We skipped a Sunday but here we are again with Sunday Rundown #111 and the hottest news from the digital marketing world! 🙂
The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetings
CEO Eric Yuan started Zoom after working at Cisco and realising there was an opportunity to make videoconferencing simpler and easier to use. And he was right: Zoom is now a household name — especially after usage exploded during the pandemic.
But usage has since come down, and Zoom faces a number of business challenges. Eric wants Zoom to be much, much more than just a video chat platform. He wants to take on Microsoft and Google in the enterprise software market by making docs and email and other productivity tools like chat. And like virtually every other company, Zoom now has a big investment in AI — and Eric’s visions for what that AI will do are pretty wild.
See, Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. He thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin” — essentially a deepfake avatar of yourself that can go to Zoom meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you while you spend your time on more important things, like your family.
Decoder with Nilay Patel and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan: https://megaphone.link/VMP9682534565
Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model
At its annual Google I/O 2024 developer conference, Google announced a number of new additions to Gemma, its family of open (but not open source) models comparable to Meta’s Llama and Mistral’s open models. The headline-grabbing release here is Gemma 2, the next generation of Google’s open-weights Gemma models, which will launch with a 27 billion parameter model.
Already available is PaliGemma, a pre-trained Gemma variant that Google describes as “the first vision language model in the Gemma family” for image captioning, image labelling and visual Q&A use cases. So far, the standard Gemma models, which launched earlier this year, were only available in 2-billion-parameter and 7-billion-parameter versions, making this new 27-billion model quite a step up.
“We’re already seeing some great quality. It’s outperforming models two times bigger than it already.”
Josh Woodward, Google’s VP of Google Labs
Instagram may soon enable you to cross-post stories to WhatsApp
This may not seem like a massive addition, but given that WhatsApp Status is now up to 450 million daily active users, and that WhatsApp is seeing significant growth in Western markets, it could be a handy expansion for your content.
As per this screenshot from app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, you may soon be able to cross-post your IG Stories directly to WhatsApp.
You can, of course, already cross-post your Instagram Stories to Facebook, expanding your potential audience reach, with the addition of WhatsApp, presumably direct to WhatsApp Status (its Stories equivalent) adding even more ways to easily reach more people with your content.
It’s nothing as yet, as this is only an element of back-end code and Meta itself hasn’t reported this as a functional update. But if it does go ahead, and WhatsApp does get an expanded integration on the Stories front, that could be very interesting.
Bonus links
- A better way to take video on your phone
- TikTok Shares New Marketing Fundamentals Overview [Infographic]
- Meet the 4 firms setting the agenda for measuring TV ads amid rapid change
- Three things we learned about Apple’s AI plans from its earnings
Thank you for taking the time to read our Sunday Rundown #111. If you have a story that you want to see in this series, reply to us below or contact us.