Amazon challenges AI coding skeptics

Read time: under 4 minutes

Welcome back, Superhuman

In the debate over whether AI can really work alongside human coders, Amazon's CEO just served up some eye-popping stats that could silence the skeptics. And: Learn how to generate ultra HD images with AI.

🎧️ New Podcast Episode: How David Park beat cancer and grew Jenni AI to millions of users. Listen now: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube.

Today’s Insights

• How Q transformed Amazon’s coding workflow

• Tutorial: Generating ultra HD images

• From the Frontier: Not-yet-invented AI apps

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Surf’s up

NEXT IN AI

Amazon’s AI assistant saved developers dozens of hours of work

In the coding world, time is money. That reality has fueled one of the biggest debates in the AI industry: Can AI coding assistants really boost productivity — and if so, does the investment ever end up paying off? 

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is firmly in the pro-AI camp, and he just brought receipts:

• In a new post, Jassy revealed that Amazon programmers had saved the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years by incorporating the company’s generative AI assistant Q into their workflow

• What once took coders an average of 50 work days now takes a few hours

• It’s also a cost-saver, boosting efficiency by $260M each year

The skeptic’s view: Amazon used Q to help update its apps to the latest version of Java; implementing it across the board might be a trickier gambit. Besides that, some developers argue that platforms like Q might actually add to their workloads, introducing errors that they have to go back and fix. And a Stanford study found that people who use AI assistants tend to write less secure code.

But Amazon’s findings challenge those assumptions: The company believes its apps are now more secure than ever — because developers have more time to focus on fixing bugs and glitches, instead of writing basic code. Since coding requires multi-step reasoning, more capable AI programmers can also help push the entire field forward. 

Investors seem to agree: Generative coding startups have collectively raised nearly $1B since the start of last year — a sign that AI software tools aren’t going away anytime soon. As entrepreneur Hadi Partovi recently told the Financial Times: “At this point, software engineering without AI is a little bit like writing without a word processor.”

PRESENTED BY ARTISAN

Automate 80% of outbound with an AI BDR

Imagine your calendar filled with qualified sales meetings–instantly.

That's Ava's job. She's Artisan’s AI BDR who automates outbound with…

• 300M+ B2B prospects

• Lead enrichment with 10+ data sources

• Email deliverability management

• A Personalization Waterfall using social media, technographic data, intent data, etc.

…and more. Book a demo.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to generate ultra HD images with Flux LoRA

• Go to Fal AI’s website and sign up (you need a GitHub account to access it)

• Click on Model Gallery to access all models.

• Now select Flux.1 with LoRAs from the list.

• Give it a prompt with proper details explaining the image.

• Wait a few seconds and you’ll get your desired image in ultra HD quality.

• You can preview or download the image to share it with others.

You can add any text and texture etc. to your images using Flux LoRA.

Get more AI tutorials →

FROM THE FRONTIER

The AI apps that have yet to be invented

What do DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber have in common? They were all released years after smartphones became widely available. YCombinator partner Jared Friedman said a recent discussion on the firm’s podcast reminded him that AI’s biggest players might not even exist yet. We’re likely to see an explosion of new AI-powered apps now that our phones and computers are starting to get generative capabilities.

DECODING THE FUTURE

How David Park Beat Cancer and Grew Jenni AI to 3 Million+ Users

Growing a startup to millions of users and millions in revenue is a rare feet. But doing it while battling cancer is unheard of. That’s the story of David Park, the cofounder of Jenni AI — one of the world’s fastest-growing AI-powered writing apps.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• David's journey from failed startups to breakout success

• How a joke about buttholes led to the insight behind Jenni

• How a viral Twitter thread took Jenni from the brink of failure to explosive user growth in hours

• David’s shock cancer diagnosis and the impossible choice he faced between his health and the company

• Insights on building AI products and scaling growth channels

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

PRESENTED BY FUTURESIGHT

Your key to unlocking new revenue streams with AI

Hire AI experts who have worked with the world’s leading AI companies

FutureSight is an AI product studio and consultancy made by practitioners and engineers who have worked at Google, McKinsey, and Snowflake to help executives and founders deliver impactful AI solutions:

• Product Development: Transform your roadmap into products

• Product Consulting: Leverage us to identify AI use cases for you

• RAG 2.0: Get the best performance from LLM models in a reliable way

• Workflow Automation: Eliminate bottlenecks and automate tasks

Book a free strategy session with our team to understand how we can help your business get ahead with AI.

Book your strategy session

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Act as a Life Coach

Prompt: I want you to act as a life coach, who can provide guidance and motivation to help me reach personal and professional goals. Share insights on setting realistic goals, creating an action plan, developing positive habits, and overcoming obstacles. Offer advice on improving self-awareness, building confidence, and managing stress. Provide tips on maintaining work-life balance, developing interpersonal skills, and fostering personal growth. My first request is ‘Help me design a personal development plan for the next year, focusing on career advancement, improving fitness, and cultivating a positive mindset.’

_{Source: gptbot [dot] io}

AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Number-Savvy: Anthropic’s Claude chatbot will now support LaTeX, a typesetting format that can display complex math equations and expressions.

• Le Search: Rumors suggest the French AI startup Mistral could be working on its own web search platform.

• Matter of Time: The AI-powered search engine Perplexity will reportedly introduce advertisements on its app later this year.

• Coming Home: Alphabet has appointed former Character AI CEO Noam Shazeer as the new co-leader of Gemini, the tech giant’s largest AI initiative.

😄 One Fun Thing: A creative director named Kody Kurth used Luma AI’s new Dream Machine 1.5 to create a stunningly life-like timelapse. The video, which shows a 1-year-old child gradually transforming into an elderly woman, proves that text-to-video generators are getting more realistic by the day.

🧠 Brain Food: In the spirit of the historic matchup between AI supercomputer Deep Blue and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, Spanish researchers pitted GPT-4 against an award-winning author to see who could write the better short story. Roughly 5,400 critics and scholars weighed in, deeming the human writer the winner — at least for now. According to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, AI has yet to master subtleties like plotting and foreshadowing.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Paperguide: An AI research assistant that helps you understand papers, manage references, annotate notes, and supercharge your writing.

✅ KaneAI: Create, debug, and evolve end-to-end software tests using natural language.

✅ Minusx: An AI data scientist that autonomously operates your analytics apps, including Jupyter, Metabase, and Sheets.

✅ Antispace: A gamified workspace that connects all your digital tools into an evolving HUD, eliminating context switching.

✅ Fliki: Transform your ideas into stunning videos with an easy-to-use AI video generator.

PS: Want more? Check out our Top 100 AI Tools.

^{* indicates a promoted tool, if any}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Surf’s Up

Midjourney Prompt: A detailed oil painting of surfers in the ocean, surfboards on waves, a [insert colors here]sky, detailed brushstrokes, a textured canvas, visible paint strokes, in the style of abstract expressionism, a wide shot, an aerial view, a surrealistic scene, a dreamlike atmosphere, a soft pastel color palette.
--ar 5:9 --v 6.1 --personalize 734a9zt

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Superhuman is the world’s biggest AI newsletter for businesses and professionals with 600,000+ readers and 1.5 Million followers on socials working at the world’s leading startups and enterprises. Companies like Amazon, Hubspot, and Salesforce feature their products in Superhuman.You can learn more about partnering with us here.

🧞Your wish is my command

Got more feedback or just want to get in touch? Reply to this email and we’ll get back to you.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team

p.s. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.