šŸ˜ŗ Hidden AI economy EXPOSED

PLUS: An AI model for sound effects!

Welcome, humans.

So yā€™know how AI companies are getting sued by authors and news companies for copyright infringement? You can count on TV screenwriters soon joining that listā€¦

It turns out, the subtitles from over 139K movies and TV shows (not the actual scripts themselves) were used in a dataset to train AI.

Needless to say, the screenwriters are PISSED. What, you thought they went on strike all last year for the looks?

Well congratulations, Hollywood, hereā€™s your revenge: we used the AI Claude to create an entire feature screenplay based on the dramatic emails between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over the founding of OpenAI:

Just for fun, of course.

And because AI works canā€™t be copyrighted, ANYONE can use this script and go make a movie out of it. So if AI companies can take your publicly available writing and ā€œtransformā€ it into new contentā€¦ why canā€™t you do the same to them?

P.S: We could also pull a Shrek Retold, where everybody picks a scene and we all cobble it together using AI. Bonus points if your scene features cats!

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

  • We break down Klarnaā€™s eye-popping AI strategy.

  • NVIDIA launched AI audio converter.

  • IMAX adopted AI dubbing tech.

  • Zoom pivoted to AI-first platform.

Well, well, well... it looks like Klarna actually knows how to use AIā€¦

Heads up: there are actually two AI economies right nowā€”the official one, where only 5% of American businesses say they're using AI, and the shadow one, where one-third of employees quietly use AI tools on the regular.

Weā€™re guessing youā€™re like us (and also Batman) and work in the shadowsā€¦

A recent Google study found the generational divide on this topic is stark:

Well, Klarna just showed us what happens when you bridge this gapā€”and the numbers are eye-opening:

  1. Marketing costs down 16% from AI-generated content.

  2. Customer service costs down 14%.

  3. 90% of staff uses AI daily (and their AI chatbot handles 2 out of every 3 of customer service chats).

Reminder: this is all after Klarna fired 700 employees and replaced them with AI (and it may even cut 1,800 more jobs).

Now here's the wild part: Klarnaā€™s tech costs rose 17% (to $227M) from all its AI investmentsā€”plus itā€™s still hiring engineers. And yet, as The Information points out, the productivity gains far outweighed the investment.

So what did Klarna figure out that everyone else missed? Love it or hate it, Klarna made its AI use open and strategicā€”not something employees hide.

First, it picked the right battles. Instead of trying to use AI for everything, Klarna focused on stuff that actually makes sense to automate today:

  1. Customer service automation (its chatbot covers for those 700 fired humans).

  2. AI-generated marketing content and translations.

  3. Internal productivity tools.

Second, Klarna committed to it. That 90% daily usage stat is wild. Most companies are still debating whether to let employees use ChatGPT.

The takeaway? The winners in the AI economy above won't be the companies or employees that avoid AI, or let it spread in the shadows. They'll be the ones that create environments where they (or 90% of employees) can use AI openly and strategically.

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Treats To Try.

  1. *Be 10x more productive with Storytell: automate repetitive tasks, focus on impactful work, and achieve your goals fast. Boost results effortlessly now with a free trial

  2. TwoMind acts as your browser sidebar assistant that understands everything you see and hear across your tabs.

  3. Sparkbase automates the process of building and managing your B2B sales pipeline.

  4. Runway Expand Video lets you expand and reframe AI videos made with the video generator Runway (hereā€™s how).

  5. ComfyUIā€™s desktop app lets you create custom image workflows through a drag-and-drop interface (read more here).

  6. Play.AI clones voices and turn them into interactive AI agents that can have natural back-and-forth conversations (like NotebookLM).

  7. Socap helps you find warm introductions to investors by mapping your network connections and suggesting intro paths to VCs you want to meet.

  8. Gitlaw is a free GitHub-style repository of legal templates where you can find, customize, and version-control your contracts with AI.

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Around the Horn.

  • NVIDIA launched Fugatto (featured above), a sound model that transforms any audio input into different sounds and music based on your text descriptions.

  • IMAX will use Camb.ai to translate original content in its theaters with the companyā€™s dubbing and speech translation.

  • Zoom (or should we say, Zoom 2.0) is focused on becoming an ā€œAI-first work platform for human connectionā€ with its AI Companion and other AI features.

  • Fill out our 1-minute advertiser survey before 12/4 and youā€™ll be entered to win $500 in cash!

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Want to learn how companies are actually shipping AI (and maybe win a MacBook M4)?

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Under the hood

MCP is an open-source protocol to connect data to any LLM. Full blog post hereā€¦ and hereā€™s a demo of why this is great.

  1. LlaVA-o1 is an open-source vision model that uses GPT-o1's step-by-step reasoning approach, but for images instead of textā€”breaking down complex visual questions into logical steps to get better answers (paper).

  2. Thereā€™s also Fireworks, who released f1 and f1-mini, new compound AI models that excel at complex reasoning tasks (like o1), with early access to the API via sign-up form.

  3. Toolhouse adds capabilities like web search and code execution to your AI apps in three lines of code.

  4. LTX-Video is an open-source tool that turns your text or images into high-quality videos in real-time, generating them faster than you can watch them (at 24 FPS).

Tuesday Ticker

  • I.A. chose Perfect for driving: ā€œOnly bad thing is when it picks up the quiet ambient noise from the drive and keeps repeating that it cannot understand me with no way to interrupt it.ā€

  • S.H. chose Language practice buddy: ā€œI'm in Spain right now and practice while walking along the beachā€

  • A.B. chose Actually I use it for something else: ā€œReally good cooking assistant.ā€

  • P.Z. chose Perfect for brain dump: ā€œUse case: telling the story of a case study and then having ChatGPT use this to draft copyā€

  • G.H. chose No I donā€™t: ā€œI donā€™t want to talk.ā€ Fair enough. 

Check out the full story here if you missed it.

A Cat's Commentary.

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

The best way to support us is by checking out our sponsorsā€”todayā€™s are:

See you cool cats on Twitter: @noahedelman02

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