Wednesday 8th November: How OpenAI is building a path toward AI agents

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There’s just one month to go until Mx3 AI; a live event in London from Media Voices and Media Makers Meet. We’ll be featuring sessions on AI in local, national, consumer and B2B media, as well as discussions on innovation, developments and regulation.

Platformer’s Casey Newton has been at OpenAI’s inaugural developer day in San Francisco. At the event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a suite of features for the GPT API. Top of the list was a feature that allows developers to draw on custom instructions and uploaded files to build their own version of the ChatGPT platform.

Newton was given beta access to the feature and has used it to build a copy editor for his newsletter. He explains how he had already ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to catch spelling and grammatical errors. Now, he’s asking the AI to simulate reader responses to what he’s written.

While not in anyway dismissing the ‘AI will kill us all’ conversations that have flared up recently, this is a fascinating behind the scenes look at how under-resourced publishers might be able to use AI to make them better at what they do. Newton imagines AI agents embedded into the text editor of your choice, transferring text to your CMS, drafting social media posts, publishing them, reporting on their performance. “All of this is coming,” he says.

Adding to our regular weekly episode roster and our Conversations panel discussions, we’re introducing Media Briefs; short, sharp sponsored episodes – about 10 to 15 minutes long – with a senior executive from a vendor working with publishers to make their businesses better. In our first Media Brief, I am speaking with Kieran Delaney, CEO at Apple News specialists FlatPlan, about how publishers can make the most of the platform.

This is a write up of the panel session I had the pleasure of hosting at the Audiencers Festival last month. My favourite ‘What’s the value in newsletters?’ nugget came from Marie Bonheim, the head of newsletters at The Telegraph. She explained that if a reader subscribes to their premium product after clicking on a newsletter, they are 50% more likely to still be a subscriber after 12 months. Retention baby, retention!

Speaking of newsletters, Simon Owens has been writing about the Sunday Long Read, a weekly curated collection of the best longform journalism published to the web. This post is itself a fairly long read, but give it the time if you care about origin stories and the how a bright idea evolves over a decade into a media phenomenon that can count Maggie Habberman among its guest editors.

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