Welcome to AI Tool Report!

Wednesday’s top story: Anthropic has released a new Claude feature that can control your PC and complete tasks, based on prompts.

🌤️ This Morning on AI Tool Report

1. 💻 Can Anthropic’s Claude control your PC?

2. 💼 How to become an AI Consultant

3. 🎭 Kevin Bacon fights against AI exploits

4. 🧮 How to have a stressless tax season with AI

5. ⬆️ How to upsell using ChatGPT

6. 📰 OpenAI and Microsoft give $10M to local news

7. 💹 Former White House Economist joins OpenAI

Read Time: 5 minutes

FACT OF THE DAY

🤔 According to the AI Index, the world’s top universities have increased their AI-related education over the last few years, for example, Stanford University increased the number of AI-related courses from 25 in 2010 to 140 in 2023.

STOCK MARKETS

👀 Stocks recover from a selloff that started the session, as Microsoft out-performs the market. NVIDIA consolidated above all-time highs and will potentially make a move to overthrow Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Learn more.

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CHATBOTS

💻 Can Anthropic’s Claude control your PC?

Our Report: Anthropic has released (in public beta) an upgraded version of its AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, with a new feature called ‘Computer Use’ that, once given prompt-based instructions, can complete a range of tasks on a computer—including searching the web, clicking buttons, opening applications, and typing text, using the mouse and keyboard—autonomously, emulating a person, sitting at a PC.

🔑 Key Points:

• In a demo, the upgraded Claude was asked to plan an outing with a friend, and in response, it opened Chrome, found all the relevant information on Google, created a calendar event, and then sent invites. 

• Although humans remain in control, Claude has been trained to see what’s happening on the screen and break human prompts into computer commands (eg. move the cursor, click, type, etc) to complete the task.

• Anthropic has cautioned that the feature is “error-prone,” and might struggle with basic actions like scrolling/zooming, but has “released it early for feedback from developers”, and expects the “capability to improve rapidly.”

🤔 Why you should care: Although several AI models can complete actions based on what they can see on a computer screen—namely Microsoft’s Copilot Vision feature, OpenAI’s ChatGPT desktop feature, and Adept (which trains models to browse websites and navigate software)—none of them can click around and perform tasks autonomously like Claude can, as it can self-correct, retry tasks, and works toward objectives that require multiple steps, but this has raised concerns over safety and misuse, however, Anthropic has put protocols in place to stop it from performing ‘high-risk’ actions, like posting on social media and interacting with government websites (ahead of the US elections, the US AI Safety Institute has tested the feature) to mitigate election-related abuse of its model.

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TOGETHER WITH INNOVATING WITH AI

💼 Want to become an AI Consultant?

The AI consulting market is about to grow by a factor of 8X – from $6.9B now, to $54.7B in 2032.

But how does an AI enthusiast become an AI consultant?

How well you answer that question makes the difference between just “having AI ideas” and being handsomely compensated for your contribution to an organization’s AI transformation.

Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone – our friends at Innovating with AI have welcomed 300 new students into The AI Consultancy Project, their new program that trains you to build a business as an AI consultant.

Some of the highlights current students are excited about:

• The tools and frameworks to find clients and deliver top-notch services

• A 6-month plan to build a 6-figure AI consulting business

• Students getting their first AI client in as little as 3 days

And, as a reader of AI Tool Report, you get early access to the next enrollment cycle.

1. Meco is a distraction-free space for reading and discovering newsletters, separate from the inbox ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ / 5 (Product Hunt)

2. BigJPG enlarges and enhances images without compromising quality with AI

3. DreamFace uses AI to enhance and animate facial features in photos

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CREATIVE

🎭 Kevin Bacon fights against AI exploits

Our Report: 11,500 creatives—including actors like Kevin Bacon and Kate McKinnon, along with other actors, authors, and musicians—have signed a petition against the unlicensed use of copyrighted materials to train AI models.

🔑 Key Points:

• The petition was published by Fairly Trained, a group led by Ed Newton-Rex, an ex-Stability AI exec, who quit after slamming AI firms for “exploiting creators” and dehumanizing” creative work by calling it “training data.”

• He feels that AI companies need “people, compute, and data” to build their models, and while they’re willing to pay “vast sums” for people and compute, they “expect to take training data for nothing.”

• And the petition's statement reflects this: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”

🤔 Why you should care: Although many creatives have backed this petition, some surprising signatures are missing, most notably from Scarlett Johansson—who had a high-profile run-in with OpenAI after it used her voice for its voice feature, without permission—and Dame Judi Dench and John Cena, who agreed to let Meta’s AI voice feature replicate their voices.

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TOGETHER WITH KICK

Imagine having accounting software that automates all your busy work while keeping you in full control

Introducing Kick: Kick is accounting software that does the work on your behalf.

Backed by OpenAI, it’s like an assistant working 24/7 to handle your accounting, saving you time and $$$ (the average user saves $4k on taxes).

Kick also provides you with real-time insights, expert reviews, and a stressless tax season for you and your CPA.

Kick costs nothing to use or pays for itself.  

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Wednesday’s Prompt: How to upsell using ChatGPT

Type this prompt into ChatGPT:

Results: After typing this prompt, you will get ideas on how you can upsell products during customer conversations.

P.S. Use the Prompt Engineer GPT by AI Tool report to 10x your prompts.

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Course 4 (Wednesday 23rd October): LinkedIn Content for Individual Brands and Businesses

✅ What You'll Learn: Course 4 is with LinkedIn content expert and Founder of Cognified, Charlie Hills, who will discuss how you can use AI to plan and create LinkedIn content and engagement strategies, write and post engaging content, analyze and repurpose old content, and more…

🫱🏻‍🫲🏻 Connect with Charlie here

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FUNDING

📰 OpenAI and Microsoft give $10M to local news

• Microsoft and OpenAI, in collaboration with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, are each giving $2.5M and $2.5M worth of software and credits” to a select group of news publications, to promote local media.

• Newsday, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Public Media, and The Seattle Times will receive the first round of grants to hire a two-year fellow who will bring AI tools into the newsroom.

• OpenAI believes that although “nothing will replace the central role of reporters…AI technology can help in the research, investigation, distribution, and monetization of important journalism.”

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ECONOMY

💹 Former White House Economist joins OpenAI

• OpenAI has hired Dr. Aaron Chatterji—former Chief Economist at the White House—to study AI’s economic impacts at OpenAI, leading research into how AI will influence economic growth and job creation.

• Chatterji will also assess the global economic impacts of building AI infrastructure, give long-term insights on labor market trends, and look at how the current and future workforce can leverage the benefits of AI.

• His participation in the rollout of the 2022 US CHIPS funding, for the development of AI chips in the US, could also help OpenAI with its plans to design and develop its own AI chips, to reduce reliance on NVIDIA.

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Until next time, Martin & Liam.

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