Apple’s new launch is our top read for today, but to be real, it’s more mixed news than “good news.”
- Apple announced a new Apple Pencil. Good: Affordability. Bad: The rest.
- You can embed Snapchat content now. Ephemeral content had its moment.
- AI funding reached $17.9 billion. 🚧 The way everyone’s working “AI” into their products right now.
- Skip to Stripe's news.
🚧 = gated content
Making it easier to make with AI
We get it — there’s a lot of AI right now (see good news above). The truth is that we’re at an exciting point in the history of generative AI. It’s everywhere, and access to various models is increasing.
That’s a bit of a problem too. People making products with AI have tons of platforms and APIs to configure and models to work with, with varying degrees of success depending on what the task at hand is.
LastMile AI just launched a solution — an AI developer platform for engineering teams. The platform gives you a notebook-like environment to prototype your AI app. OpenAI (GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Whisper), Google (PaLM), open-source providers (Stable Diffusion, Bark), and Hugging Face are all accessible in a one-stop shop.
“[LastMile's] workbooks make it easy to iterate on prompts, compare models, and create templates for others to use,” explains maker Sarmad Qadri. Qadri spent years building developer tools for ML engineers and data scientists at Facebook and Microsoft, along with his co-founders with similar backgrounds.
If you’re an engineer, you can dig into some of the other features of LastMile, like connecting to your data sets and a batch execution service to test and automate your AI app for production.
As a non-technical, I think the Discord community sounds like a great benefit too. Makers and AI enthusiasts can learn from or inspire each other by sharing workbooks and workflows.
Your agents stopped answering and started doing
Your agents call tools, write to databases and move money, so a wrong answer is now a wrong action, which is a considerably worse meeting. Arcjet runs policy before every LLM call, tool call, query and API request: prompt injection, sensitive data, bots, rate limits, spend quotas, and your own rules in Rego on top. It reads the OpenTelemetry you already emit, so switching it on is one environment variable, no code changes and nothing to deploy. Each check also reads the earlier steps in the same workflow, so an agent's tenth action gets judged against the first nine and not on its own. JavaScript, Python and Go SDKs all at 1.0, agent framework guards included, free tier to start on.
Daily Top Products
- The Permission Slip app shows you what data companies are collecting so you can file requests to stop it; built by the US nonprofit and advocacy org, Consumer Reports.
- Welly AI suggests what vitamins to take after analyzing your gastrointestinal health.
- Wiseone adds a tooltip to your browser so you can see info and helpful links as you read.
- Stripe launched Embedded Checkout. Makers can now drop pre-built, customizable payment forms into their sites.
- Harmony is a UI color palette prioritizing accessibility, using “advanced color tech” for precision.
- FlutterFlow for iPad is here.
There have been a lot of product launches around catching AI in school papers or using AI to write papers.
What if AI was used to align students and teachers instead?
Students from Edge Hill University created Mark This For Me. The concept is to let AI know what the criteria is for your papers (teachers usually outline what your work needs to have for a specific grade). The tool will check your work, then give you feedback and ask questions to ensure you meet the criteria.