The TLDR

Highlight: For us non-graphic designers who still need to care a little bit about aesthetics in our work, Canva is an excellent tool. With its new suite of Magic AI tools, users need even less design intuition to produce something pretty. Read on for our review of the Magic suite.

Musing of the Week: OpenAI just announced plans to release its GPT agent platform. Until now, OpenAI has flown under the radar without drawing the kind of scrutiny that other tech giants, such as Meta and Google, often face. However, as OpenAI continues to expand its influence in both the consumer and developer sides of the AI realm, we wonder if people will start raising alarm bells about the potential of a monopoly. This development feels pivotal.

⚡️Are Canva’s new tools really “Magic”?

We’ve been faithful to Canva for years - since college, it's been our go-to for designing anything from Instagram posts to slidedecks. The platform can help you create such a diverse array of assets that you may never need another design software, if design isn’t your core differentiator. We were excited when Canva launched their Magic AI tools earlier this year and have been test-driving them for a couple of months.

Free Canva users can access some of the basic Magic tools, and Pro users can access several additional tools. Canva disclaims that many of these tools are in continuous development.

The free plan includes:

• Automatic text-to-design feature

• Automated slide designer

• AI-assisted short-video editing

A Pro account additionally includes:

• AI writing assistant

• Automated animations

• Automated resizing for your designs

• AI-based image editing tools

After experimentation, here’s what we learned about some of the key tools

👎 Home page-based text/image → design feature

The first tool you will likely encounter is the home page-based text/image → design feature. In our opinion, it’s also the least valuable. You’re supposed to let Canva know what you want to design, and Canva is supposed to generate it. However, we find that sometimes it generated designs, and sometimes it would just search for templates. When it does work, it can produce a decent starting point for your project. However, it feels redundant because Canva has so many templates already that users know how to find.

👍 AI-powered slide design feature

We've found the AI-powered slide design feature to be much more helpful. After throwing a few text blocks and graphic elements on a blank slide, the AI can usually effectively understand your goal and then help you design the elements. It also seems to consider the visual style of your other slides so you can find an option that fits the holistic approach.

👍 Brand theming feature

One of our favorite upgrades is the new brand theming system that allows you to try out different versions of your brand colors and styles quickly inside the same design. Sometimes it’s difficult to verbalize your vision to collaborators, and you just want to be able to show them the gist without wasting a ton of time on a mockup.

👎 Video editing, photo editing, text generation features

While the video editing, photo editing, and text generation features are all rudimentary, we knew this might be the case. Canva’s value prop was never about offering tools for the professionals, the way Photoshop and Lightroom cater to professional designers and photographers. The value of these tools comes from their integration within Canva's seamless environment so that people who need peripheral design tools can execute on their project without learning complex, nuanced softwares.

🧠 Musing of the Week

Yesterday, OpenAI announced their upcoming plans to launch a new GPT agent* platform. There have been add-on solutions for building GPT agents for months now, but OpenAI’s new system will notably increase stability and lower barriers to entry for GPT-based projects. This offers companies and developers the ability to integrate and build upon ChatGPT's framework.

The newfound accessibility is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’ll accelerate the rate of innovation, enabling a wider pool of people to harness the available technology without reinventing the wheel. But we do find ourselves worrying that it may stifle the development of other models.

The concern isn't just theoretical—it has practical implications for market competition, creativity, and even resilience. A market with varied competitors is less prone to single points of failure and more likely to inspire out-of-the-box solutions. More consolidation also means that a handful of big companies will direct the way the technology advances.

I’m sure that we’ll love some of the things that get built on OpenAI’s new system, but it's worth meditating on the value of a more distributed market. It's this kind of diversity that will ultimately propel the field forward while maintaining opportunities for choice.

*A GPT agent is a customizable AI model that can perform specific tasks or replicate certain styles of interaction, based on an established AI architecture (such as ChatGPT developed by OpenAI).

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

• Dialogue Designer @ Poly.ai

• Product Marketing & Creative Lead @ Voxel

• Staff Research Scientist, Generative 3D @ Unity

• Senior Product Manager – Responsible AI Applied Science @ Microsoft

• Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Generative AI & Search Platform @ Elastic

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

• Krisp.ai - Meeting assistant that improves audio quality

• Docus.ai - Builds you a custom health report and validates it with a second opinion from a US or EU-based doctor

• Einblick.ai - AI-native notebook for processing and visualizing complex data

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

Lorel & Reily