The TLDR

Highlight: GPT Agents dropped just over a month ago, and since then tens of thousands of new custom GPTs have hit the market. Today we’re highlighting a few that we’ve found to be the most unique and workflow-changing.

Musing of the Week: Rakuten has announced its foray into LLMs, marking Japan’s most significant engagement in the global tech arena in recent years. This move underscores Japan's potential interest in global technological competition, which feels different from its relatively subdued innovation in other recent tech waves (e.g., social media, crypto, SaaS).

🤖GPT Agents Are Changing Fast

It’s only been a month since OpenAI introduced GPT agents, and people continue to find new ways to share and leverage agents through the GPT creation system. Today we wanted to take a look at some of the most interesting GPTs we’ve seen and talk about why they’re so exciting.

1. AutoExpert - If you’re looking for some direction and advice, this GPT from LLM Imagineers is super helpful. It’s designed to automatically spin up a theoretical expert based on the questions you ask it. If you’re looking for multiple perspectives it will even help you to have a conversation from different viewpoints. Obviously, it’s still just ChatGPT at its core so take what it says with a grain of salt, but we find that it produces some really helpful outputs.

2. Grimoire - Grimoire is a web development-centric GPT agent built by Mind Goblin Studios meant to help you build websites from simple text prompts. There are many similar tools, but Grimoire stands out notably in execution. Grimoire takes advantage of ChatGPT’s robust existing coding knowledge and layers a number of quality-of-life improvements on top. The agent includes extensive starting context, project ideas to get you started, and even hotkeys to help speed up your workflow.

3. Gantt Chart GPT - Upload your project files, and this GPT will extract tasks, set timelines, and craft a Gantt Chart for project planning via onlinegantt.com. It's especially handy when paired with AI transcription tools for meeting records, allowing you to transform discussions about projects and objectives into a project plan with just a few clicks.

4. YouTube Summarizer - This GPT allows you to upload long-form YouTube videos and to-the-point text summaries. We absolutely love YouTube, but the video format does inherently demand more time, which isn’t always convenient. Checkfu’s GPT helps to increase the amount of value we get out of the content, we can always go back and watch the full video if it’s particularly exciting.

5. GPT Finder - Until OpenAI releases their internal GPT marketplace one of the biggest gaps in the space will be finding the new tools people are building. SEO.AI built and maintains this GPT with an extensive list of the available custom GPT' It’s imperfect since ChatGPT doesn’t really know which GPTs are actually good or not, but it’s a good place to start if you are looking for a specific tool and don’t want to build your own.

There are a ton more tools out there. With links marketed randomly across the internet, we’re sure we haven’t seen half of the interesting stuff being built. With the forthcoming OpenAI marketplace and additional plugins to expand the model's capabilities, the possibilities are set to grow exponentially.

🧠 Musing of the Week

Japan has joined the chat. Rakuten CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, recently announced that Rakuten will be building an LLM solution for both internal use andenterprise customers. Japan joins a global AI sphere dominated by the US (home to Open AI, Meta, Amazon, Google, Anthropic) and followed by China (Tencent, Huawei, Baidu). Mirae Assets reports that there are 294 Japan-based AI startups that have received $4B in private investment over 2013-2022. It’s widely recognized that Japan was the dominant force industrial robotics innovation from the 1960s-80s. However, these AI stats are still surprising considering its general hiatus from recent tech waves. The country actually experienced a period of economic stagnation in the 1990s, known as the “Lost Decade,” characterized by increased insularity and economic shifts. Japan’s strong showing in AI today might partly be a long-tail effect of its state-backed funds (which isn’t really a factor available to US startups).

Rakuten Group already has a significant global customer base across its 70+ businesses in advertising, ecommerce, travel, digital content, telecomms, and fintech. It’s positioned to make a substantial impact in the AI domain. What else will we see from Rakuten in 2024? Will we see any of the other 294 Japan-based AI companies join the global sphere in the next few months? We’ll be watching.

🙌 If you’re hyped about the generative AI industry specifically, here are some of the coolest roles we’ve seen this week:

• Content Marketing Manager @ Session AI

• Growth Marketing Manager, Paid Ads & Campaigns @ Snorkel AI

• AI Health Data Scientist, Managing Consultant @ Guidehouse

• Sr. Product Manager, AI @ Recogni

• AI Product Manager @ Lenovo

🔨 Check out these other AI tools we’ve been looking at this week:

• Jotbot AI: Research writing-focused partner bot that ideates, outlines, and writes content in your voice

• Kapwing: Multimodal content and video generator/editor

• Tavily AI: AI partner for research and citation organization

That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!

Lorel & Reily