date votes, edits, comments, views, etc.

  3. A Slack chatbot and a VS Code extension

Guided by developer feedback, the company will iterate carefully on these AI features to augment - not replace - the knowledge and expertise of its community.

Overall: SO is empowering developers through trusted AI assistance. And with its unparalleled corpus of 58M Q&As, they are uniquely positioned to lead in this space.

🛒 Shopify’s Sidekick

Shopify conquered SMB e-commerce.

Now, they’ve raised the bar again by announcing Shopify Magic, their suite of generative AI tools, at the Editions conference.

Magic leverages LLMs like ChatGPT while utilizing Shopify's own merchant data to create relevant, customized text for their customers.

The coolest part of Magic is Sidekick, a new conversational assistant designed to understand e-commerce and help merchants.

Wondering why your sales dropped from March to June? Or how to write a blog post introducing a new product?

Sidekick has your back, answering questions, following instructions, and making suggestions - essentially acting like a virtual employee for Shopify stores.

Overall: Shopify believes AI will be transformative for entrepreneurs and is committed to democratizing AI while prioritizing safety.

The future of e-commerce is AI-powered, and Shopify is leading the charge.

Read more: TechCrunch

🤑 AI Fundraising News

AutogenAI, a generative AI tool writing bids and pitches, secures $22.3M.

CompScience, which uses visual AI to eliminate workplace safety hazards, raises $10M.

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

  1. 'AI and the Church' tech initiative aims to bring God's power to those in need.

  2. Photoshop can now use generative AI to expand images

  3. A painting newly attributed to Raphael by A.I. facial recognition goes on view for the first time

  4. Samsung extends cut in memory chip production, will focus on high-end AI chips instead

  5. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to build a new agency to police Big Tech

  6. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom join forces to take on Google and Apple Maps

  7. AWS is ready to power AI agents that can handle busywork instead of just chatting

  8. The workers behind AI rarely see its rewards. This Indian Startup Wants to Fix That

  9. AI helps scientists to eavesdrop on endangered pink dolphins

🐦️ Tweet of the day

💁 Pretty awesome to watch Embra’s journey! Watch the video below to see what they’re up to.

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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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