šŸ˜ŗ RIP Pi (the chatbot)

PLUS: one tip from OpenAI

Welcome, humans.

If youā€™ve got a fun reading spot, be sure to submit it here for a chance to be featured next Wednesday in Where do you #Neuron! Images with pets (you know which one) and/or coffee get bonus pointsā€¦

Hereā€™s what you need to know about AI today:

  • The makers of chatbot Pi are ditching their brainchild.

  • Our updated ranking of chatbots (that are still alive).

  • What OpenAIā€™s COO says managers/execs should do.

  • 7 AI companies that raised money in the last week.

RIP Pi. We hardly knew ya. šŸ«”

Is this what it feels like to see your favorite rock star retire?

Weā€™re huge fans of Pi, the chatbot thatā€™s an awesome personal confidante, coach and sounding board.

And weā€™ll be huge fans ā€˜til the very end, even though nearly all of Piā€™s parent company, Inflection AI, decided to jump ship just 10 months after Piā€™s launch.

What can we say? Weā€™re the loyal type.

That includes the CEO, Chief Scientist and nearly all 70 employees. All are joining Microsoft to work on Microsoft Copilot and other AI products.

Good product doesnā€™t mean good business. After raising $1.5B(!), Pi really had to get as big as Facebook for the business math to work out. But itā€™s clear they couldnā€™t find enough people like us to fall in love with Pi, much less charge us a single dollar.

BTW, every AI startup faces that pressure, including our other fave Perplexity, which has to get as close to Google size as they can.

Which means if you like an AI tool, be ready to look for backups. Theyā€™re all startups and youā€™re all early adopters, after all!

Updated list of chatbots to use (in order):

  • Claude 3

  • ChatGPT-4

  • Google Gemini

  • Perplexity

  • Bing Chat

  • Pi (RIP)*

*Pi isnā€™t shutting down today, but letā€™s face it, itā€™s a matter of time

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Jurny is modernizing the $4.1T hospitality industry.

Six months back, we gave you a sneak peek at Jurny, an AI startup revolutionizing hospitality with some of the slickest dashboards weā€™ve ever seen.

They help property managers like Airbnb to Booking.com automate everything from reservations to pricing, a $1 trillion inefficiency. 

After 5x customer growth and processing $35M+ in bookings, Jurny is giving The Neuron readers a chance to invest. 

You can learn more about their vision by checking out this in-depth Q&A with Jurnyā€™s CEO.

OpenAI COOā€™s single best tip for AI at work.

Raise your hand if youā€™re a business leader and still confused about how to make AI useful at work.

No judgment; itā€™s why weā€™re here.

Youā€™re not alone. This stuff takes time and learning to be valuable.

And nobody understands that more than OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who shared his one big tip about AI at work:

ā€œ90% of the value comes from giving people access to the tool and not thinking too much about it.ā€

In other words, your people will figure it out. Weā€™ll take it further with some of our tips:

  • Pay for the good stuff. Use ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro ($20/user/month). The upgrade is like going from black & white to life in full color.

  • Give permission and time, not just access. Encourage people to take the space to experiment, learn and share findings.

  • Start small and iterate. Just try one little task at a time.

Around the Horn.

  • Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated artificial general intelligence is <5 years away.

  • What Appleā€™s recent research releases says about its AI plans.

  • OpenAI is expected to launch GPT-5 over the summer. Early previews show it is ā€œmaterially betterā€ than GPT-4.

  • Saudi Arabia wants to invest $40B in AI.

Wednesday Wirings.

  1. Together AI, which makes a popular cloud platform for AI, raised $106M.

  2. Hippocratic AI, building a large language model for healthcare, raised $50M.

  3. Adaptive, which helps enterprises customize AI models, raised $20M.

  4. Xaver, which builds an AI platform for insurance companies and pensions, raised $5M.

  5. Neural Earth raised $1.4M to build AI for property and casualty insurance.

  6. Zephyr AI raised $111M to build AI for precision medicine.

  7. Empathy raised $47M to build AI tools for the bereavement process.

A Cat's Commentary.

Where do you #Neuron?

Spotlight on this weekā€™s #neuron champ: One cat = awesome. Two cats = doubly awesome. Itā€™s simple algebra yā€™all.

Alice from Strasbourg, France

Livia from London

another cat from Minneapolis, MN!

Clive from Waiheke Island, New Zealand

Share your Neuron reading spots here!

Thatā€™s all for today, for more AI treats, check out our website.

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See you cool cats on Twitter: @nonmayorpete & @noahedelman02

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