MarTech AI #46: Google Photos AI search, ChatGPT's $2000 plan, Canva's price hike, Amazon's Alexa AI upgrade & Groq's multimodal LLaVA...

Welcome to MarTech AI #46 (1st - 8th September)

Welcome to this week's AI marketing roundup. Explore how Google Photos enhances search, OpenAI considers a premium ChatGPT plan, Canva faces pricing backlash, Amazon revamps Alexa, and Groq introduces multimodal AI. Let's dive in!

TL;DR:

→ Google Photos enhances search with natural language queries

→ OpenAI considers $2000 ChatGPT plan, hinting at GPT-5

→ Canva faces backlash over 300% price increase

→ Amazon to revamp Alexa with Anthropic's Claude AI

→ Groq introduces multimodal LLaVA model on GroqCloud

Google Photos search gets smarter

Publisher: Hot Hardware (04/09/2024)

Overview: Google Photos introduces natural language search capabilities, allowing users to find specific memories using descriptive queries.

Key Points:

1. Users can now search for photos using complex queries like "Alice and me laughing" or "Kayaking on a lake surrounded by mountains".
2. The new "Ask Photos" feature enables users to ask questions about details within photos, enhancing the search experience.
3. This update represents a significant leap in making photo search more intuitive and user-friendly for a wider audience.

Marketer's POV: Google's AI-powered natural language search in Photos presents marketers with new opportunities for personalised content delivery and targeted advertising based on users' visual memories and experiences.

Rumours of a $2,000 ChatGPT plan

Publisher: BGR (07/09/2024)

Overview: OpenAI is reportedly considering a $2,000 monthly subscription plan, potentially indicating the launch of GPT-5 or advanced AI models.

Key Points:

1. The high-priced tier could offer access to upcoming products like "Strawberry" and "Orion", which are more advanced AI models.
2. OpenAI aims to improve reasoning and reduce hallucinations in its next-generation chatbots.
3. The company has reached 1 million paying users across its business products, doubling its weekly active users to 200 million.

Marketer's POV: The potential launch of GPT-5 and premium AI tiers could seriously change content creation strategies, prompting marketers to reassess their AI investment and utilisation plans.

Canva's 300% price increase

Publisher: TechCrunch (05/09/2024)

Overview: Canva's decision to raise Teams subscription prices by 300% has sparked controversy among its user base.

Key Points:

1. Some Canva Teams subscribers will see their annual pricing jump from $120 to $500, with a 40% discount for the first year.
2. The company justifies the increase by citing an expanded product experience and new AI features.
3. This price hike only affects Teams accounts, not Pro or Enterprise customers, potentially impacting small businesses and freelancers.

Marketer's POV: Canva's pricing strategy shift highlights the growing value of AI-enhanced design tools, challenging marketers to balance cost considerations with the need for advanced creative capabilities in their tech stacks.

Amazon to revamp Alexa with Claude

Publisher: Cointelegraph (06/09/2024)

Overview: Amazon plans to integrate Anthropic's Claude AI model into Alexa, aiming to enhance its conversational abilities and features.

Key Points:

1. The collaboration seeks to make Alexa more conversational and capable of handling complex queries and tasks.
2. This move is part of Amazon's broader strategy to compete with advanced AI assistants from Google and Apple.
3. The integration could potentially expand Alexa's capabilities in areas such as content creation and data analysis.

Marketer's POV: Amazon's AI upgrade for Alexa opens new avenues for voice-based marketing and customer engagement, prompting marketers to reconsider their strategies for voice search optimisation and conversational commerce.

Groq introduces multimodal LLaVA

Publisher: Groq (01/09/2024)

Overview: Groq launches LLaVA v1.5 7B on GroqCloud, expanding support to image, audio, and text modalities for AI applications.

Key Points:

1. LLaVA combines OpenAI's CLIP and a fine-tuned version of Meta's Llama 2 7B model for advanced visual-language processing.
2. The model excels in visual question answering, caption generation, and multimodal dialogue tasks.
3. LLaVA v1.5 7B offers potential applications across various industries, including retail, finance, and education.

Marketer's POV: Groq's multimodal AI empowers marketers to create hyper-personalised, visually-driven campaigns. This technology could revolutionise product demos, customer support, and content creation.

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That's all for this week. Stay tuned for more updates next week.

Warm regards,

Charlie Hills

P.S. AI writes this newsletter for me.

It's a surprisingly effective process that gets me 80% of the way there—I use Perplexity with a custom prompt, refining the output with a human touch. Check it out ↓