Thought #28 - Making Memories, Losing Jobs

Hi lovely humans,

I don’t have a news story for this - but Reddit is full of people complaining about how awful Claude has been the last few weeks. A lot of people cancelling subscriptions, getting frustrated or actually coding themselves…

One thing it has caused - people actually trying out OpenAI’s Codex and they seem pleasantly surprised.

It’s interesting to see how fickle this AI race is in terms of public opinion (especially from those paying $20 a month for the service).

In other news - a lot of small but useful releases, more job cuts, and some breakthrough medical use cases.

Our Week in AI

Making Memories

As we’ve finally bitten the bullet and upgraded to ChatGPT team subscription over at Taught by Humans, I had the option to bring my personal account with me or start fresh. I chose a clean slate. I then also turned all the memory saving off.

And it’s like a breath of fresh air - I can use ChatGPT to give impartial advice on writing, grants, ideas without it using random things it has remembered about me.

More thoughts on this to come - as it’s really got me thinking about how we use AI.

Dreadful Diagrams

I have been making those innovation diagrams for an Innovate UK grant application this week (if you know you know). I made a basic sketch of what I wanted:

I tried get ChatGPT to make it into a digital diagram:

Not awful, not usable (to be fair to ChatGPT it initially gave me instructions on how to advise a designer to do this).

Claude gave a bit of a trippy, colourful version (with moving ants and everything):

It’s very ambitious - overdid it a bit and cannot draw lines in the right places. Also, not usable (but much easier to guide as it’s actually HTML code so I can take it and edit if needed).

But I did end up making my own diagrams in Canva:

I don’t care what people say, I cannot get AI to build usable, beautiful diagrams or slides. Anyone got any tips on what everyone (on LinkedIn) is doing?

PS if anyone wants to chat about my random ants, totally up for that!

AI New Releases

• OpenAI’s new speech-to-speech model – Released via API and billed as their most advanced yet.

• ChatGPT Connectors – Out of beta and now generally available. Enterprise accounts have them off by default, but everyone else can switch them on.

• Project-only memory in ChatGPT – Woohoo. A really useful one: memory scoped to a single project (see my previous memory chat).

• Claude Code + GitHub – GitHub integration is now GA (surprisingly late). Some breaking changes reported.

• Claude for Chrome – Max subscribers can skip the waitlist for the research preview.

• Claude in Xcode – Mac developers can now log into Claude directly from Xcode.

AI News

• Salesforce CEO on job cuts – Marc Benioff says 4,000 support roles will go thanks to “agentic AI”. A big, blunt signal on how quickly these tools could reshape work.

• Two-thirds of lawyers now using AI – Up sharply from last year, with half using law-specific tools. Confidence still hasn’t caught up with adoption.

• AI for stroke recovery – NHS stroke centres using AI to help half of patients recover — rare good news with strong numbers behind it.

• AI stethoscope – A device promising to diagnose major heart conditions in seconds.

• Microsoft gives Copilot to US Government – Free licences for federal workers, billed as an adoption push.

• UK Government AI companion tender – DSIT wants SMEs and VCSEs to supply an AI “companion” pro bono for a year. Curious set-up.

• Anguilla’s .ai gold rush – The Caribbean island is cashing in on its domain.

Not Quite News, But Worth a Read (or Listen or Watch)

• What really happened at Builder.ai – A detailed post-mortem on the collapse.

• Salesforce CEO on job cuts – Included above in news, but also worth watching for the tone.

LinkedIn AI Poll

People are using AI every day - more than half of people who voted (this poll was a lot more popular than the open source one). Over 80% using it most days!

Vote in this week’s poll - please!

This week we want to know if you use AI for holiday planning (I ask writing this from Heathrow on the way to Montreal - cross your fingers for the rain to hold off).

Final Thoughts

As always we hope this was helpful!

Feel free to share this with anyone who might find it useful.

Next week, more of the same - hoping for a quiet news cycle as I’m on holidays (but I jinxed myself last time I said this).

Laura
Always learning