Previously on AI - Episode 1

Welcome to Previously on AI. I’m Jason, a web developer by trade that enjoys learning about new technology by writing about them. I’ll be using this little space on the interwebs to share my thoughts on the the things I find interesting and useful in the Artificial Intelligence space as both a user and builder. I hope to provide useful information for beginners and those with more development experience.

This newsletter will be shaped over the coming months so thanks for coming along. Love it or hate it, feel free to reach out and offer your thoughts so I can improve things as I go.

Thanks for reading,
Jason

A Good Course for Getting Started with AI

The AI Python for Beginners course is a good introductory to Python and the basics of coding. I particularly liked it for being able to run the sample code directly in browser. It saves beginners from having to figure out how to get their own Python environment up and running.

It’s a bit heavy on the basics of programming, but if you’ve never dealt with Python it’s still useful for understanding the syntax it uses for common programming techniques. Parts 3 and 4 just released and look to get into a bit more advanced topics.

Canva is raising prices

Canva announced significant prices increases on some of their subscriptions raising prices from $120 per year to $500 per year. Although they’re giving users a discount on the first 12 months. This feels like one of the first big brand price increases to recoup the costs of implementing AI into their platform. I expect we’ll get more as companies need to turn large AI spends into profits.

The Case for Single Purpose AI Products

While all of the big AI companies are racing to create massive, general models, Benedict Evans makes an interesting case for building single-purpose AI products. It helped change my view on what types of AI products could be interesting to build. I agree with the concept that now is the time to niche down with AI products. It goes well together with the concept of using AI as a supportive tool to your own knowledge and expertise. I think we’ll see more interesting AI products that are very focused coming out that people can use to enhance their workflows vs replacing people.

Nifty Notables

I’ve been playing around with Ideogram.ai for generating images. They’ve been able to make a tool that is a lot better at generating images with accurate text and they have some interesting tools for generating and optimizing image generation prompts. Great for creating a quick birthday pug image to send to your buddy.

Rad Tabs

A collection of the tabs I’ve left open to come back to over the last week.

Why AI can't spell 'strawberry' from TechCrunch does a good job of explaining why AI doesn’t really look at language the same as a human mind does. Which can cause some amusing hallucinations such as confidently counts 2 “r”s in the word strawberry.

Google’s Prompt Gallery is nice tool for getting ideas for more complicated prompts and being able to quickly test and see them in action.

Anthropic released a repository for Quickstart projects on Github. It will be interesting to see what type of projects they add over time. Right now the only project on there is a customer support agent.