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Substack Newsletter of the Week: Mia Blume
I know what you’re thinking, “do I really need to subscribe to another AI newsletter?” Well, if you’re in a leadership role, or you’re just interested in how designers need to adapt in the near future, or you’d like to see which tools or skills will be relevant, you will be able to download the 48 slide presentation, The AI Playbook for Design Teams. Blume runs a coaching and consulting business and surveyed over 200 design professionals to compile this report. I’m going to be sharing it with my classes this week as it’s the best predictor of what’s coming next that I’ve seen so far. Required reading
Are the Tech Layoffs Finally Starting to Decline?
While it was another exciting week for AI image generators, it was a difficult to hear about another spate of AI related layoffs. Back in March, LinkedIn was excited to announce a suite of AI tools and this week laid off over 700 employees. Stack Overflow laid off over 100 people (or 28% of it’s staff) as it’s online forums that help you code are rapidly becoming less relevant. I don’t mean to start this newsletter on a negative note, but I did want to share this snapshot of year to date layoffs from Tech Crunch. To be clear, most of the layoffs in 2023 are from Big Tech over-hiring and only a small percentage are directly AI related. The good news is that the trend is less layoffs per month. Check it out
AI Gets Real: How Did I Miss This?
There was an AI panel discussion in Seattle last week hosted by Geekwire and I didn’t hear about it until after the fact! Clearly I was too busy generating images in Dalle-3 and Midjourney to notice. If I had known, I would have been there and given you a first hand account. Instead you’ll need to read the recap here.
Or, more specifically, you can read how writers Ted Chiang and Eric Heisserer discussed Marc Andreesan’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Spoiler Alert: They’re not as optimistic as he is… read the recap here
YouTuber of the Week: Tao
As you probably know, I spend a lot of time watching YouTube tutorials, and this guy has been delivering a ton of value lately. First it was his Midjourney prompts, but now I’m watching his AI filmmaking tips. He has the same workflow that I developed over the summer: prompt in Mdjourney »Animate in Pika Labs»Assemble in Capcut, but his work is much better than mine. I wish I would have discovered him months ago. Looks like he lives in Seattle, maybe I can get him as a guest speaker. Check it out
Free Tool of the Week: Alpaca for Photoshop
Are you tired of all the Midjourney and Dalle-3 hype? Did you just want to draw something and then have AI finish it for you? I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears another look since I’ve had a lot of new subscribers recently. The installation instructions are a little complicated, but once you start you can hook up your iPad with Sidecar, make a sketch in Photoshop, and the basically experiment with different prompts and say “Finish it for me”. Check it out
Not AI Related, Awesome Data Visualization
The very smart folks over at Visual Capitalist have created this thing.
Charted: 50 Years of Music Industry Revenues, by Format Check it out
Walmart and Productivity from AI
You might not think of Walmart as a hotbed of product design or cutting edge AI productivity. If you work for a large corporate employer and/or you manage people, then you might want to read this account of how they built an internal tool for 50,000 employees because they actively want their team to use generative AI. Check it out
Once it came time for execution, a fully dedicated cross-functional product team was activated with high-performing leaders from product, engineering, data science, design, and the business. The team had a direct line of communication with executives when roadblocks arose, allowing them to stay laser-focused on researching, designing, and building product features that drive engagement and adoption of generative AI. Through rapid prototyping and agile development, the team developed the minimum viable product (MVP) for My Assistant and put it into employees’ hands in just 60 days.
Anthropic’s Claude Actively Seeking Human Input
Anthropic was already the ethical leader of all the AI major players because they even considered having a constitution to govern their product. Now they’ve taken it once step further by seeking input from 1000 random people to see what values and guardrails they wanted powerful AI models to reflect. Check it out