AI Is Coming for You

This Week

• AI is coming for you

• The new Claude release

• The ultimate prompting technique

• Top AI chatbots for marketers

• Why adopting GenAI is so difficult

• Free LinkedIn AI course

AI Is Coming For You

Sam Altman dropped a bomb on the marketing community last week, leaving many of us questioning our future careers. He predicts that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will take over 95% of the tasks currently performed by marketing agencies and creatives within 5 years.

In the interview, Altman notes AI's profound impact on marketing and highlights its ability to generate and test creative marketing content quickly and at minimal cost. These are efficiency and productivity gains companies will no doubt want to jump on. Just look at Klarna.

I don’t know about you, but this comment felt like it exploded my future marketing career. I’m an eternal optimist and excited about AI possibilities for marketing — but not when it threatens to bulldoze the last 20 years of my work.

It made me wonder. Are we all doomed?

Find out at Medium.

The Smartests (AI) Of Them All

Anthropic claims its new Claude 3 language model outperforms ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in industry benchmarks. The most advanced model, Claude 3 Opus, was found to outperform OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini Ultra in benchmark assessments related to knowledge, reasoning, and mathematics. 

According to Anthropic, some of Claude 3's Advantages are:

• Visual Analysis

• It can process large amounts of information for in-depth tasks

• Its writing style tends to be more conversational and less sales-y than other AI tools.

• It’s better at understanding and writing code than GPT-4.

Ethan Mollick says it also does a good job of needle-in-the-text stacks and writes a superior sonnet. 

IndyDevDan argues that the benchmarks don't show how well an LLM performs in real-life tests. His tool, Last LLM Standing, shows how different LLMs perform on a set of prompts — and spoiler, Claude’s models don’t perform all that well. 

For all the details on Anthropic’s new release, read on here. 

The Only Prompt You’ll Ever Need

This one prompting strategy will change the way you prompt forever — and it’s going to surprise you.

If your feed is like mine, it’s overflowing with "ultimate guides" and cryptic hacks—like instructing your AI to take a deep breath or giving it a pep talk.

But what if you didn’t need any of that? 

Two researchers at cloud computing company VMware set out to find the best prompts for solving math equations. Despite their efforts, they discovered that the ideal prompt changed depending on each scenario. Techniques used to improve outputs (like chain-of-thought commands) helped in some cases but degraded performance in others. 

“The only real trend may be no trend,” they said. “What’s best for any given model, dataset, and prompting strategy is likely to be specific to the particular combination at hand.”

The solution?

Asking each model to create its own parameters, and then allowing the platform to test each of those prompts on itself. 

They claim no one should manually optimize prompts ever again.

“You’re just sitting there trying to figure out what special magic combination of words will give you the best possible performance for your task. Just develop a scoring metric so that the system itself can tell whether one prompt is better than another, and then just let the model optimize itself.”

Read the full article here. 

The Top AI Chatbots for Marketers

With all this talk about advanced AI models and chatbots, it’s still a battle figuring out which one you should use (and pay for). While each chatbot has it’s strengths and weaknesses, I’ve found some are better than others.

If you want a full comparison of the top bots available today, I like ElegantTheme’s breakdown. It’s fairly recent (March 4th), so they’re including the newer updates on Gemini and Claude. And they focus on functionality — like blog writing and ad campaign creation — that marketers actually care about.

See the full comparison here. 

Why Adopting GenAI Is So Difficult

If you’re having trouble implementing GenAI at your company, you’re not alone. According to Harvard Business Review, many companies are still grappling with turning this new technology into real business value.

The truth is that generative AI tools like large language models (LLMs) are powerful but not exactly "plug and play."

Here are 5 key considerations to help you decide if and how to get your GenAI initiative off the ground:

1. Focus on Performance, Not Just Buzz: Don't get caught up in the hype. Identify tasks where AI can genuinely improve efficiency or effectiveness. Focus on measurable outcomes, not just novelty.

2. AI + Partner Tools = Supercharge Your Results: Think of LLMs as one piece of the puzzle. Combine them with tools like vector databases for enhanced information retrieval or data analysis platforms for deeper insights.

3. Keep a Human in the Loop: AI isn't meant to replace humans. Always keep a human "in the loop" to ensure high-quality, relevant, and ethically sound outputs.

4. Know Your Data, Know Your Results: Trace the data used by your AI tools to ensure accuracy and avoid biases. This transparency is crucial for building trust in AI-generated outputs.

5. Set Realistic Expectations: AI is still evolving. While it can be a powerful tool, it's not a magic solution. Set realistic expectations about its capabilities and focus on how it can complement your existing workflow.

HRB says you can move beyond the initial hype and harness the true potential of generative AI tools for real-world business applications by following these steps.

Read the full article here. 

Career Essentials for Generative AI

If you’re a Mircosoft user and want to brush up on your GenAI knowledge, LinkedIn and Microsoft have just launched a free learning course. It covers the core concepts of artificial intelligence and functionality, including:

• A history of GenAI models

• GenAI’s impact on SEO

• Ethical considerations

• The top AI tools

Join the course here. 

That’s it for this week! See you next time.