The best part about being a freelancer with a decent client base is that I can go to cool things and use it as an excuse to say I’m busy. Before, I felt like I had this side-eye whenever I told my boss or business partner I wanted to check something out that was out of scope but now since I’m my own boss, I can do whatever I want. Maybe I’ll just on a whim, go to Malaysia and hang out.
Oh wait, I did.
Anyways, over the past half a year, I’ve been trying to dip my toes in AI technology. Some opportunities came up which really forced me to look into this, including some progressive work with Food Systems Innovation and Stanford.
I discovered a group called AI User Group in San Francisco. though their ads on Instagram suck, I gave them a shot by going to a UX workshop where the adjunct professor taught us unique prompting to develop literally a product roadmap. I found it extremely eye-opening in the fact that basically, I am just a novice when it comes to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT and Generative AI have explosive growth right now, with new changes every day. Though I dislike living in San Francisco, I can’t deny that the amount of work and nerd is so concentrated here, that it is, by far, the most productively innovative city I’ve ever lived in. In the heart of it all, I found that talking to passionate creators, discovering a new tool is intellectually stimulating, and people are building really cool things.
So the AI User Conference is a 3-day conference where it’s split between Marketers, Designers, and Developers. There were a ton of workshops and 15-minute product pitches from legitimate companies. I went all three days and found each day enjoyable, and I learned a lot in which now I can understand in broad strokes, how these systems work.
Below are some notable apps I found really cool during this workshop. Do note, I am a food scientist, but these apps got me thinking, enough to write notes on them. Terminology is probably wrong.
Canva - Specifically, Canva Sheets can now have a generate function that allows you to populate whole columns and sheets. This seems very useful for headlines, tones, and translations. The image generator needs some work. You can apparently access them by clicking a banner with 6 envelopes to activate the tools.
Zams - Agentic AI is the new term. Apparently, this can build a model.
Datasaur.ai - Specifically, their LLM Labs. Can compare all of the models all at once. So you can send a prompt and it’ll evaluate a bunch of different model responses so you can compare it.
Cursor - The standard when it comes to vibe coding. Every developer has heard about this apparently. Same with Webflow
Kaggle - Apparently good at prompt engineering
Twinmind - A cool recording app that records you or lectures and feeds it back to you. Seems useful for lectures of for college.
Maestrix.ai - Made by an eccentric French marketer. Uses AI to analyse certain design steps. Very clean UI and a good example when an expert in the field has access and money to make systems assisted with AI. It can create personas, landing pages, a marketing novice’s dream
Creatify - Makes video ads really well. You can get an AI avatar, lip sync it with your copy, it’s really impressive and I see it on Tiktok a lot.
Decagon.ai - Really good customer support AI agent builder thing
Tofu - Nifty Google chrome extension that allows you to edit and intertwine other website’s tone to make your copy better. I tested this out with my website, Umaiworks and had it analyze Mattson’s website and it gave me copy that fits Mattson’s tone to possibly enhance my website.
Clay App - A table app. Apparently well know for market research
Gamma App - Makes pretty impressive slide decks and marketing material very fast. I found it very impressive. I was mentoring some high schoolers the day after and noticed that they were using Gamma! I expect a ton of kiddos to be using this already to AI slop their homework and presentations, which I have mixed feelings about it.
Source Table - Another spreadsheet app that has voice integration??
Zerowidth.ai - Good, simple, user-friendly diagram on developing AI systems. Apparently used in a lot of Universities.
Comfy UI and Kling AI - among others makes a really good video AI. The presenter was fantastic and was a game designer and he taught us the plethora of tools he used in his work. Here’s his resource list
Jabali - You can make cheap games on discord. I don’t think AI is ready for games but you have to start somewhere. I think a lot of thought will go into this in the next few years.
3d.csm.ai - Apparently made by smart Boston people. REALLY good at making 2d models to 3d.
OpenArt - Pretty cool AI art with some nifty features. you can make all sorts of assets in all sorts of styles. Not perfect, but has a few editing tools that you can refine.
Whyser.ai - I found this the most useful app in the conference. If you are a sensory person, this might be the future. The app creates an AI person that can interview people and collect very useful data. The AI has a warm, and loving voice and cheers you on when you answer a question which causes the interviewee to be more honest, getting better feedback. When you think about this app and how it takes away scheduling, human interaction, and includes transcript retention and analysis, this I can see is very useful.
RAG.app - Learned what RAG is. It’s basically how most grifters sell ChatGPT wrappers. It’s the ability to add content to a model so the model takes that into account when giving you an answer. This is a direct solution when people get cagey when it comes to their data.
From Amazon
Langflow/Datastax - Also does RAG stuff
Llama Index - Advanced Document Agent Stack. Connects with RAG pretty well
UI Path - uses AI to make an AI agent input workflows. Seems really big
There was a course about MCP, or Model Context Protocol
Assembly AI - Interesting Speech AI program that understands the speech and context, and records things
Tavus.ai - Found this interesting too. It’s basically a human Zoom call that can recognize what you’re wearing, which is pretty cool.
Trae - Challenger to Crusor/Webflow but a very suspicious company. They give everything for free to get user growth and the lecturer who presented this was very attractive. When pressed on data privacy, she became very suspicious.
Overall, this conference made my head hurt but I really enjoyed it. I found it informative but most importantly, it felt like the most innovative conference I’ve ever been in. it makes me realize people are still building great stuff here in America and that we in San Francisco have this unique culture that allows us to try without judgment.