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This is Aituts, the newsletter that's as satisfying to read as 3 consecutive line-clears in Tetris. Here's how we're capping off the week:

• Stable Diffusion XL was LEAKED
• ChatGPT drops in traffic for the first time ever
• Tips for SEO in the age of AI

Stable Diffusion XL… was LEAKED

Even though the official release for Stable Diffusion XL was scheduled on July 18th, it was leaked one day ago and has been spreading like wildfire.

SDXL 0.9 has been available online for a little while. However, this was a testing version only and didn't have much configurability.

On a subreddit thread dedicated to the leak, Joe Penna, a core member of Stability AI (creators of the model), writes: "Am I proud of y'all, or... opposite of proud?"

Another commentator muses: “Such a beautiful tradition. Leak the model instead of releasing it.”

SDXL 0.9 is a huge upgrade over previous versions, and is designed to be competitive with top-of-the-line commercial models like Midjourney.

It is trained at 1024x1024 resolution compared to version 1.5's 512x512—and the quality of the images we’ve seen so far is very, very good.

Contrary to the belief that many experts held a year ago, open source models are doing very well. They might just end up eating closed-model's lunch.

There’s just one tiny caveat:

SDXL 0.9 consumes a gargatulan 91.3 GB of space, and does not work with the most popular UI for Stable Diffusion, AUTOMATIC1111 (the developer is rushing to implement compatibility as we speak).

The best option so far has been to run it through ComfyUI [instructions].

Stay safe friends: this model DOES NOT exist as a ckpt file, only as a safetensors file.

A lot of users say they don’t mind waiting a week for the official release, because a lot of the bugs will be taken care of. We're seeing this a lot in AI-land: people are taking a more laid back approach to new things now that the hype cycle is waning.

Speaking of waning hype...

ChatGPT Drops in Traffic for the First Time

ChatGPT's traffic declined for the first time from May to June.

Worldwide unique visitors to the site dropped by 5.7%, and the amount of time spent on the site dropped by 8.5%.

Lets not blow anything out of proportion: ChatGPT (openai.com) is still the #22 website in the world, with an estimated 1.7 Billion monthly visits.

But it looks like we've past peak hype... for now.

A Google AI researcher has hypothesized that students are on summer vacation now, and ChatGPT homework help was a big use case. (on the flip side, Minecraft searches are always up big during the summer).

It's more likely that novelty as a growth driver is waning. The standards for what impresses us now are far higher than what impressed us a year ago. Many of Reddit posts from last year are quaint and charming (look ma! AI wrote a rap by Shakespeare!).

We don't see OpenAI being upset about the dip: the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described the cost of operating the free ChatGPT as “eye-watering”. External estimates have landed at $700K per day.

Traffic is up where it actually matters. One of OpenAI's most important revenue streams comes from providing custom solutions and API access to enterprise corporations. While total traffic to OpenAI's website dipped in June, traffic to platform.openai.com, OpenAI's developer’s website, was up 3.1%.

⛵ Free Stuff: Midjourney Prompts for Fantasy Art

Midjourney for Fantasy Art is a free prompt guide about Worldbuilding: it teaches you to make high quality, custom fantasy characters and impressive worlds for games, comics & films:

Yeah, yeah, it's a book for V5.1... but the prompts look great in V5.2 as well (we promise!)

✨ Creative Roundup

Midjourney: David Holz reports Midjourney V5.3 coming within 1-2 weeks, Midjourney V6 hopefully within a month and V7 being worked on actively in the background. Talk about speed! [link]

Midjourney V5.2 has a slew of new features: Zoom & Pan (AKA Outpainting) [link], --weird mode, and a Mega pricing tier at $120/mo.

ComfyUI is like the linux of Stable Diffusion WebUIs. It's the best way to run SDXL right now, but has bit of a learning curve. [link]

Stable Diffusion WebUI UX is a version of AUTOMATIC1111 that completely focuses on a better User Experience. Highly recommended, especially if you find AUTOMATIC1111 kind of clunky [link]

​

🤖 Chatbot Roundup

ChatGPT: GTP4 available for all paying customers starting on June 6 [link]

OpenChat has been released. It’s an open source model based on LLaMA-13B and achieves 105.7% ChatGPT capability score. That’s right: a model you download and run on your computer scores 5.7% better than ChatGPT on an assorted collection of tasks. Check it out: [link]

For Marketers: SEO in the Age of AI

For a hot minute, every single SEO and content marketer on the planet was worried that Google Search would be replaced by AI.

Well, it hasn't happened...yet.

We've talked to a bunch of experts in the space.

The consensus is that while AI searches might eventually eat into Organic search in a major way, there are changes you can do to stay as competitive as possible in the medium term.

Here are SEO expert Benjamin Boman's recommendations for a new strategic approach to SEO:

Focus on the long tail and think about what AI cannot adequately answer

AI will adequately answer basic and broad questions.

Examples: "What is a Large Language Model?"

On the hand, detailed searches are looking for detailed content. Think of searches like: "Alpaca LLM 7B install". They're much more likely to click on a result, rather than read an AI response. Prioritize content that cannot be adequately answered by AI: that's any content requiring

• personal viewpoint or perspective
• interactivity of any kind (including simple calculators and sliders)
• live data feeds
• video or audio supplement

Focus on revenue from SEO, not volume

Because a lot of "tire kicker" searches will be handled by AI, traffic and clicks will go down. But those clicks might not have mattered in the first place. Revenue is a much better metric to track SEO success.

Prioritize "domain authority" less. Prioritize topical authority more

Backlinks from sites with high domain authority were once useful for the most competitive search terms.

That might not be the case anymore, since those competitive broad terms will be addressed by AI.

So instead of fighting for backlinks from Forbes and TechCrunch, focus on backlinks from less popular sites that are highly relevant and specific to your niche.

🥨 Bits and Bytes

A New York City Anti Hiring-Bias Law took affect yesterday... for AI hiring. Businesses that don’t comply can be fined up to $1,500 per violation a day. [link]

Amazon’s best-seller lists are getting flooded by AI-written books, most of which aren’t… good. One user notices that only 19 of the top 100 best-sellers in the Romance category were real books. [link]

Sex toy company announces ChatGPT Pleasure Companion is a remote controllable toy that tells stories to you. It was only a matter of time. [link]

That's a wrap!

Want to see more or less of any topics we talk about here?

You can reply to this email directly or hit us up on Twitter. We read every reply.

Till next time,

Yubin & Crew

1223 Cleveland Ave #200, San Diego, CA 92103
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