Our Guests Tell Us Their Favorite AI Tools
What leading AI founders, builders, and investors actually use in their daily life
Hey Cogs,
Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution Newsletter! In this edition, you’ll find:
a compilation of our podcast guests’ favorite AI product and tools.
a recap of this past week’s podcast episodes with Med-PaLM’s Vivek Natarajan, Guardrails AI’s Shreya Rajpal, and Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman
Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Show the perfect ad tailored for each customer. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention “Cog Rev” for 10% off.
🪄 The AI Tools Our Guests Recommend
From all of the episodes of The Cognitive Revolution released so far, we’ve compiled a list of our guest’s most recommended AI tools that they actually use in their day-to-day. What’s revealed from this roundup is that even though there’s a frenzy of potential for hyper-personalized, niche AI-powered tools (and even single use-case apps), most of the builders we talk to — for now — harnessing accessible, AI-first technology with good UI.
ChatGPT
A crowd favorite, ChatGPT is our most frequently recommended tool. Rachel Woods, founder of The AI Exchange, recommends pairing Chat-GPT with an automation tool like Zapier or Make to uplevel your automation abilities, saying “it tends to be the big unlock for people”.
If you’re a developer, Anton Troynikov, founder of Chroma (an AI-native embedding database), Junnan Li, and Dongxu Li of BLIP and BLIP2 respectively, recommend using Chat-GPT to uplevel their code through its ability to provide direction. Troynikov uses GPT to orient himself when working with new libraries or strange bugs.
CoPilot
Speaking of developers, many of our guests from technical backgrounds highly recommend using CoPilot to speed up their coding. “I recently had to set up my dev environment from scratch and didn’t have CoPilot and was like… what am I missing?” — Shreya Rajpal of Guardrails AI
Bearly.ai
Bearly.ai was recommended by Ben Tossell, of Ben’s Bites, who uses it in his writing and research process for his newsletter. Bearly.ai incorporates AI into your workflow, through features like summarizing articles and papers, or generating copy.
Layup
Recommended by Neal Khosla, founder of Curai Health, Layup (YC W23) allows you to incorporate AI into your workflow through one simple prompt and over 170 integrations with software like Airtable, Salesforce, and Slack.
MusicLM
Mentioned by Vivek Natarajan as one of his favorite tools, MusicLM is exciting to him as someone who has a “keen interest in music but is not particularly skilled at it”. A MusicLM track is also used for our podcast’s theme music!
Supermeme.ai
Recommended by Rachel Woods, she says “I’ve never been a person who’s good at making memes before, but now I can make ones that make me laugh, at least.”. Type in a prompt and receive different variations of meme formats!
Character.ai
Our guests Sarah Guo, investor at Conviction, and Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika, recommend checking out Character AI. Character allows you to interact with different AI chatbots. Whether you want an AI assistant, a pair programmer, or a conversation with Tony Stark, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Socrates, there is something in store for you!
EzDubs.AI
Elad Gil describes the experience of AI-powered dubbing as magical. EzDubs.AI allows you to effortlessly drop in videos, and is able to capture the tonality and voice of the person in translating to another language.
…And we’re still hoping to get in on the custom notetaking tool Raza Habib (CEO of Humanloop) built for himself to critique and extend his writing. (Episode 20)
🎬 Episode Highlights
E27: Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM2 with Vivek Natarajan
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Vivek discuss the foundational models that Vivek and team built before Med-PaLM, the techniques used to develop Med-PaLM which will be of interest to anyone developing AI systems for high-stakes use cases, and the capabilities for Med-PaLM to equalize access to medical knowledge and care.
Vivek shares with us his story and why he thinks with the current progress in AI, now is the most exciting time in history, and the ability for AI medical care to significantly improve the lives of people without ease of access to healthcare.
👉 Listen to the full episode here: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube
E28: Keeping the AI Revolution on the Rails with Shreya Rajpal of Guardrails AI
In this episode, Nathan Labenz sits down with Shreya Rajpal, the creator of Guardrails AI, a new Python library that allows developers to add a layer of output, validation and correction to their code. Guardrails can ensure a reliable interface between language models and more traditional deterministic software systems. At the same time, mind-bending and potentially risky use case frameworks like Guardrails allow developers to ask and answer entirely new kinds of questions.
👉 Listen to the full episode here: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube
E29: The AI Chip Revolution with Andrew Feldman of Cerebras
Nathan Labenz sits down with Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras Systems, a company building a new class of computer systems for accelerating AI and changing the future of work. Cerebras Systems is the creator of the world’s largest chip, at 2.6 trillion transistors. In this episode, they discuss the founding story of Cerebras, the experience of creating the world’s largest chip, and the process that goes into chip design and manufacturing for an AI-focused chip.
👉 Listen to the full episode here: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube
🖇️ Links of Interest
[Book] The Chip War by Chris Miller
“An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict.”. Nathan and recent guest, Andrew Feldman, refer to this book in the most recent episode. Nathan read this to prepare for the discussion centered on Feldman’s experience founding Cerebras, the company behind the world’s largest chip.
[Paper] TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be and Still Speak Coherent English?
We’ll be having Ronen Eldan and Yuanzhi Li of Tiny LLMs joining us on an upcoming episode. Their paper demonstrates that “TinyStories can be used to train and evaluate LMs that are much smaller than the state-of-the-art models (below 10 million total parameters), or have much simpler architectures (with only one transformer block), yet still produce fluent and consistent stories with several paragraphs that are diverse and have almost perfect grammar, and demonstrate reasoning capabilities.”
Special Project from Nathan, host of The Cognitive Revolution
If you are interested in:
Reproducing some recent LLM benchmarking results and collaborating on a project
Reading drafts of Nathan’s AI analysis mega threads and providing feedback
Sharing questions you’d like to ask for a future discussion episode?
Reach out to us at tcr@turpentine.co.
Until next time.