Happy Friday folks!

If you’ve been following the newsletter for a while, you may have noticed that I am not a Futurist [one who studies and predicts the future, especially based on current trends].

Now, I certainly respect the movement and its members’ contributions to society, but my brain is a little too skeptical these days to adopt the ethos 100%.

However, I do think it’s important to pay attention to what is coming out of that world, especially in regard to AI. 

Week after week, I found myself writing about what was happening at OpenAI, Gemini, with LLMs in general—mostly because the news never seems to stop on that front.

I felt though, that I was missing other industry news. Marketing, SEO, culture, business in general—that news never stops either!

That leads me to the new feature being rolled out today: AI in Action. A weekly highlight of the industry, be it news, updates, or a fun tool.

This week I’m leading with a longer than usual excerpt from a more philosophical piece about Artificial General Intelligence and what it means; from the perspective of said futurists and AI companies.

I look forward to paying even closer attention to the industry and sharing insights targeted to this community.

Please let me know your favorite AI tools, what LLM you favor, or what you’re excited to see develop and grow.

Our President, Jon Sasala, likes to say “The Future is Awesome.”

-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development

Open Mic

Supporting North Carolina

By Phillip Chester, Web Designer, Hypha HubSpot Development

A group of Western North Carolina musicians have used their connections within the music industry to create a massive 136-song benefit compilation album called Cardinals at the Window.

It features new music and unreleased live songs from national artists like The War on Drugs, Waxahatchee, Fleet Foxes, and Jason Isbell along with local artists such as MJ Lenderman, Angel Olsen, and Tyler Ramsey.

100% of the proceeds will be evenly split between three organizations that have been here helping from the start (Community Foundation of WNC, Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR), & BeLoved Asheville). It’s a great opportunity to support the people of WNC and get some new music to listen to while you work.

Second Hand News

Bloomberg: US Weighs Google Breakup in Historic Big Tech Antitrust Case ➜

The Google case marches on. It clearly will be slow going, but interesting to keep an eye on.

“Antitrust enforcers are weighing a breakup to mitigate the Alphabet Inc. business’s dominance in search, the agency said in a court filing on Tuesday, confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. Judge Amit Mehta could also order Google to provide access to the underlying data it uses to build its search results and artificial intelligence products, it said.

“The 32-page document lays out a framework of potential options for the judge to consider as the case moves to the remedy phase. The agency said it will provide a fuller proposal on remedies next month and then begin gathering additional documents and evidence from Google for a two-week remedies hearing in April. Mehta said he will rule on the remedies by August 2025.”

Moz: SEO Content Has a Packaging Problem — Whiteboard Friday ➜

A quick little video from Moz that underscores our need to iterate in the wake of AI integration with search engines. A simple reframing of queries in content could make a difference in ranking opportunities.

“We have already created the content, and it’s a matter of repackaging what we’ve already created. So instead of targeting the keyword ‘how to train for a marathon,’ ‘do email marketing,’ ‘start on a particular diet’? We have to understand that users care about different perspectives given the topic, and this how query can actually be broken into a variety of different perspectives that the user is likely to care about within their search journey. Things like: ‘What to consider before training for a marathon.’ ‘Mistakes I made while starting a particular diet.’ ‘Reasons not to do email marketing or TikTok marketing’ and ‘Should I even get into SEO in this day and age?’”

Hypha Highlights

At Hypha, we adopted a guiding content principle called “publish everywhere”—something we use on behalf of our clients and our own marketing efforts. While it sounds straightforward, putting it into practice can pose some challenges; not the least of these is developing a firm understanding of where our desired audience actually spends their time online, and then producing content that will resonate within each of those places.

For us, “publish everywhere” serves two key purposes:

• It’s a practical response to the ever-shifting landscape of user behavior.
• It is a consistent reminder to explore new avenues across relevant platforms.

This philosophy aligns nicely with the popular and effective practice of repurposing content.

By repurposing content across various platforms such as audio, infographics, and videos, you can reach a wider audience and potentially improve user engagement. The key lies in creating valuable and engaging content that resonates with your target audience. So, embrace the endless possibilities of repurposing content and continue to experiment with new ways to maximize the impact of your message.

Read: The Power of Repurposing Content ➜

5 Star Review

Working with the Hypha team has been great! Their creativity, responsiveness, and attention to detail has helped us tremendously. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for help with marketing!  -C. Tucker

Industry: Technology - Software

Services provided: CRM Implementation, Sales and Marketing Alignment, and Sales Enablement

HubSpot Hacks

Welcoming Cacheflow to the HubSpot Team

“[HubSpot has] signed an agreement to acquire Cacheflow! They provide subscription billing and configure, price, quote (CPQ) software to automate revenue management and shorten the sales cycle. 

“Cacheflow’s purpose, product, and people fit perfectly with HubSpot. Being able to buy and pay for services and software is an important part of the customer experience...Their integrated CPQ and subscription revenue management solution helps companies configure complex quotes fast, close deals from interactive links, and up-sell and renew software revenue easily....Because many of Cacheflow’s customers are also HubSpot customers, Cacheflow uniquely understands HubSpot and our ecosystem, allowing them to drive impact quickly.”

AI in Action

News, updates and tools from the AI industry.

TechCrunch: Even the ‘godmother of AI’ has no idea what AGI is ➜

“But when asked what she thought about an ‘AI singularity,’ Li was just as lost as the rest of us.”

“I frankly don’t even know what AGI means. Like people say you know it when you see it, I guess I haven’t seen it. The truth is, I don’t spend much time thinking about these words because I think there’s so many more important things to do…”

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took a stab at defining AGI in a profile with The New Yorker last year. Altman described AGI as the ‘equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a coworker.’

“Meanwhile, OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as ‘highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.’

“Evidently, these definitions weren’t quite good enough for a $157 billion company to be working towards. So OpenAI created the five levels it internally uses to gauge its progress towards AGI. The first level is chatbots (like ChatGPT), then reasoners (apparently, OpenAI o1 was this level), agents (that’s coming next, supposedly), innovators (AI that can help invent things), and the last level, organizational (AI that can do the work of an entire organization).

“Still confused? So am I, and so is Li. Also, this all sounds like a lot more than a median human coworker could do.”

1x Speed

The podcasts Team Hypha has queued up.

In honor of National Coming Out Day (today, 10/11) here’s an interview with one of the founders Jean O’Leary, on the Making Gay History podcast.

How can we help you?

Industry: Social Impact

Thanks for reading! We’ll catch you in next week’s edition. -Team Hypha