This AI Reads The Internet For You (Grok 2 Changes Everything)

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain: Episode Summary
Episode: This AI Reads The Internet For You (Grok 2 Changes Everything)
Release Date: December 19, 2024
Host/Author: HubSpot Podcast Network

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Introduction: Exploring Grok 2

In this episode of Marketing Against The Grain, Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s CMO, and Kieran Flanagan, Zapier’s CMO, delve deep into the advancements of Grok 2, an AI model poised to revolutionize how we consume information online. The hosts aim to uncover how Grok 2 can enable marketers and users alike to access and process information tenfold faster, enhancing intelligence and decision-making processes.

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The Rapid Evolution of AI Models

Kieran Flanagan initiates the discussion by highlighting the swift pace of change in the AI landscape:

“[00:22] Kieran: ...developed this free guide... to build your own custom GPT... [and] focus on the part that's actually fun...”

Aaron elaborates on the competitive dynamics among AI companies:

“[01:10] Aaron: ...companies are trying to front run each other... Google came out with Gemini 2.0... released a pretty great update for their Gemini Flash...”

The hosts discuss the intense race between major AI players like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, noting how each company's rapid launches aim to capture more market share and user engagement.

Kieran presents a compelling statistic:

“[01:48] Kieran: ...Google Gemini's market share among developers went from 5% in September to 50% last week.”

This surge underscores Google's aggressive advancements with Gemini 2.0, positioning it as a formidable competitor in the AI space.

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Grok 2: Features and Capabilities

Grok 2 emerges as a focal point, with its real-time information processing and enhanced image generation capabilities.

Kieran explains how Grok 2 is being utilized for daily information consumption:

“[04:20] Kieran: ...use Grok to summarize Apple intelligence...”

Aaron highlights a practical use case:

“[04:34] Aaron: ...tell me everything about this thing that's happening on X... better than going into trends...”

A notable feature discussed is the Grok button, which allows users to instantaneously summarize and analyze content with minimal effort:

“[05:30] Aaron: ...Grok basically describes its take on the button... It just brings AI front and center...”

This functionality transforms every piece of content, such as tweets, into searchable artifacts that can be explored in depth, significantly altering how users interact with information.

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Impact on Content Consumption and Marketing

The hosts explore how AI summarization tools like Grok are changing content consumption:

Aaron reflects on the change:

“[06:33] Aaron: ...all of the content that we engage with becomes data for AI...”

Kieran offers a critical prediction for marketers:

“[11:35] Kieran: ...we are going to see a pretty big rotation in marketing to channels in which they cannot be AI summarized. So I'm thinking things like in-person events, out-of-home advertising...”

This suggests a shift towards unfiltered channels where messages remain direct and unaltered by AI summarization, thereby preserving the integrity and intent of the original content.

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Grok 2's Image Generation and Future Prospects

Kieran introduces Grok 2's advanced image generation capabilities:

“[14:42] Kieran: ...new Grok image capabilities... especially good for real human faces and images...”

Examples include creating photorealistic images of historical figures, demonstrating Grok 2's proficiency in generating high-quality visuals.

Aaron shares insights on practical applications:

“[15:38] Aaron: ...the practical use case will not be from Grok. It will be a company that can train on your style guide...”

The discussion touches on the potential for customized image generation, tailored to specific brand aesthetics, which could be highly valuable for marketing purposes.

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The Future of AI and Content Creation

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around the long-term implications of AI on content creation and marketing strategies.

Aaron contemplates the limits of current AI scaling:

“[16:13] Aaron: ...Grok 3 is the model that's being trained on the 100K GPU cluster... testing the scaling laws...”

Kieran and Aaron debate whether current AI models have reached their potential in terms of data scalability, with Ilei, ex OpenAI co-founder, suggesting that intelligence will advance through smarter apps rather than bigger models:

“[16:13] Aaron: ...we have hit scaling laws and we've run out of data... apps built around it will get smarter...”

This viewpoint posits that future AI advancements may hinge more on the application layer rather than just enhancing the underlying models.

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Predictions for Marketing Strategies

Kieran offers a forecast for marketers in the AI-driven landscape:

“[20:17] Kieran: ...make sure that your marketing mix... has channels where you can deliver your message in an unfiltered way... billboards, events, IRL...”

This underscores the necessity for marketers to adapt their strategies to include channels resistant to AI summarization, ensuring that their core messages remain intact and impactful.

Aaron concurs, emphasizing the importance of personal connections:

“[20:32] Aaron: ...brands will still consume content because of the person...”

The discussion reinforces the idea that personality-led growth and authentic connections will remain crucial in an era dominated by AI-driven content summarization.

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Conclusion: Embracing AI While Preserving Authenticity

As the episode wraps up, the hosts reiterate the benefits and challenges posed by Grok 2 and similar AI tools. They encourage marketers to leverage AI for efficiency while also exploring traditional, unfiltered channels to maintain the authenticity of their messaging.

Kieran leaves listeners with a final thought:

“[20:37] Kieran: ...it's a wild time. More AI innovation has shipped in December 2024 than I thought possible...”

The hosts invite listeners to engage with the content by sharing their experiences with Grok in the comments, fostering a community dialogue around the evolving AI landscape.

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Key Takeaways

• Grok 2 offers advanced real-time information processing and image generation, significantly enhancing how users consume and interact with online content.
• The AI race is intensifying, with major players like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic rapidly launching new features to capture market share.
• AI summarization tools are transforming content consumption, leading marketers to shift focus towards unfiltered channels such as in-person events and out-of-home advertising.
• The future of AI advancements may rely more on the application layer rather than solely improving model scalability, emphasizing smarter app integration.
• Personality-led growth and authentic human connections remain essential in marketing strategies amidst the rise of AI-driven content tools.

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Notable Quotes

• Kieran Flanagan [01:48]: "Google Gemini's market share among developers went from 5% in September to 50% last week."
• Aaron [04:34]: "Tell me everything about this thing that's happening on X... better than going into trends."
• Aaron Levy [05:30]: "The Grok button is now being on every post is a clever new UX pattern for AI..."
• Kieran [11:35]: "We are going to see a pretty big rotation in marketing to channels in which they cannot be AI summarized."
• Aaron [16:13]: "We have hit scaling laws and we've run out of data... apps built around it will get smarter."
• Kieran [20:17]: "Make sure that your marketing mix... has channels where you can deliver your message in an unfiltered way."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the pivotal discussions and insights from the episode, providing a clear understanding of Grok 2's impact on marketing and information consumption for those who haven't tuned in.

Transcript

[Kieran]

On today's show we're diving into Grok, specifically Grok 2, the AI model that you're not using. But if you want real time information, it is the one to check out. We're going to show you how you can use it to consume 10x the information you are getting today and get way smarter. Let's dive into today's show.

[Kip]

Hey guys, real quick. You know we love building custom GPTs on the show and we love sharing it with all of you. Well, we wanted to kick that up a notch. We just developed this free guide that teaches you how to build your own custom GPT on on chatgpt. We've taken the guesswork out of it. We've got templates, we've got a step by step guide to design and implement custom models. So you can focus on the the part that's actually fun, the part we love actually building it. And if you want it, you can grab a link in the description below and go check it out now. Now back to today.

[Kieran]

Kieran. It's amazing the rate of change that we are currently in right.

[Aaron]

Right now. It is because what happens is all of these companies are trying to front run each other other than Claude, I guess like Google basically decided we're not going to allow OpenAI to continue to steal our launches. OpenAI came out this like 12 days of launches. Google came out with Gemini 2.0 which did the multimodal voice agent first. They released a pretty great update for their Gemini Flash, like their search engine. They released agents that can automate work all in one bundle. And so I think this is the thing that happens is all of these companies are trying to steal each other's engagement, which means you end up with like tons of launches all at the same time.

[Kieran]

This is one of the most fascinating charts I've seen on the Internet in the last week. Google Gemini's market share among developers went from 5% in September to 50% last week.

[Aaron]

Wow. Because of the Gemini 2.0 launch?

[Kieran]

Yeah, I think that, I think the.

[Aaron]

Chip news they introduced veo too. I thought the Sora launch actually was pretty underwhelming and I think Google stole a lot of engagement with their video launch.

[Kieran]

We did a whole show on how underwhelming the Sora launch was and look at the VO2 launch.

[Aaron]

They look pretty dope.

[Kieran]

Like obviously these are curated videos we're looking at here. It's like this AI race is kind of wild, right? OpenAI had this massive lead and then things happened. I won't even speculate as to what things happen. Anthropic has come up, Google has woken up and what we're going to talk about today is you have Elon, who you can never count out. Yeah, it is wild what's happening. The other thing is everybody's been dogging on Apple Intelligence, right?

[Aaron]

I heard it sucks.

[Kieran]

Here's the deal. I can now have my ChatGPT Pro subscription linked to Siri. So it's just way easier for me to use ChatGPT Pro. I can ask questions when I have my camera open through like a multimodal experience. I can generate custom emojis. In love with generating custom emojis you really do need like a lot of pictures of somebody to generate fun emojis about them. But that's like a whole other thing. And it just basically redoes the infrastructure of your iPhone. Like all of my push notifications are summarized. I now have full like priority and summarized email. Just even default in the Apple Mail app. It's not life changing, but it is very different.

[Aaron]

I am planning to get one.

[Kieran]

I think it's worth it and I think if they make it even marginally better over the next few months, it will feel like a pretty different experience. I think what I like is if you get a bunch of messages from one app, like a bunch of push notifications from the same person on WhatsApp or bunch of news notifications from like the Wall Street Journal. The top notification is now a summary of all the notifications.

[Aaron]

Oh, wow. Yeah. Summarize it. And that's what we're going to get into the theme of this show. We're going to show Grok. The theme of the show is the great summarization.

[Kieran]

Yeah. So why do we want to talk about Grok today? Grok is, I think the least talked about of the core kind of what we call frontier AI models and apps. Right. But Kieran, I'm using Grok every day. Are you using Grok every day? We're using it for very specific things, but I think we're using it pretty regularly. Right.

[Aaron]

I'm using it. If I see something interesting on X, I'll basically say, tell me everything about this thing that's happening on X. It's actually better than going into trends. Obviously it can still hallucinate, but for the most part I use it for all of real time information.

[Kieran]

Correct. And that's one use case I have One of the things that Grok has done. There's a good tweet here from Aaron Levy that I will share. There's a new Grok button. You see this button right here on the post, this slash, which is essentially the Grok logo. Aaron's like, the Grok button is now being on every post is a clever new UX pattern for AI that could be more broadly useful across the web. Being able to provide instant analysis to anything with zero friction dramatically increases the ability to go deep on a topic. And what happens is you hit this button and Grok gives you an instant summary. What I like about this feature, Kieran, because I'm now using this feature all the time. The biggest reason I use this feature, you and I were talking off air. You're like, what the hell do you use this feature for? Do you ever read a tweet that is like, oh, I think I'm interested in this, but I clearly don't have the full context in this one tweet. Like, clearly this person is referencing something I don't understand or haven't seen.

[Aaron]

I got you. Yeah.

[Kieran]

Or whatever. Grok fixes that problem now for me, right? I could hit that button and it shows me all the web pages related to it and it gives me its take. And what's interesting in this case, Aaron's tweet was pretty brief. So Grok basically describes its take on the button, which is like a change in UX community notes, comparison and then search utility. But what's interesting to me is it just brings AI front and center, right? And it's like, I don't really have to read anything anymore. You know what I mean?

[Aaron]

Yeah, exactly. It turns every tweet into an artifact that you can search against. Basically, it means that any kind of tweet is a searchable artifact where you can say, tell me more about what this person meant in this tweet, or tell me more about the trend this person is referencing in this tweet. I think that is a pretty cool feature. I was thinking of it as it's summarizing what's in a tweet, which doesn't make any sense because you don't need to really summarize what's in a tweet, but I actually think about it as well. It's just jumping off point. To be able to search and go deeper in a topic is actually a pretty cool function.

[Kieran]

Here's a really good example. There's this guy, Tim. I follow him on X Twitter. I still can't really get used to calling it X. And he has a newsletter that's all about affordable, cheap properties to buy in Italy, Spain and France and it's awesome. And I just look at these houses and I'm like, oh yeah, I'd buy that house of day. And he wrote this like really long thread, as you can see here, right? With all this information about how would you actually buy a house in Italy? And what's great is I can now get like this very clear summary of what I would actually need to know from this post in a way that like, you often don't have the time to read this whole thing. So then you bookmark it and then you're like, am I actually going to come back and read it? I doubt it. And so this is the other like Groq summary feature that I just used sometimes. It's just like if I have this really long piece of information, I just want like the quick summary of it, right?

[Aaron]

It's the same thing that I love about Gemini in your Google Drive. It basically sits on the right hand panel and can summarize documents, summarize presentations, aggregate information together. Like this is what AI is really good at, is you really don't have to consume content in the same way. So that person went to the trouble of probably spending hours to write this detailed, thoughtful post. But because we are being taught that we don't have to read all of the content, AI can just read it for us and summarize it for us. It's like our friend telling us over coffee. I read this incredible post. Here's the core points that you need to know. It is interesting, right? It does change the way that we consume information in a way that is potentially not good for publishers.

[Kieran]

Yeah, talk to everybody. Explain that. Because we haven't done our prediction show yet, but I think we should make a prediction around this. But explain what you're talking about.

[Aaron]

Well, it turns all of the content that we engage with into data for AI. And there's an AI layer that sits on top of the Internet and does all of the things that we used to do, right? In that example, the AI is able to consume a content from someone you would normally read content from and then give you a bunch of time back. Because in any post that you read, it will just give you the core takeaways. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. But I would probably use that as well in a lot of ways. Like I have a ton of newsletters and they do really in depth analysis of tech and things like that. I would probably want a summary in a lot of occasions. And so we talked about this in a Previous episode I can't imagine a world within the next couple of years where we have agents, whether they are built into the platform like Grok, or they are just our own personal agents that go and consume all of the information for us and can probably give it back to us in whatever format we want and whatever, like, medium we want. Right. So if I say, hey, subscribe to these 20 podcasts, this is exactly what.

[Kieran]

I'm trying to build right now.

[Aaron]

Yeah. Every week, create a transcript and then basically you can give that to me in audio. I can say, actually give it to me in a video format, whatever it may be. And so I can consume content very differently. But then the publisher then is creating content for the agents to be consumed on behalf of the person. That's what I keep saying about search, Right. It moves everything back one step. And there's this agent layer and the agent layer is doing most of the work that we used to do.

[Kieran]

Yeah. Well, if you think about it, right, the first generation of the Internet, you still had basically some exclusive group of publishers were publishing content on places like AOL and charging a fee to access it. Right. Then the second generation of the Internet, companies like Facebook and Google and everything really scale up and all of our free interactions to those companies then get sold and monetized through advertising. Now we're entering this third stage where like, the AI access to this information is going to become what gets monetized. And I think one of your takes is like, is this a good thing? And what does this mean for publishers? I agree with that. And I think if you're a marketer, it's a little terrifying because most marketers, you know what I know, what do they do? They obsess over their message. They craft it perfectly. They work to deliver it at the exact right time. What happens when that's just not possible anymore? One prediction I will make, Kieran today on the show ahead of our prediction show is we are going to see a pretty big rotation in marketing to channels in which they cannot be AI summarized. So I'm thinking things like in person events out of home advertising, you can control the message. Things where you're like, I can get my message directly to these people without any filter or summarization. The irony is the Internet was the way you used to get information to people without any filter or summarization. And now that is basically going away.

[Aaron]

Yeah, I agree.

[Kieran]

Do you buy that?

[Aaron]

I do agree that brands will want to spend much more time and effort in places where they control the message. Grok in and of itself, they are going to spin out Grok as a standalone agent. So I know it's embedded in the platform today, but at some point it will be accessible in the same way Claude is, the same way ChatGPT is. So at some point, like, we have this selection of agents which are basically personal assistants, and they are going to be able to consume most of the things that we consume today. So the best example would be in traditional sales, you have a gatekeeper and you're like trying to get through the gatekeeper to book a meeting with this person. And now we all will have gatekeepers to what reaches us via the Internet. Right? Like, we'll be able to actually tune out a lot more things than we were able to tune out in the past, because even on these platforms they monetize through ads. But a lot of the times maybe I don't even need to engage in the platform to get what I want from it because the agent is consuming a lot of the content and giving me the nightly readout. Now on social, maybe different because you kind of want to interact with people, but there is a fascinating, like, change in the way that we're going to interact with content and interact with things that marketers used to create.

[Kip]

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[Kieran]

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[Kip]

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[Kieran]

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[Kip]

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[Kieran]

Couldn't agree more. And the other part of Grok that I wanted to talk about today, Kieran, I think builds on that and I wanted to talk about like the new Grok image capabilities because they released the Grok 2 models, Aurora, and they built a really interesting improved image model that's especially good for like real human faces and images. Right. And so I don't know if you saw this thread. Did you see the guy who made the most viral thread I have seen in a while, which is he used Grok 2 to create these images and then had somebody animate them, but he created like a present day image of John Lennon and Paul McCarthy, William and Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury and Brian May. Like basically these historical figures and like the Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton one for example. It's like really good. Some of these are really good and pretty wild, right?

[Aaron]

Yeah. This is actually a fun tool to play with. Grok does create pretty good images. I don't really know the practical use cases. I think the practical use case will not be from Grok. It will be a company that can train on your style guide and things like that and give you images that fit your kind of like brand style guides and all of that kind of stuff. I did like really weird ones that like Conor McGregor eating a lettuce with Bono. Almost Sure. Like it's actually pretty amazing how good it is. Why is it so good at life? Like, let me see. Why is it so good at like, like it's designed to excel at creating photorealistic images.

[Kieran]

They fine tuned it for this.

[Aaron]

This is like the thing. They've tuned it. Yeah. If people are listening, like. So a couple of other things they did recently was they made Grok free for all users, not Grok2, but I think Grok in general, like can be used for all users, not just premium. Grok 2 is like part of, I think Pro Plus. I think you have something better actually in Pro Plus. We should look at that. They released the Aura Image Generator. They're going to make it a standalone app. The big thing for me is I don't think this is the model that Elon thinks is very competitive. I know he's talking about it being very competitive on X. It's really. Everyone is waiting for Grok 3. Grok 3 is the model that training on the 100K GPU cluster where Elon has figured out how to get all those things to actually talk to each other and he wants to move to even larger clusters. But this is the first time we talked about it on a previous podcast where we're really going to test the scaling laws. Have we hit max scaling or not? Because no one has figured out how to train at this scale before. And so we'll really see if data is the problem. And what we mean by that is these models have just run out of data to train on and synthetic data is not the same. And so they're kind of capped in. Ilei, who is ex OpenAI co founder, did a talk last week and he did say that he believes that we have hit scaling laws and we've run out of data. And what he believes will happen is we have the intelligence we have in AI and the apps built around it will get smarter and that's how these things will evolve, not the models themselves, which is actually pretty bad news for the likes of OpenAI. But I think Elon's going to test that because Xai, which is Elon's AI company, it really comes down to this, like, if it's not a gigantic leap, I don't see how he ever makes any inroads on Google or OpenAI or Claude. So I think this is a huge launch for grok. It's like a do or die thing. They either make transformational gains or they're kind of just another player. But I don't think they would ever be a large player as a standalone AI app. I think they will have some cool capabilities on X, but not a huge standalone business.

[Kieran]

I agree. Okay, so to kind of close out the show, what we're really saying is if you want real time information and to get clear summaries of news and information or real time AI search, GROK is really the tool for that. Right. If you go to the core Twitter search page and you just use GROK on any of the trending topics, it's very good.

[Kip]

Right?

[Kieran]

And it gives you a very detailed breakdown of like what the heck's going on and what you actually need to know, that is very good. If you have some use cases around creating very like hyper real personal kind of imagery, the image generator could Be interesting for that or at least again, I think it's kind of in the prototyping stage. Like if you were looking to like mock something up, it could give you something pretty good for a quick mock. But then you would probably need to do real photography for kind of the final shipped version. And then two, I do think as a user we all have to get into that summarization workflow and use Grok to summarize Apple intelligence, whether you're using Gemini or anything else. But like you and I are now, I feel like we are consuming more information than ever before.

[Aaron]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

I think the real unlock of AI is that it is giving my model in my brain way more data to train off of.

[Aaron]

Right. Yeah.

[Kieran]

That's what I feel like. More powerful as a human than I have ever felt before.

[Aaron]

Exactly. This is the whole thing with AI. It should actually allow you to do 10x more of what you previously could. And we really do have the tools to already do that. There's nothing we need from these new models to be able to do that. We have the tools today to be able to do that.

[Kieran]

Totally agree. And so if you're a marketer, I think the last thing we'd leave everybody with Kieran. Right. Is you need to make sure that your marketing mix, if you're growing your business, has channels that are maybe, I'm not going to say immune to AI, but where you can deliver your message in an unfiltered way. So that might be billboards, events, basically anything irl. Right. Is going to be a big part of that. And then I do think things like creator LED ads, content and everything, it's going to be summarized far less.

[Aaron]

Right.

[Kieran]

I'm just like, oh, I like Kieran. I like how he frames everything. I just want to hear it directly from him. I don't want to have this AI summary. I do think this is where our thesis around personality led growth and personality being so important. I think it still holds and I think it's still going to work.

[Aaron]

I think it gets larger. I think the reason you will still consume content is because of the person.

[Kieran]

I think so too. That is my take on what all is going to happen here. It's a wild time. More AI innovation has shipped in the month of December 2024 than I thought possible. We hadn't talked much about Grok on the show. We wanted to do a deep dive. If you have any questions, tell us how you use Grok or if you have not used it, tell us why you're not using it. Leave Those in the YouTube comments below. We'll see you next time on Marketing. It's the grain.