Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 60 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Friday Five
I. ChatGPT Has Never Been More Accessible
II. X’s AI Tool, Grok, is Born
III. Ignore at Your Own Risk: A Patent for Bing Rankings
IV. Hearst To Employees: No Political Opinions on Social
V. Pair of Google Algorithm Updates Underway
VI. Other Important Updates
REMINDER: I’m collecting anonymous responses on how newsrooms and how they view and use AI. It takes less than two minutes to complete.
I. ChatGPT Has Never Been More Accessible
A day before Elon Musk’s big announcement (see next point), OpenAI announced this bombshell ChatGPT update. -OpenAI
"We’re rolling out custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose—called GPTs."
"GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others."
"Many power users maintain a list of carefully crafted prompts and instruction sets, manually copying them into ChatGPT. GPTs now do all of that for you."
"Starting today, you can create GPTs and share them publicly. Later this month, we’re launching the GPT Store, featuring creations by verified builders."
Only available to Plus and Enterprise users.
I just received access Thursday to create one. I’ll share updates in the future.
This is as far as I can get:
🛠 Why does this matter?
ChatGPT will become like an app store, allowing users to make money from their agents (and ChatGPT to take a cut).
The way I currently do this is by siloing conversations by specific topics. I then go back to those repeatedly for the same tasks. (e.g. Excel formulas or article summaries.) That will no longer be necessary.
This could detrimental to many startups/entrepreneurs that built a business model on using ChatGPT’s API (or another API-based tool altogether) to do this exact thing.
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II. X’s AI Tool, Grok, is Born
Musk announced X’s AI tool, Grok. -x.ai
“It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4.”
“A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
“Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help.”
Waitlist link: https://grok.x.ai/ (U.S.-only)
One early review says it’s basically Elon in bot form.
🛠 Why does this matter? The AI chatbot market is becoming crowded. Its almost as if you can’t call yourself a major tech company unless you have one. Whatever you call Musk’s social media platform – Twitter, X, A Dumpster Fire – he’s staying true to form with his version.
One unique advantage I can see for this platform is that it’s connected to – and draws upon – the Twitter (X) firehose of content.
One unique disadvantage I can see for this platform is that it’s connected to – and draws upon – the Twitter (X) firehose of content.
Here’s OpenAI founder Sam Altman roasting Grok on its own platform:
To be fair, I’m surprised Musk didn’t delete this. In fact, he responded (with an apparently Grok-generated retort).
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III. Ignore at Your Own Risk: A Patent for Bing’s Rankings
Microsoft secured a patent for evaluating website and content reliability to influence Bing search rankings.
The system scores reliability based on factors like site quality, user interactions, and content updates.
This scoring could impact SEO strategies, prioritizing content reliability and quality for better ranking.
🛠 Why does this matter? Bing helps power OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.
As that tool is more prominently used – and sometimes provides citations – it would be wise to pay attention to Bing's guidelines as much as we do to E-E-A-T.
Sure, referrals from Bing pale in comparison to those from Google, but if OpenAI continues to lead the AI chatbot race (over Bard et al), I imagine that gap could close a bit.
The good news? I imagine there's a lot of overlap between what Google and Bing consider quality content.
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IV. Hearst To Employees: No Political Opinions on Social
Hearst's new social media policy prohibits employees from posting personal political views.
Policy violations can result in dismissal; political posts require supervisor approval.
The Hearst Magazines Media Union is currently reviewing the policy, advising against signing.
A BBC host recently quit over similar rules.
🛠 Why does this matter? This is a new wrinkle to a years-long debate about how much say companies should have in their employees’ social media presence. Hearst, as a big media organization, could embolden other companies to update policies.
This raises (anew) questions about the balance between personal freedom and professional responsibilities.
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V. Pair of Google Algorithm Updates Underway
The core update began Nov. 2
The reviews update began Nov. 8
🛠 Why does this matter?
The core update is the main one that affects how content is ranked on the platform.
While this one is still underway, these typically focus on E-E-A-T.
Google documentation on how to “write high quality reviews.”
If you don’t write reviews on your site, this shouldn’t affect you.
The bottom line for both: Create quality content and you’ll rank better on Google’s SERP.
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VI. Other Important Updates
Helping People Understand When AI Or Digital Methods Are Used In Political or Social Issue Ads -Meta
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Any other important updates this week? Let me know in the comments.
I self-edit this newsletter, so please don’t be shy about emailing me if you spot a mistake.
See you next week for a practical tip and an in-depth analysis in the world of digital content strategy.