Welcome, humans.

We’ve got so many big ideas for 2024 (think courses, podcasts, & more), and we’re eager for your input. Pretty please fill out our 2-minute audience survey—we'll pick one respondent at random and reimburse your AI tool of choice (up to $250)!

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

• Grok is roughly ChatGPT-3.5 level; don’t buy just yet.

• We've uncovered 5 impressive custom GPTs for you.

• Ilya Sutskever hasn’t been seen recently at OpenAI’s HQ.

• Most Neuron readers are using AI for some work tasks.

Our honest review of Elon Musk’s “Grok”.

Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor “Grok” is finally live for all X Premium+ subscribers in the US and we took it for a test drive.

The result: Grok is just mid.

(mid like a cold ham and cheese sandwich—no crust.)

Its performance is roughly the same as ChatGPT-3.5—the free version—with a few notable exceptions. It’s:

• noticeably slower.

• more personable.

• less likely to say, “I can’t answer that.”

• capable of tapping into live info from X (but often pulls outdated tweets in our tests).

It’s actually so similar to ChatGPT-3.5 that some speculated Grok was trained on ChatGPT’s responses, though this was debunked by an xAI engineer (plus OpenAI bans such practices).

Why it matters: Chatbots at ChatGPT-3.5’s level are becoming commodities, much like toilet paper, and thankfully, not the sandpaper kind…

The big question is whether ChatGPT-4 will follow this trend.

So far, no company has matched GPT-4, except maybe Gemini in theory. Grok doesn’t even come close, which is why we suggest avoiding the $16/month subscription for now.

But don't write off Grok just yet. They’ve got a treasure chest of proprietary data from X and Tesla that could help distinguish itself from its rivals.

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5 custom GPTs to put on your radar.

We initially hyped up GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT, as the “next big thing”.

Fast forward, and not that many people are using GPTs—they’re a bit slow and hard to create, plus OpenAI delayed its App Store for GPTs. 

We’re still bullish.

We created custom GPTs for a major real estate firm that employees enjoy, plus many Reddit users have reported creating GPTs more helpful than GPT-4.

The key is feeding GPTs specialized knowledge that ChatGPT doesn’t have: think APIs, legal contracts, company manuals, GitHub repositories, customer support queries, and the like.

It's about pinpointing repetitive tasks, figuring out what data could help ChatGPT, and adding feedback loops to help the GPT improve.

In the meantime, here are some popular GPTs (full rankings here):

• Grimoire: a powerful coding assistant.

• ResearchGPT: research assistant with access to 200M papers.

• DesignerGPT: creates and hosts websites.

• Data Analysis: analyze and visualize data.

• ChatGPT Classic: the OG version of ChatGPT with no updates.

Around the Horn.

• Investing.com got caught publishing AI-generated stories that seem to copy competitors.

• Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s Chief Scientist who helped oust Sam Altman, has been MIA at OpenAI HQ lately.

• OpenAI is joining forces with ex-Twitter India lead Rishi Jaitly to expand in India.

• Microsoft and the CWA union struck a deal: unionized staff will have a voice in the company's AI deployment.

Tuesday Ticker.

Last week’s poll results are in:

2024 goal: to shift all of y’all into the first category.

Let us know if you’re using GPTs!

This Should (Probably) Exist.

The only thing worse than being totally lost in a movie is to receive the dreaded “psst, hey, what just happened???” whisper.

That sparked an idea: imagine a chatbot that explains movies when they get too twisty.

Perfect for mind-benders like Inception, though we doubt streaming giants like Netflix would jump on board…

A Cat's Commentary.