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Wednesday’s top story: Following in Google’s footsteps, AI search engine, Perplexity, is starting to add AI-generated ads to its search results.

💼 Want to be compensated for your contribution to your organization’s AI transformation? Join The AI Consultancy Project

🌤️ This Morning on AI Tool Report

1. 🌟 Perplexity ads ‘more premium’ than Google’s?

2. 💼 How to become an AI consultant with Innovating with AI

3. 🧐 Amazon trying to sway AI research?

4. 🧠 How to stay ahead of the AI curve with Brilliant 

5. 🦾 How to serve your customers better than your competitors using ChatGPT

6. 💵 AI startup valued at $1.9B!

7. 🪙 Genius goes “Bitcoin first” and shares jump 66%

Read Time: 5 minutes

FACT OF THE DAY

🤔 When it first launched in 2015, OpenAI had 624 employees. In 2024, they have over 3.5k, and out of those, 475 are AI engineers, with the average salary of an OpenAI employee being $925K/yr.

STOCK MARKETS

😑 Tech stocks consolidated overall, with the Nasdaq close to unchanged for the day. Apple was neutral after news of plans to launch their first smart home camera in 2026, aiming for 10M shipments annually. In other news, Bitcoin continues to show strength after breaking to fresh all-time highs above $90,000. Learn more.

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ADVERTISING

🌟 Perplexity ads ‘more premium’ than Google’s?

Our Report: Back in August, AI search engine start-up, Perplexity, revealed it would be introducing ads to its platform “in the fourth quarter of this year”, and true to its word, they have arrived.

🔑 Key Points:

• Perplexity will test ads—which will be AI-generated (not written/edited by the advertisers) and will show up as “sponsored” follow-up questions, to the side of the AI search summary results—in the US to begin with.

• Perplexity is committed to providing users “with direct, unbiased answers to questions,” which is why they chose this AI-generated ad format, feeling it “protects the utility, accuracy, and objectivity of answers.”

• Google recently launched similar ads in its AI-powered overviews, but Perplexity is positioning itself to advertisers as a “premium alternative”, highlighting that its platform reaches “educated, high-income consumers.”

🤔 Why you should care: Despite their bold positioning—and securing ads from brands like Whole Foods, Universal McCann, and PMG—some experts feel that advertisers may be deterred by Perplexity's recent run-ins with news publishers (like The New York Times, News Corp, and NY Post) over plagiarism, content kleptocracy, and failure to attribute publishers.

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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 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.

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FUNDING

🧐 Amazon trying to sway AI research?

Our Report: Amazon is launching a $110M grant program called “Build on Trainium” (Trainium is Amazon's custom AI chip) to support researchers, academic institutions, and students and help advance their AI research.

🔑 Key Points:

• Through the program, Amazon will give participating universities $11M worth of Trainum credits, the wider AI research community grants up to $500k, and research teams access to a ‘research cluster’ of 40k Trainium chips.

• “AI academic research is bottlenecked by a lack of resources,” so Amazon aims to give researchers the hardware they need to complete their work and prevent the academic sector from falling behind.

• A team of Amazon AI practitioners will have the final say on which projects receive funding, selecting “the most impactful and promising projects that will help advance machine learning science forward.”

🤔 Why you should care: Selecting “the most impactful and promising projects that will help advance machine learning science forward” is a little vague, leaving many concerned that this corporate-backed funding could influence the direction of academic research, and favor research that aligns more with business goals than ethics.

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TOGETHER WITH BRILLIANT

🧠 Learn AI like it’s 2024

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• Bite-sized, interactive lessons that make complex AI concepts accessible and engaging

• Personalized learning paths and competitive features to keep you motivated and on track

• Building skills to tackle real-world problems—not just memorizing information

Join over 10M people and try it for nothing, for 30 days.

Plus, AI Tool Readers readers can snag something special on an annual premium subscription with this link

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Wednesday’s Prompt: How to serve your customers better than your competitors using ChatGPT

Type this prompt into ChatGPT:

Results: After typing this prompt, you will get an analysis of your competitor’s customer service processes and suggestions on how you can serve your customers better than they can.

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

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Course 4 (Wednesday 13th November): 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 to 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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STARTUPS

💵 AI startup valued at $1.9B!

• AI start-up, Writer—which deploys custom AI applications, tools, and agents to solve enterprise challenges and serves customers like Mars, L’Oreal, Salesforce, and Uber—has raised $200M, at a $1.9B valuation.

• With participation from Adobe, Salesforce, Accenture, and Vanguard, Writer will use the funds for product development and “cementing the company’s leadership in the enterprise generative AI category.”

• Founded in 2020, just last month, it launched a new AI model, which was trained almost entirely on synthetic data, which cost just $700k to develop, vs OpenAI’s models, which cost around $4.6M.

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BITCOIN

🪙 Genius goes “Bitcoin first” and shares jump 66%

• AI education platform, Genius Group, is following in Micheal Saylor’s footsteps with a “Bitcoin first” approach and is committing 90% of its reserves into Bitcoin, meaning cryptocurrency will become its primary treasury asset.

• It also announced (yesterday) that its EdTech platform would shortly be accepting Bitcoin payments and is launching an education series for students to learn about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

• Since it announced it’s following the “Bitcoin-first” path made by Micheal Saylor’s MicroStrategy—which currently holds 279,420 Bitcoin, currently worth $24.5B—its share price has jumped by 60%.

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Until next time, Martin & Liam.

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