Now with Gems, Dots, Ice, and More Random Stuff!

SPEAKER_1 (0:07)

This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall (0:15)

Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall.

Christopher Penn (0:18)

I'm Christopher Penn.

John Wall (0:19)

And everything on fire all the time. I don't know why I even say that because that's just a given, but everything is just totally crazy going on. There's a bunch of listener feedback that we'll get to. But the big one that was at the top of the list, I had it between last time we've talked, is Claude Cowork getting rolled into Claude, because we've been using that so much. What's going on with that? Or is this basically streamlining the product line to make it easier? Or what's going on?

Christopher Penn (0:45)

This is the case across a lot of the different tools. But yes, Claude Cowork is just getting folded into Claude. So they call it the One Claude Initiative. Claude Design getting folded into Claude itself. So there will really only be two forks, Claude and Claude Code will be left. Chat GPT, same thing. So Chat GPT has the chat version and the work version, Chat GPT work. It now defaults to Chat GPT work. So it is effectively the same thing. Google Gemini and Gemini Spark.

It is pretty clear that Spark will be the way that moves forward. In fact, Google just published an announcement saying that Google's Gems will be retired in November. I'm in the midst of creating some transition resources for folks because a lot of the ways that...

I have very strong opinions about how people should be making skills for these agent tools because a lot of the existing tools don't, in my opinion, don't do a good job and make things, in some cases, make things worse.

John Wall (1:43)

That's interesting. Well, I have to give a shout out to Ron Plouffe has been pushing me to play around with the anti-gravity. He's got a bunch of things that he's been working on with that. So I have to give a touch to him for that. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of stuff we could go into as far as skills. I don't know, even that seems like maybe a Trust Insights live stream at some point. There's got to be plenty of stuff to dig into on that front.

Christopher Penn (2:03)

Yeah, for sure. I'm probably going to even have a paid download because I have a very specific way that I think skills should be made. It is admittedly very highly opinionated. In fact, the product name is called The Highly Opinionated Skill Converter.

But there's a lot of things that people want to do with skills and with GPTs and Gems, whatever you want to call them, where AI isn't the best choice. There's a lot of things that should be done in regular code and stuff. And so the skill converter will look at an existing GPT or a gem or whatever and say, you know what, I'm going to apply Chris's highly opinionated rubric here and say, all this stuff here should not be done by AI.

John Wall (2:46)

Always one of the great parts about us recording is I get to throw all this stuff to you. Stuff will pop up during the weekend. I don't even have time to look and see what's going on. And on the list this week is Dots. I've seen a bunch of hype and people getting all worked up, but what the heck are Dots?

Christopher Penn (2:59)

So Dots is opening as new product. It is very similar if you've heard of Meta's Muse product. It's an always-on AI assistant. That is a mobile app or a desktop app or whatever. And if you've heard of things like OpenClau or Hermes agent, it is basically consumer-friendly versions of these where you can give them either long-running tasks or complex tasks and they will try and figure it out one way or the other. So with Dots, you can say, hey, check my inbox, see who's canceled meetings today, rearrange my calendars so that I have the maximum productive day possible.

Or as happened with a few folks, Meta Muse, they are finding out. It's very funny saying Meta Muse almost sounds like Meta Musel.

John Wall (3:45)

Meta Musel, right. Revealing our demographic as we go there.

Christopher Penn (3:50)

Exactly. But people have been finding that it is particularly bad at poorly bounded tasks. One person had their Muse agent not only help them list something for sale, but then started messaging buyers and stuff and inviting people over to their house without their knowledge.

John Wall (4:09)

Oh, okay. Yeah, that's because I do have to admit to you I've seen dots, but then and I've also seen a lot of people like I will die on a hill before Meta comes near my house with Muse or that kind of stuff. So obviously, that's why that's going on.