Is AI going to end the world?

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MindStudio’s API is more powerful than ever, and with it comes a seismic shift in our business model. Say goodbye to seat charges—invite up to 50 team members, get access to all premium models, and use the API starting at… $0. More on this below.

In the last month, the biggest news in the AI world are probably ChatGPT search and the rumors about OpenAI building a web browser.

Also, Anthropic launched Claude 3.5 Haiku at a higher price than its predecessor, Suno unleashed v4, the best AI music generator by far, Mistral shipped a significant upgrade to its top-tier model and the chatbot interface partnering with Black Forest Labs, Perplexity capitalized on the US elections to build a solid fanbase… and they entered the eCommerce space.

Continue reading to learn more!

As a reminder, we’re now welcoming partners who want to build AIs for their clients. Sign up for extra support, training resources, and more here.

🗞️ Industry news

Perplexity won the US/AI elections

Perplexity’s CEO ran a marvelous marketing campaign during election days on the first week of November. With a series of posts, charts, and dedicated dashboards to follow elections, he drove massive spikes in traffic for the company and used it to ship new features.

During the span of just a few days, Aravand Srinivas talked about his experience as an immigrant in the US (and got comments from Elon Musk), the US economy, and many political topics without actually expressing any real political opinion. The closest he got is a huge shoutout to Elon Musk, which is now notoriously very close to President-elect Donald Trump.

It worked, and Perplexity’s coverage of the election got the attention of big publications like The Verge and Tech Crunch… talk about good PR!

What this means:

• Perplexity delivered a better product than Google. Multiple times. Their AI Search works much better than Google’s AI Overviews, and their US elections map was more up to date and easier to read than Google’s counterpart

• Perplexity has a dedicated fanbase of people willing to buy their merch and support them MoM with subscription revenue. Their pro experience got a huge upgrade as a result, with now more interactive widgets and full reasoning

• The young CEO is not letting the recent lawsuit stop him and keeps pushing to ship as fast as possible against a industry behemoth.

The situation is particularly interesting given the DOJ is investing Google and just said they might consider asking them to sell Chrome, one of the pillars of web browsing today. It seems like it’s never been a better time to seriously compete with Google.

This week, Perplexity also announced “Shop like a Pro”, the first AI-powered shopping experience within a search engine.

Anthropic breaks the pattern and bumps up cost for 3.5 Haiku

Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Haiku on November 4th and, for the first time in so long, kinda disappointed the community.

Not only Claude 3.5 Haiku is not particularly better than the counterparts from OpenAI (GPT-4o mini) and Google (Gemini 1.5 Flash), but it’s also more expensive.

It’s rare for a company to raise prices in a field where everyone is racing to make AI cheaper and faster. With this update, Claude 3.5 Haiku became approximately 3x times more expensive than its predecessor.

To be fair, it’s still very affordable for something that would’ve seemed like science fiction just three years ago. But the reasoning behind the price hike is puzzling.

Anthropic explained that the increase is due to Claude 3.5 Haiku’s superior intelligence, even compared to the previous Claude 3 Opus. They claim the price aligns with the model's enhanced capabilities.

This logic feels off. GPT-4o consistently improves, yet OpenAI continues to lower prices with each iteration. Google made Gemini cheaper and introduced special pricing for short inputs, and Grok remains competitively priced.

No other company is raising costs in tandem with increased intelligence. On the contrary, the industry's focus is on making AI so affordable that it can scale to unprecedented levels—much like the adoption of the internet.

If models were priced strictly based on intelligence improvements, every reasonable update would lead to a price hike. This seems like a strange approach, likely driven by investors eager to see returns.

That said, both Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Sonnet New are now available in MindStudio. Try them out and share your thoughts!

Mistral updates its top model & Le Chat

Mistral has just released Pixtral 12B, replacing the previous Mistral Large model, along with a series of updates to their Chat Interface.

With a significant portion of OpenAI’s revenue coming from ChatGPT, it’s no surprise that Anthropic, Mistral, Google, and Microsoft are all focusing on improving their interfaces.

Microsoft acquired Inflection to emulate Poe’s popular personal interface. Google is actively gathering feedback to refine its AI studio. Anthropic introduced direct integrations with Google Drive...

...and Mistral launched “Le Chat.”

As one of the few major AI players based in the EU, with a strong presence in Paris (France), it makes sense for Mistral to emphasize distinct naming conventions to stand out.

Le Chat can now:

• Browse the web. It’s not clear on which search engine

• Generate images, using Black Forests’ APIs like Grok 2

• Understand documents

• Use Canvas, a copycat of ChatGPT Canvas

Basically, they copied all main features from ChatGPT and made them completely free. Classical strategy, but it can burn them if the revenue doesn’t kick in at some point in the close future. They don’t have the same fundraising capabilities as OpenAI 😉

🔥 Product Updates

Since we last spoke, MindStudio added a plethora of features and changed its pricing plans. Here’s what’s new:

• We only have two plans: Community and Business

• Community is free for everyone, and comes with $5 in AI compute (one time) plus 10,000 API runs (per month). You can invite up to 50 team members for free as well—no more seat pricing

• Business is a custom pricing plan starting at $200 that comes with extra goodies such as white labeling, enterprise features, lower fees on AI compute, and more API runs

Regardless of the plan, you need to get familiar with two core terms:

• AI Compute: this is what you paid for already, and it’s the cost to use AI models within the platform. Previously, we added 20-25% to the base model price. The fee is now only 2.9%, making it significantly cheaper to run any model

• API runs: a Run event is triggered each time a single workflow is executed (for example, starting a new Run manually, or invoking the workflow via API).


You can learn more on our pricing page here.

We also have updates to the product we think you’ll like:

• You can connect your AI workers to Slack. This way, your coworkers can get access to AI responses without logging into MindStudio. No third party app required!

• You can use MindStudio to generate and execute code, which is essential for any kind of data analysis workflow

• There’s a brand new dashboard and website to represent our focus on automating processes with AI and empowering builders to mold AI Workers to their needs.

💡 Tip of The Week

Shane just posted a documentary on how AI might end the world, part of his series on investing conspiracy theories. The video is highly sensational and already received over a million views in two days with people freaking out about how good voice cloning got and things of that nature.

YouTube is currently promoting sensational videos more than ever before, so it’s not surprising to see “oh my god you should be furious about this” kind of videos.

So, instead of asking you to spend 1 hour (+ 1h for “part 2”) and freak you out, let me try to answer the question briefly:

• There’s no serious evidence to show that AI is in any way “sentient”, and improvements to the LLM technologies are not as drastic as they were before

• Most of the things people are “scared” of are things that scared their parents. Yes, AI voice cloning is dangerous and scary, just like it was dangerous and scary to put your credit card on a screen in the past. Yet, we do, daily, and the world still looks fine to me

• No invention with real potential ever got into the market without disrupting what was there before. The reason our markets work the way they do is to allow for flexibility—that’s the whole point. Things we call “jobs” now would sound like a joke to our grand-grand parents

• I can’t think of another huge technology breakthrough in my lifetime that became so cheap and readily available to everyone in so little time. You currently have access to the best possible AI model in ChatGPT, for free, multiple times per day. All of this happened in 2-3y. There’s no difference in GPT-4o if you’re a billionaire or if you’re a student with $10 in your bank account. It’s incredible how quickly this technology expanded from a small elite to… everyone.

So, I don’t think AI is going to end us.

AI is going to reshape how our world looks, and that can be, and probably will be, a good thing. Every technology comes with the good and the bad, but the fact AI has been available for years and still hasn’t destroyed the world seems like a good starting point to start talking about it more pragmatically 🙂 

🤝 Community Events

You can register for upcoming events on our brand new events page here.

Our new webinar series is up on there as well, with the following on-demand webinars:

• MindStudio for Partners: Level Up Your Agency With AI Workflows

• Customize AI Applications With Your Data

• How To Build Your First AI Assistant (the best webinar for beginners!)

• Which Models to Choose for Your AI

• First Steps to Bring AI Into Your Workflow

Thank you for being an invaluable member of our community, it’s always great to see many of you join multiple workshops 🔥

If you’re interested in any topic in particular, feel free to reply and I’ll do my best to include it in the next releases. We’re going to update all of these soon.

🌯 That’s a wrap!

Stay tuned to learn more about what’s next and get tips & tricks for your MindStudio build.

You saw it here first,

Giorgio Barilla
MindStudio Developer & Project Manager @ MindStudio