Digest #508 → Subscribe⁴ | Upgrade to Pro¹³²

Hey folks, a relatively light email courtesy of the US election results yesterday. Things are going to get wilder from now on.

ps: Tom and I are chatting about voice assistants on Tuesday. Sign up here.¹⁵⁴

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• ChatGPT’s new home and FLUX's image quality upgrades

• snack n skill - a bite-sized lesson to clean your messy data

• An actionable plan to unlock AI usage for your team.

• 6 new AI tools for you to try

• 6 interesting posts on GenAI spending, the future of AI and more.

• to-do’s

Alright, let’s get to it!

 🔎 Trends & news

• chat.com²⁴⁵ now points to ChatGPT. Dharmesh Shah, CEO of HubSpot, who bought the domain last year for (reportedly) $15.5M, gave a cryptic prompt to figure out the sale price in his LinkedIn post.⁸³³

• FLUX models by BlackForestLabs have become the go-to choice for image-generation apps. Their FLUX1.1 [pro] now has two new modes⁴⁰⁶: Ultra can pump out 4MP images (that's 4x higher res!) with the same speed, while Raw mode makes humans and nature scenes look way more natural and less "AI-ish".

• Tired of repeating yourself? Guidde⁴²², a GPT-powered tool, lets you create AI-generated, step-by-step guides with visuals, voiceovers, and CTAs—11x faster than manual docs. Share or embed anywhere. Save time, make documentation engaging, and it's 100% free. Try Guidde today!⁴²²*

• And to add some delight to your week: you can use AI to ideate and illustrate a children’s book for your kids.³⁹⁵
  *sponsored

🍽️ Snack ‘n’ skill

Learn how to automate data cleaning

Dirty data is a nightmare. Combining multiple CSVs, validating values and more. What if you could automate the entire process and share it with your team? Julius AI's workflow builder lets you create reusable data-cleaning processes without writing any code.

Step 1. Create your workflow in Julius AI

Get started by creating a new workflow in Julius AI. Give it a clear name and description, then use a simple prompt to generate all the required steps - from file uploads to data deduplication.

Step 2. Build your automated data-cleaning process

• Upload your CSVs through an intuitive interface

• Let AI combine and deduplicate data automatically

• Review the process step by step for transparency

• Download the cleaned, combined CSV file

• Share the workflow with your team for repeated use

Tip: You can edit and customize any step in the workflow to match your specific needs. Add human checkpoints or make it fully automated—it's up to you.

This walkthrough is a condensed version of this tutorial¹¹⁴. Pro members get exclusive access to the full tutorial plus a special offer for a Julius subscription.

⚙️ Top new tools

• Datadog¹¹⁶ - Infrastructure and application monitoring with automatic anomaly detection, powered by machine learning.*

• EVI-2 by Hume²⁹⁶ - AI speech with emotion, 7 different voices and personalities. It also connects with LLMs and web searches.

• Sona³²¹ - AI transcription notes across your devices.

• Bidcrunch¹⁹⁵ - Your personal AI assistant for public tenders.

• Midship²⁸³ - Extract data from PDFs, spreadsheets and more into your preferred apps.

• Mochi 1 Playground²³⁷ - Try Genmo AI’s latest video generation model for free.

• Hearth AI³⁴⁹ - Go beyond memory for people in your network.

More tools here →¹⁵²
*sponsored

🗣️ Everyone’s talking about

Where can my team start using AI? This is a common question in our community. Do I hire a consultant? Hire for a new AI expert role?

The simple way to start is with people already on your payroll. Try this: Let your team explore our tutorial library for an hour. We've organized it by function - marketing⁸⁸, sales⁶⁴, data⁵⁵, and operations⁷⁶. Ask them to pick 4-5 tutorials that resonate with their daily work—the tasks they spend hours on each week. You can start with our free tutorials to test the waters.

For the next week, let them experiment with their list and note down other ideas where they think AI could help. Ask them for another list of 5-10 highly specific use cases. This creates natural buy-in (they choose what to try) and builds practical skills through real work. Once you see the impact, our pro tutorials (we have team plans) can help scale these wins across your company—still cheaper than “AI Consultants”.

More importantly, you'll discover patterns where standardizing AI use could benefit the entire company. Maybe multiple teams need help with email drafts, or everyone's trying to analyze spreadsheets. These patterns help you focus on high-impact areas first and guide you on where to invest time and money.

Ready to get your team started? Check out our tutorial catalog.¹³⁶

 📜 Interesting posts

• The generative AI spending of 50 companies⁴⁷⁴, from Coke to Walmart.

• Prime Video will let you summon AI to recap what you’re watching¹⁶⁵.¹⁶⁵

• Incorporating AI into your work⁴⁵⁷ and where it’s going w/ Sarah Guo, Kevin Weil (OpenAI CPO) and Mike Krieger (Anthropic CPO).

• Scale AI released Defense Llama¹¹², purpose-built for use by defence departments and American national security.

• Future of AI³²⁴ - A collection of articles from the Financial Times.

📌 To-dos

1. Let us know^42† if you have any tutorials or courses you want us to create—we’re always open to ideas.

That wraps things up for today! See you again next week (with the new look for our website 🤞).

Ben

Enjoy this newsletter? Please forward to a friend.

Want more education on AI? Become a Ben’s Bites member⁵⁷ and access our courses & tutorials.

Want to advertise in this newsletter? Click here⁴⁴.