Welcome to The Week in Generative AI, a weekly column for marketers from Quad Insights that quickly sums up emerging developments surrounding tools such as ChatGPT and Bard, while also offering the latest details on how generative AI tools are being incorporated into advertising products and workflows.
Why Nvidia stock is on a rocket ship
Nvidia is a technology company that makes powerful chips used in computing — chips that are particularly good for generative AI, which is why they’re in the news right now.
The company just reported that its profits climbed 26% to $2 billion last quarter, and sales rose 19% to $7.2 billion, surpassing analysts’ expectations. As a result, Nvidia’s stock shot up 28% in a single day, and it’s up nearly 110% for the year. That’s making a lot of people on Wall Street and in the tech industry very excited. As Jeremy C. Owens of MarketWatch reports, the company is “within sight of becoming only the seventh U.S. company to top a valuation of $1 trillion.” That’s rarefied air occupied by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Tesla.
Additional takes:
- “Nvidia stock explodes after ‘guidance for the ages’: What Wall Street is saying” (Yahoo Finance)
- “Nvidia’s blowout earnings lift AMD while other chipmakers such as Intel fall” (CNBC)
Microsoft adds AI everywhere
Microsoft’s Build 2023 developer event was a full-on AI party. The company launched Windows 11 AI Copilot, which means that all Windows machines will integrate an AI agent within the taskbar. This embeds AI into the workflow for daily, casual users of the Windows ecosystem. From the Bing blog we learned that Bing will become the default search engine in ChatGPT, enabling browsing for all ChatGPT users, including the free version.
Also, new plugins are coming to Windows, meaning developers can build apps that work across ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Mary Brandscombe writes in TechRepublic that “AI Copilot can already be used to build applications in Microsoft Dataverse by describing in natural language what a user wants the app to do.” Classic Microsoft apps including Excel will now “connect to a range of new AI tools.”
Additional takes:
- “Microsoft Build 2023: all the news and announcements from the developer conference” (The Verge)
- “Microsoft comes for Google with big new update” (TheStreet)
Google Marketing Live 2023 recap
Google continues its generative AI search push, with Ad Age reporting how the search giant’s new ad tools “will put brands into search chatbots.” At the Google Marketing Live event (see videos and more on the Google website), the company launched Product Studio, which according to Aisha Malik at TechCrunch will “help merchants easily create unique product imagery using generative AI right from Merchant Center Next, Google’s platform for businesses to manage how their products show up” in search. Google also demoed Google Ads AI, a tool that will analyze landing pages and then build out a Google ad campaign, soup to nuts: from keywords and headlines to descriptions, images and other creative assets, as Kristi Hines reports in Search Engine Journal.
Additional takes:
- “Google Marketing Live 2023: Everything you need to know” (Search Engine Land)
- “Generative AI Is Coming Soon To Search, Performance Max And Google Ads” (AdExchanger)
- “Google Bard AI can now display images — here’s how it works” (Boy Genius Report)
- “Google introduces chatbot, other generative AI creation tools for marketers” (Adweek)
Is Generative Fill the cheat code for Photoshop?
We covered Adobe’s Firefly last week, but this week the software giant was heavily promoting its updates for Photoshop, with a “Generative Fill” add-on that allows users to quickly and easily add, remove or replace objects in images using text prompts. Benj Edwards from Ars Technica writes that with “Generative Fill’s ability to easily warp the apparent media reality of a photo (admittedly, something Photoshop has been doing since its inception), Adobe is doubling down on its Content Authenticity Initiative, which uses Content Credentials to add metadata to generated files that help track their provenance.” The concern for Adobe with tools like these is that there is a “huge liability target painted on its back when it comes to issues of harmful or socially stigmatized content generation, utilizing artists’ images for training data, and powering propaganda or disinformation,” according to Edwards.
Additional takes:
- “I turned my vacation photos into nightmares with Photoshop’s new generative AI tool” (The Verge)
- “Everything I learned testing Photoshop’s new Generative AI tool” (CNET)
Further reading
- “Anthropic raises $450M to build next-gen AI assistants” (TechCrunch)
- “White House takes new steps to study AI risks, determine impact on workers” (Reuters)
- “With new grant program, OpenAI aims to crowdsource AI regulation” (TechCrunch)
- “Elon Musk wants to challenge Google and Microsoft in AI” (Wall Street Journal)
- “A majority of Americans have heard of ChatGPT, but few have tried it themselves” (Pew Research Center)
Thanks for following along as we cover this rapidly evolving space. We’ll see you next Friday.
Previously: “The Week in Generative AI: May 19, 2023 edition”
