Product of the Week: Monterey AI
Sep 22, 2023
For those that are new around here, this is weekly newsletter where I highlight new and innovative AI products that I think are worth exploring.
Hi fellow humans!
No baby this week…the wait continues. But we do have beautiful September weather here in Seattle so I’ve been able to get out for some relaxing bike rides. The calm before those sleepless nights.
In this week’s issue:
A tool that allows teams to aggregate, analyze, and monitor qualitative data at scale is my product of the weekChat with any websitePlus, a recommended read on why DeepMind’s cofounder says Generative AI is just a phase and Interactive AI is what’s next.
PRODUCT OF THE WEEK
After testing dozens of new AI products this week. Here’s my top pick.
Monterey AI: Turn millions of data points into instant insights.
Backed by Y Combinator, they launched their 1.0 version in late April and are working on 2.0
Monterey is a tool that allows teams to aggregate, analyze, and monitor qualitative data at scale. It is built by leads from Uber, Scale AI, and MIT. This tool can process millions of data points in seconds to help companies better understand their user feedback. The key differentiator here is that they combine analysis of both the qualitative feedback (ex: app store reviews) with the quantitive data (ex weekly churn rates).
Earlier this week I spoke with the co-founder and CEO, Chun Jiang, about the product and her vision. She believes Monterey AI can help teams go beyond the surface level questions like “why are users churning” and recommend follow up questions that are more nuanced and detailed, with the ultimate goal of helping teams make evidence-based decisions in product development.
Chun and I were in agreement that sometimes product managers are guilty of finding data to back up their feature idea, no matter how biased the data analysis is. True evidence-based decision making is sorely needed.
One additional point to mention is that I appreciate the approach taken by Monterey in combining LLMs with more traditional ML methodologies. Unlike some other AI-based tools for user feedback analysis that solely rely on GPT-4 to identify commonalities in feedback, Monterey utilizes a total of nine different models (including sentiment analysis and context understanding) and subsequently groups the results into themes. This approach yields outcomes that are more practical and actionable. Additionally, the models have the capability to learn and adapt to your dataset over time.
RUNNER UP
One more AI product that is worth your time.
Glimpse: Chat with any website. There are a ton of Chrome plugins that are basic ChatGPT wrappers and I have to admit I was a bit skeptical of Glimpse when I first heard about it. But, after using it for the past few days I was impressed. Essentially, Glimpse is a chat bot that you can open up on any webpage you are viewing. Once it digests that page (typically only a few seconds) you can ask it any question about the context of the page, such as “ what’s this article about” and it will quickly give you an answer. It also suggests follow up questions based on the content of the site.
It’s especially helpful if you are on a long listicle type page with tons of SEO keyword fluff. Ask Glimpse to tell you the key takeaways and you’ve got a nice summary, minus all of the ads.
All in all, Glimpse’s product felt more robust and helpful than other Chrome plugins that have promised the same thing.
One thing I didn't like about Glimpse was that sometimes it would suggest a follow-up question for me to ask, but when I asked it, it would simply repeat what it had said before. However, since it is still in the early phases, I expect them to resolve these types of bugs in the future.
OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED
Some other notable news and product launches from this week
Microsoft announced that their Copilot will begin to roll out as part of a free update to Windows 11, starting Sept. 26… that’s next week. Keep an eye out for it on Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365.
Amazon announced that generative AI is coming to Alexa. Finally! Now you’ll be able to have more meaningful conversations with Alexa, instead of just giving simple commands like "Alexa, set timer for 5 minutes!"
The Information is reporting that Google nears release of Gemini AI which is their competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Challenge OpenAI. Some early testers are saying that it’s on par with GPT-4, but there is no specific ETA on when it will be officially released.
Google taught it’s chatbot, Bard, to stop making stuff up and enabled it “double check” itself. Casey Newton of Platformer has a good overview.
Morgan Stanley released an AI assistant for it’s financial advisors. The tool gives them speedy access to a database of about 100,000 research reports and documents.
TikTok announced a new tool that will allow creators to label their AI-generated content and will begin testing other ways to label AI-generated content automatically. I’m skeptical that creators leveraging AI are going to voluntarily tell Tiktok that their content is AI generated, but we’ll see.
And the big news of the week… OpenAI announced that DALLE3 is coming in October. DALLE is OpenAI’s image generation tool. They are planning to integrate DALLE3 into ChatGPT which means it will be multimodal, a big step forward. According to OpenAI the v3 model can generate readable text on images. Something that has been the bane of earlier versions and it’s Midjourney competitor. Here’s one of it’s creations:
WHAT I'M READING
If you only read one thing this week let it be this.
DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI. by Will Douglas Heaven
"DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman wants to build a chatbot that does a whole lot more than chat. In a recent conversation I had with him, he told me that generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI: bots that can carry out tasks you set for them by calling on other software and other people to get stuff done. He also calls for robust regulation—and doesn’t think that’ll be hard to achieve. Suleyman is not the only one talking up a future filled with ever more autonomous software. But unlike most people he has a new billion-dollar company, Inflection, with a roster of top-tier talent plucked from DeepMind, Meta, and OpenAI, and—thanks to a deal with Nvidia—one of the biggest stockpiles of specialized AI hardware in the world. Suleyman has put his money—which he tells me he both isn't interested in and wants to make more of—where his mouth is.…" MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Until next week!
-✌🏻 Tyler