Apple’s new launch is our top read for today, but to be real, it’s more mixed news than “good news.”

• Apple announced a new Apple Pencil. Good: Affordability. Bad: The rest.
• You can embed Snapchat content now. Ephemeral content had its moment.
• AI funding reached $17.9 billion. 🚧 The way everyone’s working “AI” into their products right now.
• Skip to Stripe's news.

We get it — there’s a lot of AI right now (see good news above). The truth is that we’re at an exciting point in the history of generative AI. It’s everywhere, and access to various models is increasing.

That’s a bit of a problem too. People making products with AI have tons of platforms and APIs to configure and models to work with, with varying degrees of success depending on what the task at hand is.

LastMile AI just launched a solution — an AI developer platform for engineering teams. The platform gives you a notebook-like environment to prototype your AI app. OpenAI (GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Whisper), Google (PaLM), open-source providers (Stable Diffusion, Bark), and Hugging Face are all accessible in a one-stop shop.

“[LastMile's] workbooks make it easy to iterate on prompts, compare models, and create templates for others to use,” explains maker Sarmad Qadri. Qadri spent years building developer tools for ML engineers and data scientists at Facebook and Microsoft, along with his co-founders with similar backgrounds.

If you’re an engineer, you can dig into some of the other features of LastMile, like connecting to your data sets and a batch execution service to test and automate your AI app for production.

As a non-technical, I think the Discord community sounds like a great benefit too. Makers and AI enthusiasts can learn from or inspire each other by sharing workbooks and workflows.

• The Permission Slip app shows you what data companies are collecting so you can file requests to stop it; built by the US nonprofit and advocacy org, Consumer Reports.
• Welly AI suggests what vitamins to take after analyzing your gastrointestinal health.
• Wiseone adds a tooltip to your browser so you can see info and helpful links as you read.

• Stripe launched Embedded Checkout. Makers can now drop pre-built, customizable payment forms into their sites.
• Harmony is a UI color palette prioritizing accessibility, using “advanced color tech” for precision.
• FlutterFlow for iPad is here.

There have been a lot of product launches around catching AI in school papers or using AI to write papers.

What if AI was used to align students and teachers instead?