All things digital December 2024
Happy holiday and thanks for subscribing as always. For the new ones, I'm Robert and I'm working with social media and digital marketing, interested in all things digital and tech.
AI updates of the month 🤖
OpenAI is about to release the new version of Sora, their prompt to video tool. Tech YouTube Marques Brownlee got to try it out for a week and shares what it’s bad at, how to generate videos out of photos and what it’s specifically good at. You can really see how this quite soon will change the entertainment industry.
Reddit has introduced a new AI feature called Reddit Answers, which helps users quickly find answers based on user posts. Similar to ChatGPT and Perplexity, this feature allows users to ask questions directly on the platform. By encouraging more users to search for content within Reddit, the company aims to reduce its dependence on Google for traffic which is it’s biggest weakness.
Emails between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed in court case. Interesting read and how things are being discussed around hiring top tier engineers and what to make out of OpenAI even though it’s from a few years back.
Google’s Deepmind division has released two new research models, one that forecasts weather globally and one that can create impressive gaming worlds. The examples are quite crazy, something that previously took years to create can now happen much faster.
The Commonwealth Bank in Australia have implemented AI supported tools with great results. 50 % reduction in scam losses, 30% decrease in customer-reported frauds and reduced call centre wait times by 40%.
Research paper on AI powered virtual fitting room.
Ben Affleck saying that AI doesn’t stand a chance against actors, or Shakespeare.
Ecommerce 🛍️
TikTok’s built in shop tripled it’s sales in the U.S. during this year’s Black Friday compared to 2023. Let’s see if TikTok get’s banned or not with Trump in the White House.
Temu has grown crazy the last years. Letting you get cheap stuff more or less directly from Chinese factories. To compete with this, Amazon is now live with it’s competing service called Amazon Haul. Selling for 20 dollars or less with most things under 10 dollars.
Tech (not as much AI) 🔧
Since Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads etc..) is being used for 10 % of the fixed internt lines and 20 % of all mobile traffic it wants to secure it’s own infrastructure. Now looking at building a sub sea cable spanning the world.
The 10th State of European Tech by venture capital firm Atomico.
Google’s self driving division Waymo is launching in Miami 2026. Yes you read it right, in more than a year from now, scaling physical things takes a lot longer than scaling digital.
Mr. Beast got more views on his sports episode than the most watched NFL game.
None of us misses Spotify Wrapped right? But I was waiting even more eagerly for the Google Photos yearly summary. And it DELIVERS! I am obviously a Google fan boy, using all of their products from Drive to Gemini, on my Pixel phone to Google built-in my car. But for me the best memories are all the photos I have shot throughout the year and when I get them like this I can relive and remember all the fantastic things that happened.
