Welcome, humans.

In a bold move to tackle its declining birth rate, Japan is offering AI matchmaking services for just $100. Meanwhile, a startup in the US is charging a whopping $100,000 for something similar.

The "everything in Japan is cheap right now!” is starting to make a bit more sense…

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Meta is serving more of its customers with AI vs. humans.

• Mistral released a new top-tier model.

• Debates are swirling about whether Google CEO Sundar Pichai should step down.

• 62% of Neuron readers are more excited for Sora than Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Big Tech shows AI is just as good.

Big Tech is proving an uncomfortable new reality: automating customer-facing teams using AI is totally going to happen.

Meta and Google, tired of seeing their employees' "day in the life" TikToks featuring poolside lounging and green smoothies, are trimming the fat.

And it's working.

Digiday reported that Meta's big automation push reduced the # of employees managing a customer’s ad campaigns from 10 down to just 2-3, with big strategy questions going to those 2-3 humans and the remaining nitty-gritty handled by AI chatbots.

You might be thinking, "Surely this must mean worse service?" And yeah, initially the customers were a little peeved.

However, it turns out that, much like those seldom-used personal concierges from high-end credit cards, companies mostly have account teams to say them have them, not cause they’re actually that useful.

Even worse, one Meta advertiser said they didn't actually know what their account reps did!

They were making TikToks, duhh...

Here’s what this means for businesses:

• Incorporating AI chatbots for customer support is not only feasible but becoming more accepted by consumers.

• Do a deep audit of how much work your customer teams actually do and how much can be transitioned to self-service platforms.

• Don’t aim for *full* automation; just start with the basics for now.

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Mistral's new model takes on OpenAI and Google

In just 10 months, one AI company wowed the field by raising a fat $415M, building elite models and giving them all away for free.

Enter Mistral.

The start just released its ChatGPT competitor, “Le Chat”, powered by a new AI model called “Mistral Large”.

Um, excuse me? You literally called your chatbot "the cat"?? Sign us up ASAP!

Their track record speaks volumes.

The new Mistral Large edges close to (but not better than) top-tier options like OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude 2, and Google Gemini Pro. All made by companies years older.

But here's the twist: Mistral aims to cash in this time. Unlike their previous giveaways, Mistral Large will hit the market via a partnership with Microsoft, available on Microsoft Azure.

You can try Mistral Large by signing up for Le Chat here.

Around the Horn.

• The Gemini snafus has led to doubt about Sundar Pichai as Google CEO.

• Meta launched a new team to address AI deception in EU elections.

• Perplexity is giving away its premium search engine to SK Telecom users in a new partnership.

• Singapore's government is doubling down on AI, starting with an AI-driven badminton court reservation chatbot.

Tuesday Ticker.

Here are the results from last week’s poll:

• 💬 B. “Getting to full 3D modeling for videos... after that will be interactivity. 3D environments from text descriptions.”

• 📹 B.C. “Like stable diffusion, sora will be fun to play with. But I use LLMs (including Gemini Advanced) constantly at work.”

• 🎞️ B.P. “personally have more use for creating videos with little knowledge of how to create effective prompts.”

Here’s this week’s poll:

A Cat's Commentary.