Four Tickets Left! + Random Thoughts // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 39
More conference stuff and some other thoughts about AI & marketing that has been rattling around in my head.
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Good afternoon from a slightly cloudy New York City! Today’s update will be relatively short as I’m very deep in conference planning. But there are a few things I wanted to get out there. I’m starting with conference updates and then finishing with a few things that have been floating around my head and will (hopefully) be fodder for future editions.
First, as for the conference, things are shaping up well. I have (mostly) locked down the speaker lineup, which you can find on the site. The format should be roughly the same as last year: a very small number of keynotes, a lot of demos, and some fireside chats as anchors for different sections. I don’t do panels because, by and large, I think they’re terrible.
As for the themes of the day, in rough strokes, here’s my current thinking:
Interfaces: Who is pushing beyond the chat modality?
Creativity: How are the best brands and creatives throwing themselves into the deep end with AI?
Brand: What does it mean to integrate AI into brand marketing and design?
B2B: How will B2B sales and content work in an AI world?
Legal: How do we think about the liability and other legal questions surrounding this technology?
The programming tenets for the day stay the same:
Doers > Speculators: We want BrXnd to be about doing and learning, not talking and speculating. We are too early in this journey, and the technology is too different from what we’ve seen before to get stuck speculating about its future impact.
Curiosity > Overconfidence: We embrace the unintuitive nature of AI and its future implications. We're all learners in this new era of technology.
Conversations > Panels: Whenever possible, it’s better to have just two people on stage talking to one another rather than a whole set of speakers competing for time and attention. Go deeper with fewer people so that the audience can learn from their thinking and experience more than just their opinions.
Show > Tell: It’s always better to show people something than to tell them about it. While other conferences try to urge people away from showing specific products, we think it’s most useful for people to see what’s real and possible.
Process > Perfection: Take your audience on a journey, even if it’s something that didn’t work out. This is an audience of doers and experimenters, and understanding the journey is often more important than just seeing the outcome.
And, of course, a big thank you to all our 2024 sponsors, without whom I couldn’t pull this thing off. Airtable enables any team, regardless of technical skill, to create apps on top of shared data and power their most critical and unique workflows. The Brandtech Group The Brandtech Group is a marketing technology group that helps brands do their marketing better, faster, and cheaper using the latest technology. Brandguard is the world’s #1 AI-powered brand governance platform, Focaldata is combining LLMs with qualitative research in fascinating ways, and Redscout is a strategy and design consultancy that partners with founders, CEOs, and CMOs at moments of inflection for their organizations. Plus, big thanks to McKinney, Inuvo, Dstillery, and Persistent Productions. If you’re interested in sponsoring the 2024 event, please be in touch.
Okay, so what’s been floating around my head?
Since I first played with GPT3 a few years ago, I’ve had a real sense that it was going to have a significant impact on SaaS. Specifically, I have been noticing in my behavior that the ease of building combined with the power of the models has meant that I’m choosing to just deploy small apps to solve problems rather than using off-the-shelf tech much more often than I have in the past. Accenture announced $600 million in generative AI revenue in its latest quarter, which seems like a bit of a bellwether for those who are capturing value in this new world. I can’t quite make heads or tails of the whole thing, but it definitely feels like something is shifting.
I have been building a bunch of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) apps lately (if you want a refresher on RAG, or at least embeddings, I wrote something a year ago). I have a nice little architecture I’ve been using that relies entirely on serverless stuff, which means for low traffic, it’s cheap, fast, and high-quality. Overall, I’m still impressed by the power of RAG compared to the effort. I’ve also been reasonably seriously considering open-sourcing the little repo I’ve been using (which is based on this nice repo from Vercel). If this is of interest to you, let me know.
There are a lot of folks circling the problem with AI evals (this is the set of questions they give new models to benchmark). I’ve been fascinated by this for a while. It seems incredibly clear that the best way to measure these things right now are the “vibes”: you play with them and learn what they’re good/not good at. It’s very subjective and taste-based. That, of course, isn’t great for benchmarking, but maybe there’s an answer. I keep coming back to this comment from Daniel Gross in his interview with Ben Thompson for Stratechery:
I think the piece of information that’s most interesting is the fact that Google lacked a very basic process. This is your point, where maybe people thought or maybe people didn’t even think before they launched it and I’m thinking a lot of that famous Steve Jobs interview where he says, “The problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.” I think the unexpected thing about AI, we’ve talked about it in this podcast, but I don’t think it’s been generally expected, is fine-tuning a model is just as aesthetic an art as making a beautiful landing page for your website.
That’s it for now. Get your tickets before they’re gone. Thanks for reading, subscribing, and supporting.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. If you are interested in sponsoring, reach out, and I’ll send you the details.
Thanks for reading,
Noah