[#2] AI can be your therapist, best friend or romantic partner

Hi, Thanks a lot for Subscribing to my Newsletter. I am changing the format a little bit and trying something new this week.

Anthropic release Clause Sonnet 3.5 and it is beating almost all benchmarks and beating GPT-4o (The best-performing model so far). If you want, you can try it for free here → https://claude.ai/chat/ It’s also available on AWS Bedrock.

AI Chat App with 250M+ users

Over 250 million people love talking to AI personas every month! Say Hi to Character AI which just crossed over 250M+ users but has yet to figure out how to generate revenue. They recently raised over $150M from marquee investors like a16Z, SV Angel, and others with a $1B valuation. Character AI lets you talk to AI personas from a therapist to a friend or a virtual girlfriend. It’s free to try. I assumed AI would never be able to affect the social aspect of our lives but I guess it’s too hard to predict the future. They are still only available in English, it would be interesting to see these kinds of bots in local languages like Hindi.

I actually would love a bot like this for my mother and other elderly to make sense of the world. Maybe my mom can just call one of the AI bots and ask how to cast Chromecast to the TV in Hindi. Imagine a world where you can call these AI bots in any language and ask them about any topic at all.

Google might actually be in trouble

Perplexity is going strong on the other end. I use a lot of ChatGPT every day for writing emails, completing my tests, or generating one pager but I keep coming back to Perplexity when I want a quick detailed answer. Perplexity is slowly replacing my own habits of “googling” for answers, they might be onto something big here. The founder “Aravind Srinivas” seems like a grounded guy and has a great team of investors including Elad Gill who also invested in Character AI. They have raised around $63M with a valuation of $1B. They are on the path to $20M ARR and are now raising over $250M with over $2.5B valuation.

I Sold over $2000 worth of Software on API.market

On a side note, I sold over $2000 dollar worth of software made by other people on the Internet. (via api.market). I still think it’s kind of crazy that people are willing to pay random strangers on the Internet across the Globe. We also crossed 500 total users.

Interesting AI-powered tools this week:

n8n.io: The most powerful AI workflow Automation tool available for free: Last week I tested over 15+ AI automation tools but none of them worked out for me. I have used n8n in the past but with OpenAI integration this tool has become 100X useful. n8n allows you to create any kind of AI workflow, you can use it to do research, analyze data, parse emails, do ElasticSearch queries, and pretty much anything you could have thought of. I am using this tool to generate long-form articles with clickbait titles, and descriptions and post them automatically on WordPress. I run it locally using Docker, there is also a community-developed helm chart if you want to deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster.

TryJournalistic: AI SEO blog writer. They crossed over $20K MRR as reported on Twitter by the founders. A lot of users have reported good SEO results. I tried this for blog.api.market but to be honest it is far easier to use ChatGPT to generate really good articles, for example I created these articles using AI: https://blog.api.market/ai-api/3-ideas-to-make-1000-a-month-using-face-swap-api-no-experience-needed/2518/ (Featured in last week’s newsletter).

GumLoop: AI workflow automation. This is one of the tools that stood out of all the other AI workflow tools I have tried. It is quite easy to use as compared to other tools. You can integrate any LLM API etc and create workflows to get tasks done such as creating articles, doing research, analyzing data, etc.

Top Podcasts I recommend this week: Starbucks by Acquired with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/starbucks-with-howard-schultz). What a treat this one was.

Top Book I recommend this week: A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald K. Fierstein Amazon (Ronald K. Fierstein) (Amazon Link). If you haven’t read this book yet, I strongly recommend you get it now. Edwin Land invented Polarized sheets which had been an unsolved problem for over 100+ years and he was in his 20s when he did that. But he was not done, he invented “one-step” photography and the iconic Polaroid cameras which were 100% analog and did a whole chemical process to print photographs in less than a minute as compared to 1 week it took to process photos before that.

That’s it for this week folks, lookout for next week’s newsletter. What did you think of this email?

Please send me a reply with your thoughts. I would love to hear from you. Are you working on something interesting, any new book you read? Let me know and I am happy to share with other readers as well.

Thanks and have a great day.

Regards,
Shashank Agarwal