Welcome, humans.

My orthodontist just told me her 95-year-old mother is using ChatGPT. We’ve hit escape velocity, folks!

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

• 3 companies make AI-related acquisitions.

• 43% of US adults have never heard of ChatGPT.

• Deepmind is building a ChatGPT competitor.

• Adobe is protecting enterprise clients from IP claims.

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Companies Are Choosing To Buy, Not Build AI 💰

In the race to stay on top of AI, companies have three options: build, buy, or partner.

Many firms like Discord, Snap, and Airbnb have opted for the simple route of baking GPT features into existing products.

But other, more enterprise-y companies are making a calculated move to buy AI tech rather than to build it.

This trend became evident when Snowflake snapped up Neeva to help enterprises search cloud data. Now, three other companies are joining the “invest-not-invent” club:

• Databricks acquired MosaicML (a platform to train models on your data) for $1.3 billion, roughly $2 million per employee!

• Fintech startup Ramp is buying Cohere.io, an AI-powered customer support startup.

• Thomson Reuters is shelling out $650 million in cash for Casetext (a legal AI company)

Why it matters: This is a critical window for companies to establish themselves as “AI-first”. But developing AI internally can be a headache and a half. Anticipate more SaaS firms to start shopping for AI infrastructure and talent this year.

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A Peak Into Who’s Actually Using AI 🙉

If you exist inside of Silicon Valley, you may think that everyone has AI agents running around automating tasks. But Silicon Valley isn’t the world (sorry).

A survey by The Verge of 2,000 US adults paints a clearer picture of who is using AI and what they’re using it for. Here are the deets:

Who is actually using AI:

• Despite most people knowing AI exists, a majority (67%) haven’t even started using any AI-powered products.

• So who is? Mostly GenZ and Millennials … and not so much their parents.

What are they using AI for:

Mostly for creative projects: photos, music, and stories. Professional tasks, like emails, coding, and data analysis, are less common.

Why it matters: AI will penetrate society first through consumers and then via businesses (thanks to stronger network effects + lower friction). We’re labelling my orthodontists’ 96-yr-old Mum an "outlier” and a “trailblazer”!

Around the Horn 🦄

• Build an AI app at Google’s Cloud Vertex AI Hackathon July 7-10!

• Deepmind is building an AI model that will rival ChatGPT, according to its CEO.

• Adobe will protect enterprise customers from third-party IP complaints over Firefly-generated artwork.

• The lawyers who cited fake legal research are being fined $5,000.

• YouTube is testing a tool that dubs videos into other languages with AI.

• Congress is limited to using ChatGPT Plus for its privacy features.

Treats To Try 🍿

• Chat with the Hacker News API using ChatHN.

• AWS Docs GPT is a search and chat engine for AWS documentation.

• Hour One transforms text, slides, & prompts into professional videos (includes templates & assets).

• Factiverse detects mistakes, bias, dispute in news, reports, and documents.

We curated the top 27 tools you need for work in our “Top Tools For Business”!

Tuesday Ticker ⏰

Here are the results from last week’s poll:

Funniest comment: “I'd be stupid to share all my knowledge about AI (thank you!) with my boss for free, wouldn't I?”

Here is this week’s poll:

A Cat's Commentary 😻

That's all we have for today. See you cool cats on Twitter if you're there: @nonmayorpete & @noahedelman02.