We swear other companies aside from Google made moves in the AI space recently.

But Google was …. Everywhere. 

And not always in a good way.

You could spend hours each day trying to keep up with what’s happening in the world of GenAI, or you can spend your Mondays with us.

Each Monday, we give you the news that really matters.

We cut through the big tech marketing, sift through the nonsense, and tell you what actually matters in the AI space.

This is how you grow your career and your company.

You can’t get ahead if you’re always looking behind you.

Let’s push forward, shall we?

Here’s the news that matters.

Tyler Perry is one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. His reach is deep and wide, making an impact in filmmaking, producing, and acting. 

He had plans for an $800 million expansion of Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, already the largest film production facility in the U.S. 

But when he saw OpenAI’s Sora, he hit pause on expansion.

He was shocked at the output quality and said that AI technology would have a profound impact on jobs and the movie industry. 

What it means:
Shorties, we’ve been screamin since last year that 2024 was the year of AI videos becoming extremely high quality. 

Even we were shocked by Sora, though, TBH. 

Side note…. Sora is actually more about AGI than AI video.

Back to the topic at hand.

• Is Tyler Perry overreaching? 

• We don’t think so. 

• AI actually creates new jobs in the film and entertainment industry? 

• Absolutely. 

• Will it create a net negative on the industry early on? 

• Absolutely. 

And it’s not just Tyler Perry Studios. Even Disney is going all-in on AI.

Three of their 5 companies in the 2024 Disney Accelerator are GenAI companies, including ElevenLabs. (That one’s kinda a big deal.)

We’re not being negative Nancies when we say AI is coming for jobs. We’re just being realists.

Recent estimates show 62,000 jobs in California alone could be impacted by AI. (We’d say that’s a low estimate.) 

How to avoid the chopping block? Position yourself to be the AI leader in your company, or start your own AI endeavor or AI-powered side hustle.

Welp. There it goes. 

If you listen to the Everyday AI show or read our newsletter, this one isn’t news to you. 

But, OpenAI officially put a death date on its plugins mode inside of ChatGPT. OpenAI is phasing off plugins and instead pushing GPTs. 

(That’s a little problematic, though. See why here.) 

You can no longer create new chats with Plugins past March 19, and your current chats with plugins enabled will no longer function past April 9. 

What it means:
This is more than semantics. Obviously, we know that OpenAI is moving toward AI agents and AI assistants. 

But, they legit had a very small version of that already with plugins. Three ChatGPT plugins can work with each other autonomously, which is pretty friggin cool. 

Right now, you can only interact with GPTs one at a time. In other words, less AI automation for now. Until OpenAI changes how GPTs work and adds new functionality. 

Not sure how to live without plugins? (Us, too.)

We’ll be launching new courses and trainings in April. We’re rebuilding everything from scratch. Reply to this email with NEW PPP and we’ll send you the updated info once it’s available.

We talked about this a few times, as it had been reported that a mystery tech giant was striking a partnership with Reddit worth $60 million a year. 

Now, we finally know who that mastery company is: Google. 

In short, Google is paying Reddit $60 million a year to have exclusive access to Reddit’s data for its large language models. 

Over the years, Reddit has become a preferred destination for users trying to find answers to their queries, as the user-generated content has become a goldmine for frustrated internet users who have to weed through dozens of advertising-heavy sites to find answers. 

What it means:
In short, expect more partnerships or lawsuits. No other way around it. 

We might see lawsuits from Reddit against other LLM giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, unless those models can somehow untrain their models on the content goldmine that Reddit has provided. 

Or, if they can strike similar deals with Reddit. Right now, there’s not a lot of details available on the exclusivity of the partnership. 

In the near term, expect Google’s Gemini to take a huge leap forward in quality, and expect some potential steps backward in quality from OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude. (When and if they aren’t able to use Reddit data.) 

If you ask for an AI image generator for a picture of a pope, historically accurate photos would give you pictures of a white male.

Right? 

Questions like this have been swirling this week, as Google has been in hot water for AI image generations inside of Gemini. 

In short, it seemed like Google’s Gemini was having the opposite problem of other AI generators, which perpetuated ugly racial stereotypes and biases. 

Google has temporarily shut down AI image generating capabilities inside Gemini, and had to issue an apology.

What it means:
Google went a bit too far when trying to reduce prejudice and bias in its AI image generation model. 

Yet, the problems with AI image generation are still rampant.

This is one we don’t have an answer to. But, as AI image and video generation is the future of media consumption (whether we like it or not) this is a problem Big Tech and AI unicorns gotta figure out. 

Wait, another Google language model? 

Yup. 

Google just released Gemma, a lightweight and smaller model based on its new Gemini model. 

Aside from the low-key naming/branding/access chaos at Google, we’re excited to see Gemma enter the field. 

Here’s the biggest differentiator between Gemma and Google Gemini’s 3 flavors: 

Gemini Ultra — Google’s most capable and most advanced model, for paid business and enterprise users. 

Gemini Pro — Google’s new model powering its free AI chat, Gemini. 

Gemini Nano — For local edge devices, Nano takes Gemini out of the cloud and helps it live on actual devices like the Samsung S24 smartphone. 

Gemma — The newest entrant, this lightweight and open small model is made more for developers and can be downloaded to your desktop or used on Google Cloud and Hugging Face. 

What it means:
As much as we give Google a hard time (it has changed the Gemini naming and accessibility 3 times in the past 8 days) we’re big fans of this move. 

Microsoft was ahead of Google in releasing its Phi-2 small model to the open source community, so we’re glad to see Google follow suit. 

In short, this signals the bigger push for smaller and open models that can be run on the desktop. Google and Microsoft are following in Meta’s footsteps, which has been one of the leaders for Big Tech releasing open models.