The newsletter

#99- Committed companies, Whatsapp arrives on Mac and the AI news of the week

Greg Taieb · · 6 min read

Hello,

I hope you are doing well this week. Things are going pretty well for me even if I was a little late in finishing this edition of my newsletter.

The good news is that in return I have a nice program to offer you:

  • 🗞️How the traditional press deals our data with Google
  • 🌱The companies most committed to CSR according to... bac+5
  • 💬WhatsApp finally available on Mac
  • 🤖AI news of the week

Two notable pieces of information this week: I have grouped the AI news into a single section so you can find your way (or skip them) more easily. Don’t hesitate to tell me at the end of the newsletter what you think via the vote button.

Second info I will be live at CanalChat tomorrow to discuss trends in digital communication.

🗞️How the traditional press deals our data with Google

As we know, the media and Google have a rather special “love/hate” relationship. In other words, the media have often been up in arms with Google News, accusing it of stealing the headlines when the same media would not have survived the delisting.

In the meantime, relations have weakened since Google will even finance several media.

But it turns out that the relationships are even better than I imagined since it is now possible to subscribe at half price to a number of titles through Google.

The information dates from 2021 but I am only discovering it now.

The Tweet above shows the example of Le Monde but it is also the case of Figaro, Liberation but also l'Equipe and many others.

A true Faustian pact as the Journal du Net.

🌱The companies most committed to CSR according to... the bac+5

We know that the taking into account of CSR issues by companies is essential from a societal point of view but it is also increasingly a criterion of choice for new entrants to the labor market when deciding the companies in which they wish to work.

This is precisely what the CSR index proposed by Universum measures.

Social commitments are those that are the most looked at and the 3 companies with the best image are:

  1. Decathlon
  2. Blablacar
  3. Carrefour

However, beware of green washing because the majority of students remain skeptical at best when it comes to CSR communications from these same brands.

I admit to being a little skeptical about this ranking to the extent that we would not really be using the criteria for bac+5 evaluate companies. Because if it is in the domain of perception, it is certainly based a little on communication which these same Bac+5 declare to be wary of 😒.

💬WhatsApp finally available on Mac

Unpopular opinion (as they say on Twitter) WhatsApp is a fraud!

We are talking here about one of the main instant messaging applications owned by a web giant but it is progressing at a slow pace.

Just look at the speed at which Telegram adds useful features to realize the immobility of Meta with Whatsapp.

For example, I have never really understood why it there was no WhatsApp application on desktop. Why not be able to exchange on all the devices we use?

Of course there has been a web version for several years but it's still all DIY. Fortunately WhatsApp has just released a Mac version (sorry for Windows users) and frankly it's very very practical not to have to juggle between several devices to continue a conversation.

To test!

Install Whatsapp

🤖The AI news of the week

Well I realize that this subject still interests me a lot and that there has some crazy stuff to share this week. So I'm grouping them together for the moment in a single section.

The point? If that bothers you, you can easily see which paragraph to skip.

The future of video dubbing thanks to AI?

The job of film dubber is particularly technical. You have to succeed in synchronizing the lips of an actor with the translation of what he says in another language. A real balancing act which sometimes gives completely failed results.(

Fortunately, the startup Flawlessmay have an innovation that we would also have dreamed of thanks to its Truesync software. This application based on generative AI allows you to modify on the fly the dialogues of a character or even the language used by maintaining perfect lip sync.

id="musiclm-la-r%C3%A9ponse-de-google-%C3%A0-chatgpt">MusicLM Google's response to ChatGPT

It must be admitted, Google was completely taken by surprise by the success of ChatGPT and the American company went into panic mode promising to announce a slew of products in 2023.

We can understand:

  • On the one hand ChatGPT shows what could replace the search engine as we have known it for 20 years (we explain how in this podcast)
  • On the other hand it is very frustrating for one of the world's AI giants to see itself pilloried by an unknown company there is still a year

Moreover, one of the creators of Gmail goes so far as to think that conversational models like ChatGPT could definitively kill Google's business model.

As a result, Google announced MusicLM which is to music what ChatGPT is to text. You type in a description and it gives you a piece.

And the crazy thing is that the results are excellent. You can easily imagine the AI ​​creating songs by a deceased artist or mixing styles. Unlike ChatGPT, Google does not want to put MusicML into everyone's hands because according to their tests in at least 1% of cases the result could be the subject of complaints from artists.

I'll let you take a look at the quality of the pieces produced but it is at least as incredible (or worrying) as what ChatGPT offers for text.