🧙🏼‍♂️ Collaborate better with Claude

Howdy, wizards.

OpenAI is postponing ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode “until the fall”. But worry not, there’s some amazing treats launched this week when it comes to using AI with voice.

Dario’s Picks

The most important news stories in AI this week

1. Claude just got more collaborative with Projects. You can now organize your chats with Claude into shareable projects. Each project has its own knowledge base and you can set project-specific custom instructions.

    

    Why it matters  Projects bring together the customisation that GPTs have, but let’s everyone contribute to it. You can also share snapshots of your best convos with your team. Paired with the new Artifacts feature, Claude might be winning the user interface race for chatbots at the moment. Summary below.

    

2. ChatGPT’s MacOS app is now available to everyone. The key features compared to the web version are a fast desktop shortcut, easier file sharing, and ability to search conversations. It also has a dictation / voice typing button.

    

    Why it matters  ChatGPT is coming closer to where most of us do our work, the desktop. The shortcut and conversation search are certainly practical. The biggest productivity boost for me has been the dictation button, allowing me to ramble/speak freely for several minutes at a time while multitasking and dropping in relevant screenshots – ChatGPT somehow still makes sense of it all.

    

3. Character.ai introduces Character Calls. Characters now have a call button for live conversations. Works only on the mobile app. ICYM Character AI is this massively popular platform among Gen Z for chatting to real and fictional characters, where its users spend on average 2 hours a day chatting to bots. The company is now worth $1B and has about 20M monthly users.

    

    Why it matters  The voice interaction on character calls is actually a step faster than ChatGPT’s current voice mode, and the bots are better with humour. Try it for yourself – ask Michael Scott from the Office for some business advice. Don’t mention Toby though, or he’ll get him grumpy.

    

4. Eleven Labs now has a reader app. It lets you read any content content you come across on the web in a human-like voice. Just paste a link or use the iOS share button in Safari.

    

    Why it matters  A simple yet super handy use case for AI, which could materially reduce your screen time. With this product, Eleven Labs is going head to head with Speechify, the market leading AI reader. We’ll be making a comparison on these tools soon – so stay tuned for that.

    

5. More challenging benchmarks for Open LLMs. HuggingFace’s leaderboard for open LLMs got six new benchmarks. The previous ones got too easy for the models (and newer models had possibly used them for training, ie contamination), leading to a plateau in performance.

    

    Why it matters  Good benchmarks makes it possible to evaluate the models’ performance, separating actual results from marketing fluff. This helps researchers identify areas of improvement.

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Tool picks

The very best AI tools we’ve tried recently. We personally test and review AI tools to find the best one for every task. How we test & review tools.

Recent top picks

‎ Meeting notes  🥇 Fathom

‎ Music Generation  🥇 Suno

‎ Text to speech  🥇Speechify

 Presentations  🥇Gamma‎

 Academic research  🥇SciSpace

Behind the news

Claude just got more collaborative with Projects

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is making waves. Less than 2 weeks ago they released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a new model which beats GPT-4o on several key benchmarks. That new model was coupled with an amazing feature, Artifacts, which lets users build and edit apps inside Claude. It’s similar to how Code Interpreter works in ChatGPT, but takes it a step further by letting you create things like website prototypes, simple games and simulations.

Claude Projects, available to Pro and Team users, lets you gather all your chat activity and knowledge on a topic in the same place. All in a collaborative space, where people can highlight their best chats with Claude. You can upload documents to increase the project’s knowledge; the context window of a project is 200k tokens, about the size of a 500-page book. Each project can also have its own custom instructions.

 Why it matters  The performance of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, coupled with its ability to create Artifacts and now Projects, makes Claude the most viable alternative to ChatGPT – even for teams and businesses. For many use cases, Projects as a collaborative space makes more sense than building a custom GPT that only one person has the possibility to edit.

ChatGPT still got several aces up its sleeve in terms of user experience, though, including image generation (with DALL-E), better voice mode, the desktop app, and having internet access.

GPTs

Newcomers on whatplugin.ai’s top 1,000 list of GPTs in the last week. How rankings work.

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