Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — your copilot for work

Copilot — A whole new way to work — from news.microsoft.com

  • Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.
  • Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.
  • Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.
  • Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on actually communicating.
  • Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.
  • Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.
  • Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work — from blogs.microsoft.com by Jared Spataro

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — A whole new way to work — from microsoft.com by Colette Stallbaumer

Excerpt:

Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more—to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. Today, we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.


A new era for AI and Google Workspace — from workspace.google.com by Johanna Voolich Wright

Excerpt:

As we embark on this next journey, we will be bringing these new generative-AI experiences to trusted testers on a rolling basis throughout the year, before making them available publicly.

With these features, you’ll be able to:

  • draft, reply, summarize, and prioritize your Gmail
  • brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite in Docs
  • bring your creative vision to life with auto-generated images, audio, and video in Slides
  • go from raw data to insights and analysis via auto-completion, formula generation, and
  • contextual categorization in Sheets
  • generate new backgrounds and capture notes in Meet
  • enable workflows for getting things done in Chat

Here’s a look at the first set of AI-powered features, which make writing even easier.

 


Description of video:

Sal Khan walks through Khan Academy’s GPT-4 integration (not generally available yet). Folks can join the waitlist at Khanacademy.org. To learn more about Khanmigo, visit: khanacademy.org/khan-labs

We believe that AI has the potential to transform learning in a positive way, but we are also keenly aware of the risks. To test the possibilities, we’re inviting our district partners to opt in to Khan Labs, a new space for testing learning technology. We want to ensure that our work always puts the needs of students and teachers first, and we are focused on ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared equally across society. In addition to teachers and students, we’re inviting the general public to join a waitlist to test Khanmigo. Teachers, students and donors will be our partners on this learning journey, helping us test AI to see if we can harness it as a learning tool for all.


GPT-4 has arrived. It will blow ChatGPT out of the water. — from washingtonpost.com by Drew Harwell and Nitasha Tiku
The long-awaited tool, which can describe images in words, marks a huge leap forward for AI power — and another major shift for ethical norms


Introducing Our Virtual Volunteer Tool for People who are Blind or Have Low Vision, Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 — from bemyeyes.com
We are thrilled to announce Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer™, the first-ever digital visual assistant powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 language model.


 

For example, [GPT-4] passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%. 

Source

 


 


 

HOW DUOLINGO’S AI LEARNS WHAT YOU NEED TO LEARN — from spectrum.ieee.org by Klinton Bicknell, Claire Brust, and Burr Settles
The AI that powers the language-learning app today could disrupt education tomorrow

Excerpt:

It’s lunchtime when your phone pings you with a green owl who cheerily reminds you to “Keep Duo Happy!” It’s a nudge from Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, whose algorithms know you’re most likely to do your 5 minutes of Spanish practice at this time of day. The app chooses its notification words based on what has worked for you in the past and the specifics of your recent achievements, adding a dash of attention-catching novelty. When you open the app, the lesson that’s queued up is calibrated for your skill level, and it includes a review of some words and concepts you flubbed during your last session.

The AI systems we continue to refine are necessary to scale the learning experience beyond the more than 50 million active learners who currently complete about 1 billion exercises per day on the platform.

Although Duolingo is known as a language-learning app, the company’s ambitions go further. We recently launched apps covering childhood literacy and third-grade mathematics, and these expansions are just the beginning. We hope that anyone who wants help with academic learning will one day be able to turn to the friendly green owl in their pocket who hoots at them, “Ready for your daily lesson?”


Also relevant/see:

GPT-4 deepens the conversation on Duolingo

Duolingo turned to OpenAI’s GPT-4 to advance the product with two new features: Role Play, an AI conversation partner, and Explain my Answer, which breaks down the rules when you make a mistake, in a new subscription tier called Duolingo Max. 

“We wanted AI-powered features that were deeply integrated into the app and leveraged the gamified aspect of Duolingo that our learners love,” says Bodge.


Also relevant/see:

The following is a quote from Donald Clark’s posting on LinkedIn.com today:

The whole idea of AI as a useful teacher is here. Honestly it’s astounding. They have provided a Socratic approach to an algebra problem that is totally on point. Most people learn in the absence of a teacher or lecturer. They need constant scaffolding, someone to help them move forward, with feedback. This changes our whole relationship with what we need to know, and how we get to know it. Its reasoning ability is also off the scale.

We now have human teachers, human learners but also AI teachers and AI that learns. It used to be a diad, it is now a tetrad – that is the basis of the new pedAIgogy.

Personalised, tutor-led learning, in any subject, anywhere, at any time for anyone. That has suddenly become real.

Also relevant/see:

Introducing Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4 — from blog.duolingo.com

Excerpts:

We believe that AI and education make a great duo, and we’ve leveraged AI to help us deliver highly-personalized language lessons, affordable and accessible English proficiency testing, and more. Our mission to make high-quality education available to everyone in the world is made possible by advanced AI technology.

Explain My Answer offers learners the chance to learn more about their response in a lesson (whether their answer was correct or incorrect!)

Roleplay allows learners to practice real-world conversation skills with world characters in the app.

 

ChatGPT as a teaching tool, not a cheating tool — from timeshighereducation.com by Jennifer Rose
How to use ChatGPT as a tool to spur students’ inner feedback and thus aid their learning and skills development

Excerpt:

Use ChatGPT to spur student’s inner feedback
One way that ChatGPT answers can be used in class is by asking students to compare what they have written with a ChatGPT answer. This draws on David Nicol’s work on making inner feedback explicit and using comparative judgement. His work demonstrates that in writing down answers to comparative questions students can produce high-quality feedback for themselves which is instant and actionable. Applying this to a ChatGPT answer, the following questions could be used:

  • Which is better, the ChatGPT response or yours? Why?
  • What two points can you learn from the ChatGPT response that will help you improve your work?
  • What can you add from your answer to improve the ChatGPT answer?
  • How could the assignment question set be improved to allow the student to demonstrate higher-order skills such as critical thinking?
  • How can you use what you have learned to stay ahead of AI and produce higher-quality work than ChatGPT?
 

…which links to openai.com/research/gpt-4


Also relevant/see:

See the recording from the GPT-4 Developer Demo

See the recording from the GPT-4 Developer Demo

About GPT-4
GPT-4 can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities.

You can learn more through:

  • Overview page of GPT-4 and what early customers have built on top of the model.
  • Blog post with details on the model’s capabilities and limitations, including eval results.

From DSC:
I do hope that the people building all of this are taking enough time to ask, “What might humans do with these emerging technologies — both positively AND negatively?” And then put some guard rails around things.


Also relevant/see:

 

Exploring generative AI and the implications for universities — from universityworldnews.com

Excerpt:

This is part of a weekly University World News special report series on ‘AI and higher education’. The focus is on how universities are engaging with ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools. The articles from academics and our journalists around the world are exploring developments and university work in AI that have implications for higher education institutions and systems, students and staff, and teaching, learning and research.

AI and higher education -- a report from University World News

 

The Librarian: Can we prompt ChatGPT to generate reliable references? — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman

Lessons Learned

  • Always assume that ChatGPT is wrong until you prove otherwise.
  • Validate everything (and require your students to validate everything too).
  • Google Scholar is a great tool for validating ChatGPT outputs rapidly.
  • The prompt works better when you provide a subject area, e.g. visual anthropology, and then a sub-topic, e.g. film making.
  • Ignore ChatGPT’s links – validate by searching for titles & authors, not URLs.
  • Use intentional repetition, e.g. of Google Scholar, to focus ChatGPT’s attention.
  • Be aware: ChatGPT’s outputs end at 2021. You need to fill in the blanks since then.
 

ChatGPT is Everywhere — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie
Love it or hate it, academics can’t ignore the already pervasive technology.

Excerpt:

Many academics see these tools as a danger to authentic learning, fearing that students will take shortcuts to avoid the difficulty of coming up with original ideas, organizing their thoughts, or demonstrating their knowledge. Ask ChatGPT to write a few paragraphs, for example, on how Jean Piaget’s theories on childhood development apply to our age of anxiety and it can do that.

Other professors are enthusiastic, or at least intrigued, by the possibility of incorporating generative AI into academic life. Those same tools can help students — and professors — brainstorm, kick-start an essay, explain a confusing idea, and smooth out awkward first drafts. Equally important, these faculty members argue, is their responsibility to prepare students for a world in which these technologies will be incorporated into everyday life, helping to produce everything from a professional email to a legal contract.

“Artificial-intelligence tools present the greatest creative disruption to learning that we’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Sarah Eaton, associate professor of education at the University of Calgary



Artificial intelligence and academic integrity, post-plagiarism — from universityworldnews.com Sarah Elaine Eaton; with thanks to Robert Gibson out on LinkedIn for the resource

Excerpt:

The use of artificial intelligence tools does not automatically constitute academic dishonesty. It depends how the tools are used. For example, apps such as ChatGPT can be used to help reluctant writers generate a rough draft that they can then revise and update.

Used in this way, the technology can help students learn. The text can also be used to help students learn the skills of fact-checking and critical thinking, since the outputs from ChatGPT often contain factual errors.

When students use tools or other people to complete homework on their behalf, that is considered a form of academic dishonesty because the students are no longer learning the material themselves. The key point is that it is the students, and not the technology, that is to blame when students choose to have someone – or something – do their homework for them.

There is a difference between using technology to help students learn or to help them cheat. The same technology can be used for both purposes.

From DSC:
These couple of sentences…

In the age of post-plagiarism, humans use artificial intelligence apps to enhance and elevate creative outputs as a normal part of everyday life. We will soon be unable to detect where the human written text ends and where the robot writing begins, as the outputs of both become intertwined and indistinguishable.

…reminded me of what’s been happening within the filmmaking world for years (i.e., such as in Star Wars, Jurrasic Park, and many others). It’s often hard to tell what’s real and what’s been generated by a computer.
 

What Can A.I. Art Teach Us About the Real Thing? — from newyorker.com by Adam Gopnik; with thanks to Mrs. Julie Bender for this resource
The range and ease of pictorial invention offered by A.I. image generation are startling.

Excerpts:

The dall-e 2 system, by setting images free from neat, argumentative intentions, reducing them to responses to “prompts,” reminds us that pictures exist in a different world of meaning from prose.

And the power of images lies less in their arguments than in their ambiguities. That’s why the images that dall-e 2 makes are far more interesting than the texts that A.I. chatbots make. To be persuasive, a text demands a point; in contrast, looking at pictures, we can be fascinated by atmospheres and uncertainties.

One of the things that thinking machines have traditionally done is sharpen our thoughts about our own thinking.

And, so, “A Havanese at six pm on an East Coast beach in the style of a Winslow Homer watercolor”:

A Havanese at six pm on an East Coast beach in the style of a Winslow Homer watercolor
Art work by DALL-E 2 / Courtesy OpenAI

It is, as simple appreciation used to say, almost like being there, almost like her being there. Our means in art are mixed, but our motives are nearly always memorial. We want to keep time from passing and our loves alive. The mechanical collision of kinds first startles our eyes and then softens our hearts. It’s the secret system of art.

 

FBI, Pentagon helped research facial recognition for street cameras, drones — from washingtonpost.com by Drew Harwell
Internal documents released in response to a lawsuit show the government was deeply involved in pushing for face-scanning technology that could be used for mass surveillance

Excerpt:

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government’s ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.

From DSC:
This doesn’t surprise me. But it’s yet another example of opaqueness involving technology. And who knows to what levels our Department of Defense has taken things with AI, drones, and robotics.

 

‘ChatGPT Already Outperforms a lot of Junior Lawyers’: An Interview With Richard Susskind — from law.com by Laura Beveridge
For the last 20 years, the U.K. author and academic has been predicting that technology will revolutionise the legal industry. With the buzz around generative AI, will his hypothesis now be proven true?

Excerpts:

For this generation of lawyers, their mission and legacy ought to be to build the systems that replace our old ways of working, he said. Moreover, Susskind identified new work for lawyers, such as legal process analyst or legal data scientist, emerging from technological advancement.

“These are the people who will be building the systems that will be solving people’s legal problems in the future.

“The question I ask is: imagine when the underpinning large language model is GPT 8.5.”

Blue J Legal co-founder Benjamin Alarie on how AI is powering a new generation of legal tech — from canadianlawyermag.com by Tim Wilbur

Excerpts:

We founded Blue J with the idea that we should be able to bring absolute clarity to the law everywhere and on demand. The name that we give to this idea is the legal singularity. I have a book with assistant professor Abdi Aidid called The Legal Singularity coming out soon on this idea.

The book paints the picture of where we think the law will go in the next several decades. Our intuition was not widely shared when we started the book and Blue J.

Since last November, though, many lawyers and journalists have been able to play with ChatGPT and other large language models. They suddenly understand what we have been excited about for the last eight years.

Neat Trick/Tip to Add To Your Bag! — from iltanet.org by Brian Balistreri

Excerpt:

If you need instant transcription of a Audio File, Word Online now allows you to upload a file, and it will transcribe, mark speaker changes, and provide time marks. You can use video files, just make sure they are small or office will kick you out.

Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers — from wired.com by Chris Stoken-Walker
Large law firms are using a tool made by OpenAI to research and write legal documents. What could go wrong?

Excerpts:

The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been forecast multiple times before. But the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at its forefront, has those within the industry more convinced than ever.

“I think it is the beginning of a paradigm shift,” says Wakeling. “I think this technology is very suitable for the legal industry.”

The technology, which uses large datasets to learn to generate pictures or text that appear natural, could be a good fit for the legal industry, which relies heavily on standardized documents and precedents.

“Legal applications such as contract, conveyancing, or license generation are actually a relatively safe area in which to employ ChatGPT and its cousins,” says Lilian Edwards, professor of law, innovation, and society at Newcastle University. “Automated legal document generation has been a growth area for decades, even in rule-based tech days, because law firms can draw on large amounts of highly standardized templates and precedent banks to scaffold document generation, making the results far more predictable than with most free text outputs.”

But the problems with current generations of generative AI have already started to show.

 

You are not a parrot — from nymag.com by Elizabeth Weil and Emily M. Bender

You Are Not a Parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.

Excerpts:

A handful of companies control what PricewaterhouseCoopers called a “$15.7 trillion game changer of an industry.” Those companies employ or finance the work of a huge chunk of the academics who understand how to make LLMs. This leaves few people with the expertise and authority to say, “Wait, why are these companies blurring the distinction between what is human and what’s a language model? Is this what we want?”

Bender knows she’s no match for a trillion-dollar game changer slouching to life. But she’s out there trying. Others are trying too. LLMs are tools made by specific people — people who stand to accumulate huge amounts of money and power, people enamored with the idea of the singularity. The project threatens to blow up what is human in a species sense. But it’s not about humility. It’s not about all of us. It’s not about becoming a humble creation among the world’s others. It’s about some of us — let’s be honest — becoming a superspecies. This is the darkness that awaits when we lose a firm boundary around the idea that humans, all of us, are equally worthy as is.

 

Introducing Q-Chat, the world’s first AI tutor built with OpenAI’s ChatGPT — from quizlet.com by Lex Bayer

Excerpt:

Modeled on research demonstrating that the most effective form of learning is one-on-one tutoring1, Q-Chat offers students the experience of interacting with a personal AI tutor in an effective and conversational way. Whether they’re learning French vocabulary or Roman History, Q-Chat engages students with adaptive questions based on relevant study materials delivered through a fun chat experience. Pulling from Quizlet’s massive educational content library and using the question-based Socratic method to promote active learning, Q-Chat has the ability to test a student’s knowledge of educational content, ask in-depth questions to get at underlying concepts, test reading comprehension, help students learn a language and encourage students on healthy learning habits.

Quizlet's Q-Chat -- choose a study prompt to be quizzed on the material, to deepen your understanding or to learn through a story.

 

How ChatGPT is going to change the future of work and our approach to education — from livemint.com

From DSC: 
I thought that the article made a good point when it asserted:

The pace of technological advancement is booming aggressively and conversations around ChatGPT snatching away jobs are becoming more and more frequent. The future of work is definitely going to change and that makes it clear that the approach toward education is also demanding a big shift.

A report from Dell suggests that 85% of jobs that will be around in 2030 do not exist yet. The fact becomes important as it showcases that the jobs are not going to vanish, they will just change and most of the jobs by 2030 will be new.

The Future of Human Agency — from pewresearch.org by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie

Excerpt:

Thus the question: What is the future of human agency? Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts to share their insights on this; 540 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, academics and activists responded. Specifically, they were asked:

By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives?

The results of this nonscientific canvassing:

    • 56% of these experts agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will not be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.
    • 44% said they agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.

What are the things humans really want agency over? When will they be comfortable turning to AI to help them make decisions? And under what circumstances will they be willing to outsource decisions altogether to digital systems?

The next big threat to AI might already be lurking on the web — from zdnet.com by Danny Palmer; via Sam DeBrule
Artificial intelligence experts warn attacks against datasets used to train machine-learning tools are worryingly cheap and could have major consequences.

Excerpts:

Data poisoning occurs when attackers tamper with the training data used to create deep-learning models. This action means it’s possible to affect the decisions that the AI makes in a way that is hard to track.

By secretly altering the source information used to train machine-learning algorithms, data-poisoning attacks have the potential to be extremely powerful because the AI will be learning from incorrect data and could make ‘wrong’ decisions that have significant consequences.

Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment — from pmarca.substack.com by Marc Andreessen

Excerpt:

Normally I would make the standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment — see good summaries by Henry Hazlitt (chapter 7) and Frédéric Bastiat (his metaphor directly relevant to AI). And I will come back and make those arguments soon. But I don’t even think the standand arguments are needed, since another problem will block the progress of AI across most of the economy first.

Which is: AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy.

How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time.

How do I know that? Because:


From DSC:
And for me, it boils down to an inconvenient truth: What’s the state of our hearts and minds?

AI, ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), and the like are tools. How we use such tools varies upon what’s going on in our hearts and minds. A fork can be used to eat food. It can also be used as a weapon. I don’t mean to be so blunt, but I can’t think of another way to say it right now.

  • Do we care about one another…really?
  • Has capitalism gone astray?
  • Have our hearts, our thinking, and/or our mindsets gone astray?
  • Do the products we create help or hurt others? It seems like too many times our perspective is, “We will sell whatever they will buy, regardless of its impact on others — as long as it makes us money and gives us the standard of living that we want.” Perhaps we could poll some former executives from Philip Morris on this topic.
  • Or we will develop this new technology because we can develop this new technology. Who gives a rat’s tail about the ramifications of it?

 

Meet CoCounsel — “the world’s first AI legal assistant” — from casetext.com

Excerpt:

As we shared in our official press release, we’ve been collaborating with OpenAI to build CoCounsel on their latest, most advanced large language model. It was a natural fit between our two teams. OpenAI, the world leader in generative AI, selected Casetext to create a product powered by its technology that was suitable for professional use by lawyers. Our experience leading legal tech since 2013 and applying large language models to the law for over five years made us an ideal choice.

Meet CoCounsel -- the world's first AI legal assistant -- from casetext

From DSC:
I look forward to seeing more vendors and products getting into the legaltech space — ones that use AI and other technologies to make significant progress on the access to justice issues that we have here in the United States.

 
© 2022 | Daniel Christian