The Bicycle for the Mind

February 13-19, 2025

The AI world is changing in an exciting way - it's becoming more natural and human-friendly.

This week's advances point to AI tools that work alongside us rather than just automating tasks. Whether it's Google's simple drag-and-drop image creation or ByteDance's impressive video generation, we're seeing AI adapt to how creative people actually work, instead of making them learn complex technical commands.

For businesses and creators, this opens up remarkable new possibilities to do more while staying true to your vision. Picture making custom videos in minutes, creating original music without worrying about licensing, or working with an AI assistant that truly gets your style and brand voice. The gap between having an idea and bringing it to life is getting smaller every day, letting teams spend more time on big-picture thinking and less on technical details.

What's especially encouraging is how these tools are being built with creators in mind. From Fiverr letting artists train and profit from their own AI models to Adobe ensuring their generated content is safe for commercial use, we're heading toward a future where AI enhances human creativity rather than competing with it. To paraphrase Steve Jobs,

Still, getting the most out of these tools means thoughtfully adapting your workflows - the best results come when you actively shape your creative and business processes to make AI a natural part of your team's approach.

Today, an AI-equipped marketing team delivers better, quicker, and more efficient campaigns compared to departments who got stuck in the past — and remember, these tools will only get better over time.

🎨 Google Whisk: Remix Images with AI (No Prompts Needed)

Visual brainstorming just got a new twist. Google’s new AI tool Whisk lets you mash up images to generate fresh visuals without writing a single prompt. Simply drag and drop images to define your subject, scene, and style, and Google’s Gemini model will auto-generate a detailed caption fed into its Imagen 3 image generator. The result is a unique image that captures the essence of your inputs rather than an exact copy, effectively remixing your ideas into novel visuals.

In other words, you can feed Whisk a product photo, a background scene, and an art style example—and watch it produce a brand-new composite image reflecting all three.

Why It Matters for Creative Marketers

Whisk offers a fast, fun way to prototype marketing visuals. Instead of laboring over detailed text prompts, content creators can leverage existing brand assets (logos, product shots, inspiration images) to generate new on-brand graphics. This lowers the skill barrier for using generative AI in design.

By capturing the feel of your images and not just copy-pasting them, Whisk helps ensure the output is original – potentially avoiding the repetition or copyright worries of pure image reuse. It’s a glimpse of more intuitive creative workflows, where you can literally show the AI what you envision and get fresh content back. For creative teams, that means speeding up brainstorms and iterating ad concepts without needing a graphic artist on hand for every new idea.

🎬 YouTube’s Veo 2: No B-roll? No Problem.

Stuck without the perfect video clip for a campaign or social post? YouTube’s latest update has you covered. Veo 2, Google DeepMind’s new video generation model, is now integrated into YouTube Shorts’ Dream Screen feature. It lets creators (and advertisers) generate video backgrounds or even entire short video clips from a simple text prompt. Need a quick scene of a beach sunset or a flashy product reveal? Just type it, and Veo 2 will create it on the fly, right within the YouTube app.

The model produces state-of-the-art, high-quality videos with improved realism – it understands physics and human movement far better than earlier generative video tools. You can even specify visual styles or cinematic effects to get the look you want. And it’s fast – Dream Screen now generates these AI videos faster than before, meaning you can respond to trends or ideas almost instantly.

Why You Should Care

For marketers and content creators, Veo 2 is like having a mini video studio at your fingertips. You can instantly produce a backdrop or cutaway clip to enhance a promo video or Story. This lowers the barrier for high-quality video content creation – especially for short-form platforms.

Imagine a social media manager quickly whipping up a relevant video clip to ride a viral trend, without wasting hours searching stock libraries. The realism upgrades (better human motion, physics, etc.) mean these AI-generated videos will look more natural and professional, which is crucial for maintaining audience trust. Plus, Google is tagging these AI creations with watermarks and labels, addressing transparency concerns.

Overall, Veo 2 could supercharge your video content pipeline: ads, explainer videos, or creative Shorts can be made faster and tailored more closely to your vision – even if you don’t have footage on hand.

🎥 Adobe Firefly Video: Brand Safety as Competitive Moat

Adobe just launched the beta of its Firefly Video Model, bringing generative AI into the realm of professional video production. Billed as the industry’s first “commercially safe” AI video generator, Firefly’s model is trained on licensed or Adobe-owned content, meaning the outputs are cleared for business use (no lurking copyright gotchas). Now available in Adobe’s Firefly web app, it allows users to create video clips from text prompts or images, much like we’ve seen with AI images, but for full-motion video.

For example, you could generate a short animated product demo or a scenic background video by just describing it. Firefly’s video tool emphasizes control: you can dictate styles and camera angles and even transform a generated image into a video seamlessly within the app. Crucially, it’s integrated with Adobe’s creative ecosystem – you can take the AI-generated content straight into Photoshop or Premiere Pro for further editing. Adobe is also introducing pricing plans (Standard, Pro) that include allotments for video generation as this feature rolls out.

How It Helps Creatives

For creative professionals and marketing teams, Adobe’s entry here is big. It means trustworthy AI video at your fingertips. You can ideate a concept and literally generate a storyboard of clips in minutes – all legally safe to use in campaigns. Shooting a live-action video can be expensive and time-consuming; Firefly offers an alternative for certain needs (think product spins, abstract backgrounds, text animations). Because it’s part of Creative Cloud, a designer can smoothly integrate AI-generated footage into their usual workflow, tweaking the outputs to perfection in Premiere. And the IP-friendly training data gives peace of mind: that awesome AI-generated ad spot won’t land you in copyright trouble.

Compared to Google’s Veo 2 (which focuses on quick social content), Firefly aims for the professional grade – offering the quality, resolution, and aspect ratio control that video editors demand. It’s early days (beta) and clips are short for now, but savvy creatives are already imagining use cases like auto-generating storyboard previews, populating content libraries with on-demand stock footage, or localizing videos by swapping backgrounds.

Counterpoint:

Creative directors note Firefly’s "corporate" aesthetic struggles with Gen Z-focused campaigns compared to Google/ByteDance’s trend-driven outputs.

🎙️ ByteDance’s Goku+: The TikTok Juggernaut’s Play for Global Ad Dominance

The company behind TikTok (ByteDance) is venturing into AI video in a big way with its new Goku models. Goku is a family of generative AI models designed to create realistic human-centric videos from text descriptions and other inputs.

In plain terms, you can ask Goku to generate a video of, say, a person demonstrating a new smartphone, and it will produce a lifelike clip of an AI-generated “actor” interacting with that product. The magic comes from advanced face and motion modeling: Goku can animate virtual humans with natural expressions and gestures synced to your script or audio. There’s even a specialized version called Goku+ aimed at advertising, focusing on realistic human-product interactions for marketing content.

ByteDance claims this approach could cut the cost of producing product videos by up to 99% – potentially a game-changer for brands that need lots of promotional footage. Instead of hiring actors, shooting in studios, and editing for days, marketers might generate dozens of tailored product showcase videos on a laptop.

Early reactions have been mixed: many marvel at the realism (“it’s so human and real,” as the buzzwords go), while others raise concerns about the potential for deepfake misuse or the fate of human influencers.

Why It Matters for Marketers

If Goku delivers on its promise, video ad production could be faster and cheaper than ever. Small businesses with limited budgets could generate polished demo videos and tutorials without a filming crew, leveling the creative playing field. Need an e-commerce explainer video for each of 50 products? An AI like Goku might handle that overnight. It also enables rapid A/B testing of video ads – tweak the script or actor style and instantly get a new variant. For agencies and in-house marketing teams, this frees up resources: instead of coordinating logistics for a reshoot, they can focus on strategy and creative direction, letting the AI churn out the visuals.

Counterpoint:

Of course, there’s a flipside. Authenticity will be something to watch – audiences might start to question if a personable “spokesperson” in a video is real or an AI avatar. Brands will need to balance the efficiency with transparency to maintain trust. And while cutting costs by 99% is eye-opening, the quality and emotional impact of these AI videos will need to match real human storytelling. Also, there is no API access outside China, which limits integration with Meta/Google ad stacks.

🎵 Beatoven: Good Vibes

Beatoven.ai is an AI music generator turning heads for its ability to create original, royalty-free background music in minutes. Think of it as your on-demand composer: you input the mood, genre, and length you need, and Beatoven composes a unique background music track tailored to your request.

Need an upbeat electronic jingle for a product launch video, followed by a mellow acoustic loop for a podcast intro? Beatoven can churn those out faster than a human musician could draft an email. Over 1 million creators have already used it to generate more than 1.5 million tracks, showing the demand for quick, customizable music.

One big selling point is cost and licensing – the tracks are original (algorithmically generated from AI training, not straight copies), so you don’t have to worry about music rights or royalties for your ads, videos, or podcasts. The platform even lets you fine-tune the output, for example, by changing the emotion or instrument emphasis after the first pass, so you’re not stuck with a one-size-fits-all tune.

How Marketers Can Use It

Audio is a huge part of branding and engagement. Beatoven and similar tools put the power of a whole music studio into the hands of a marketer who can’t tell a treble clef from a bass clef. You can quickly generate background music for a campaign video or social ad without blowing your budget or waiting weeks.

Have a webinar or event and need some intro music? Spin one up in the style you want. Because it’s fast and cheap, you might create multiple themes and test which one resonates best with your audience – something unheard of when each track would’ve required hiring a composer or licensing a pricey stock track. The variety is a plus too: the AI isn’t limited to one genre, so whether you need classical, hip-hop, ambient, or techno, it can produce options. And importantly, no copyright headaches – marketers have been burned before by using a catchy song only to get a takedown notice later.

Counterpoint:

• Beatoven struggles with complex genre hybrids (e.g., K-pop meets flamenco)

• No stem exports for professional audio post-production

📈 Concierge AI: Sales and Support Copilot

What if managing CRM updates or drafting client emails was as easy as chatting with an assistant? Concierge AI aims to be exactly that: an AI-powered assistant that connects to your everyday work apps and automates tasks via natural language. Launched this month (to considerable buzz), Concierge AI integrates with Gmail, Slack, Notion, Jira, HubSpot, and more, letting you literally talk to your tools. You can ask it questions like, “Hey, what’s the latest email from Client X about?” and it will pull the data from Gmail, or “Summarize our Slack conversations from last week with the design team,” and it will generate a summary.

It doesn’t stop at retrieval – it can perform actions too. With multiple AI models under the hood (GPT-4, Claude, and even Elon Musk’s Grok, among others), it’s capable of drafting content and executing commands. For example, you might say, “Concierge, find info on John Smith at Acme Corp and add a note to our CRM about his company,” and it will fetch John’s details and update the record in HubSpot automatically. Or a support agent could say, “Draft a follow-up email to the customer I just spoke with about issue Y, in a friendly tone,” and get a ready-to-send email. Essentially, Concierge AI is positioning itself as a universal AI assistant for work, bridging data and tasks across different apps so you don’t have to click and type in each one.

How It Can Help Your Team:

For sales and customer success teams, Concierge AI can relieve a ton of busywork. A few impactful examples:

• CRM Data Entry and Research: Instead of manually researching a lead and logging notes, simply ask the AI. “Gather recent news on Company Z and update the lead in Salesforce,” and it’s done. This means reps spend less time on data entry and more time on actual selling.

• Follow-up and Outreach: The AI can draft personalized emails or messages based on prior conversations. It can analyze your last call notes or emails and generate a follow-up that sounds like you (using custom skills to match your tone) . This ensures timely, tailored outreach without writing from scratch each time.

• Meeting and Conversation Summaries: CSMs can have Concierge summarize the last few support chats or a lengthy email thread with a client to prep for a meeting. No need to read pages of text – the AI highlights key points (“Client was upset about X, we promised Y”). This context at a glance helps you jump in fully informed.

• Cross-App Updates: Say a sales manager wants a quick status update: “List my top 5 open deals and any recent Slack mentions about them.” Concierge can pull deal amounts from HubSpot and relevant chatter from Slack to give a concise report. This kind of cross-app querying is usually a headache of exporting data and merging reports – now it’s conversational and instant .

Overall, tools like Concierge AI can function like an AI sidekick for your team. Early adopters will gain efficiency – imagine each rep having an assistant to offload admin tasks, ensure nothing falls through the cracks, and even coach by providing information on request. It’s not here to replace your judgment or personal touch but to augment your capacity. As one reviewer noted, it’s about making AI truly work for you in your existing workflow rather than sitting on the side. For organizations, that means better CRM hygiene, faster response times, and more bandwidth for your team to focus on what humans do best: building relationships and closing deals.

🔍 Fiverr Go: AI that Works For Creators, Not Instead of Them

Freelance marketplace Fiverr marked its 20th anniversary with a bold new platform called Fiverr Go. Unlike many AI tools that raise fears of replacing creatives, Fiverr Go is designed to empower freelancers by letting them train their own AI models on their unique style of work and profit from it. Essentially, top Fiverr creatives (designers, writers, voice-over artists, etc.) can create a Personal AI Model that learns from their portfolio. This model can then generate content in their style under their control.

For example, a graphic designer could have an AI that produces draft illustrations that look like their work, which they can then refine. Freelancers set the rules – they configure the AI, set prices for its outputs, and crucially retain ownership of their creative IP even as the AI scales their workload. Alongside this, Fiverr Go offers a Personal AI Assistant that learns a freelancer’s communication preferences and helps handle routine client interactions. It might auto-draft responses to common inquiries or highlight key points from past client messages, acting like a virtual studio assistant. The philosophy here is clear: rather than letting AI scrape artists’ work without credit, Fiverr is giving creators an AI of their own and ensuring they get credit and compensation whenever it’s used.

Why It’s Important (Especially for Creatives):

Fiverr Go represents a new, more human-centric approach to AI in the creative industry. For creative professionals and marketers who hire them, this could be transformative. Freelancers will be able to take on more projects without compromising quality because their personal AI can handle first drafts or repetitive tasks in their signature style. That means faster turnaround times for clients and the ability for a one-person shop to scale like never before. From a marketer’s perspective, if you love a particular illustrator’s style, in the future you might license their AI model via Fiverr Go to generate a bunch of assets, with the confidence that the artist is involved and earning from it. It’s a win-win: the client gets more content quickly, and the creator amplifies their earning potential without being cut out of the loop.

It also addresses the ethical elephant in the room – AI has been hungry for human-created data, often without permission. Here, creators explicitly train the AI on their work and own it. Fiverr’s move could set a precedent across the industry: acknowledging that human creativity is the source of AI’s magic, and those humans deserve a stake in the upside. In practical terms, marketing and creative teams might soon start looking for vendors who come with an “AI-enabled” tag – not to get cheap work done but to get more of the style and quality they already trust.

Fiverr Go is starting with categories like voiceovers, writing, design, and will expand, so it’s worth watching as a model for how AI and creatives can partner up rather than compete.

xAI’s Grok 3: A New AI Powerhouse (That Marketers Might Skip for Now)

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI rolled out Grok 3, its latest large language model, and it’s making waves for its raw power. This model is a beast – it took a data center of roughly 200,000 GPUs to train (about 10× more computing than the previous version). All that muscle has pushed Grok 3 to score exceptionally high on certain AI benchmarks, outperforming models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in some programming and math tests. Early feedback highlights Grok’s impressive logical reasoning abilities; for instance, it can tackle complex problems step-by-step, calculate technical figures, or generate structured solutions that few other chatbots can. Even OpenAI alum Andrej Karpathy nodded to Grok’s skill in handling tasks that stumped others.

But here’s the problem: Grok 3 might be in the 98th percentile in ad copy ideation. It also hallucinated statistics in 23% of marketing and product claims during trials. Imagine a product chatbot that’s supremely confident in solving an equation but might flub a simple factual lookup – not exactly the reliable content assistant you need. Additionally, Grok’s lineage (and Musk’s vision) leans toward an AI that’s an “eager student of the internet’s hive mind,” complete with edgy humor and internet slang. Entertaining? Perhaps. On-brand for a corporate campaign? Probably not.

Bottom line: Grok 3 is a technically impressive leap – an AI that can reason through puzzles and code like a champ. However, for marketing and sales use cases, its value is unproven. It might not generate the most engaging copy or could misstep factual accuracy in content. This is one to keep an eye on (the tech could trickle down into future general models), but most teams won’t be swapping out ChatGPT or Claude for Grok in their daily workflow just yet — there’s no public API yet, either.

OpenAI’s Roadmap: GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 Are Coming

Sam Altman took to X (Twitter) on Feb 12 to pull back the curtain on OpenAI’s upcoming models, and there are big implications for anyone using AI for content. He confirmed that GPT-4.5, codenamed “Orion,” is set to arrive within weeks, and GPT-5 is expected in a few months. Importantly, GPT-4.5 will be the last model of its kind before a major paradigm shift – Altman calls it the final “non-chain-of-thought” model. That hints that GPT-5 will incorporate new reasoning techniques (chain-of-thought is an AI method for better step-by-step logic), merging the raw power of huge language models with the logical prowess of OpenAI’s special “o-series” reasoning models. In practice, OpenAI plans to unify its model lineup so you won’t have to choose between, say, GPT-4 vs. an “o-model” – the next-gen GPT will handle it all.

Another big change: product simplification. Altman acknowledged that the current array of ChatGPT models and options is confusing. The vision is that GPT-5 becomes a one-stop system that can use all of OpenAI’s tools and skills for many tasks, making AI feel more like a utility that “just works” rather than a gadget you tinker with. Concretely, he mentioned when GPT-5 launches, ChatGPT’s free tier users will get to use GPT-5 (at a standard power setting), while Plus and Enterprise users can tap into higher “intelligence” modes of GPT-5 for more complex tasks. This could democratize access to a very advanced model, meaning even users of the free ChatGPT could see a leap in capability and quality once GPT-5 rolls out.

For marketers, content creators, and really any business user, this roadmap is exciting. GPT-4.5 (Orion), arriving soon, might bring a nice boost in performance or speed in the interim (perhaps smoother outputs or better handling of tricky queries). But the real game-changer will be GPT-5. If it integrates the advanced reasoning of OpenAI’s previously separate logic-focused models, we could get AI that not only writes fluidly but also thinks through problems in more depth – imagine campaign copy that comes with strategic rationale or an AI that can brainstorm a full marketing plan with budgets and timelines considered. It could handle complex prompts more intelligently, keep context even better, and reduce those occasional “off the rails” moments. And simplifying the model choices means less time for trial-and-erroring which GPT setting to use for what – you’ll just trust one model to handle it.

That said, “months” is a bit vague, and we know from reports that GPT-5’s development has been challenging. Some say it was behind schedule as of late last year, and pushing the boundaries of these models is getting harder. So while we can be optimistic, it’s wise to plan with what’s here now (GPT-4 and soon 4.5) and be pleasantly surprised if GPT-5 lands sooner than expected. Keep an eye on OpenAI’s official channels in the coming weeks as GPT-4.5’s release could drop any day, bringing us one step closer to this unified AI future.

Anthropic’s Next Claude: Hybrid AI with a Reasoning Slider

Not to be outshone by OpenAI, Anthropic (maker of Claude AI) is preparing its own leap forward. They’re working on a new Claude hybrid model that combines the strengths of a chatty language model with advanced reasoning abilities in one package. What does “hybrid” mean here? Essentially, Anthropic is merging its ultra-smart but slower “reasoning” AI with the fast, fluent Claude we know. The upcoming model will let users adjust how much computing power (and “braininess”) it uses per task via a simple slider. Dial it down, and it acts like a normal quick chatbot – great for casual Q&As or drafting copy. Dial it up, and it spends more time thinking step-by-step, tapping into more complex logic and problem-solving – ideal for tasks like debugging code, analyzing data or solving a hard math problem. This dynamic approach addresses a key issue: big AI models can be very smart or very fast, but usually not both at once. Anthropic wants Claude to be versatile, adapting to the user’s needs on the fly.

According to insiders, the new Claude is performing impressively in early tests – one user noted it handled a massive codebase analysis more effectively than OpenAI’s own reasoning model (their o3 model). For enterprise users and marketing teams, this could be powerful. Imagine having one AI assistant that can brainstorm catchy social content one minute, and crunch through a complex spreadsheet or SQL query the next, just by toggling a setting. That reduces the need to use different tools for different tasks. And unlike a one-size-fits-all approach, you won’t waste time when you don’t need deep reasoning (no overkill CPU usage for a simple task), but you have the heavy-duty option available when you do need it.

From a marketing automation perspective, such a model could, for example, generate a campaign’s content calendar (creative writing mode) and also optimize the media spend distribution based on performance data (analytical mode). Claude might write your press release quickly in low mode, then switch to high gear to generate an in-depth competitor analysis report with citations. The big question: will this actually improve creative outputs or just the technical ones? Anthropic’s team acknowledges it’s not yet clear if pouring more “reasoning” into a language model makes it better at open-ended writing or idea generation. Creative tasks often don’t have a single right answer, so the benefit might be marginal there. However, marketers could win in tasks that straddle creativity and analysis – think personalized content generation where the AI has to interpret user data or sales stats and then write a tailored message. A hybrid Claude could analyze the data deeply (who is this customer, what do they like, what did they buy before) and then produce a compelling, context-rich sales email.

Anthropic is reportedly focusing these models on enterprise customers first, so we might see them embedded in business software or available via API soon.

Thank you for reading Horizon 01. Looking forward to bringing you more incredible AI developments next week.

— Peter and Torsten