Microsoft has launched a GPT-4 enhanced Edge browser.
By integrating OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology with Microsoft Edge, you can now use ChatGPT as a copilot in your Bing browser. This delivers superior search results, generates content, and can even transform your copywriting skills (read on to find out how).
Benefits mentioned include: Better Search, Complete Answers, and Creative Spark.
The new interactive chat feature means you can get the complete answer you are looking for by refining your search by asking for more details, clarity, and ideas.
From DSC: I have to say that since the late 90’s, I haven’t been a big fan of web browsers from Microsoft. (I don’t like how Microsoft unfairly buried Netscape Navigator and the folks who had out-innovated them during that time.) As such, I don’t use Edge so I can’t fully comment on the above article.
But I do have to say that this is the type of thing that may make me reevaluate my stance regarding Microsoft’s browsers. Integrating GPT-4 into their search/chat functionalities seems like it would be a very solid, strategic move — at least as of late April 2023.
Speaking of new items coming from Microsoft, also see:
[On 4/27/23], Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features.
Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.
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Designer will remain free during the preview period, Microsoft says — it’s available via the Designer website and in Microsoft’s Edge browser through the sidebar. Once the Designer app is generally available, it’ll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and have “some” functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn’t elaborate.
A few current categories of AI in Edtech particularly jump out:
Teacher Productivity and Joy: Tools to make educators’ lives easier (and more fun?) by removing some of the more rote tasks of teaching, like lesson planning (we counted at least 8 different tools for lesson planning), resource curation and data collection.
Personalization and Learning Delivery: Tools to tailor instruction to the particular interests, learning preferences and preferred media consumption of students. This includes tools that convert text to video, video to text, text to comic books, Youtube to notes, and many more.
Study and Course Creation Tools: Tools for learners to automatically make quizzes, flashcards, notes or summaries of material, or even to automatically create full courses from a search term.
AI Tutors, Chatbots and Teachers: There will be no shortage of conversational AI “copilots” (which may take many guises) to support students in almost any learning context. Many Edtech companies launched their own during the conference. Possible differentiators here could be personality, safety, privacy, access to a proprietary or specific data set, or bots built on proprietary LLMs.
Simplifying Complex Processes: One of the most inspiring conversations of the conference for me was with Tiffany Green, founder of Uprooted Academy, about how AI can and should be used to remove bureaucratic barriers to college for underrepresented students (for example, used to autofill FAFSA forms, College Applications, to search for schools and access materials, etc). This is not the only complex bureaucratic process in education.
Educational LLMs: The race is on to create usable large language models for education that are safe, private, appropriate and classroom-ready. Merlyn Mind is working on this, and companies that make LLMs are sprouting up in other sectors…
This week I spent a few days at the ASU/GSV conference and ran into 7,000 educators, entrepreneurs, and corporate training people who had gone CRAZY for AI.
No, I’m not kidding. This community, which makes up people like training managers, community college leaders, educators, and policymakers is absolutely freaked out about ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and all sorts of issues with AI. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of this. But the frenzy is unprecedented: this is bigger than the excitement at the launch of the i-Phone.
Second, the L&D market is about to get disrupted like never before. I had two interactive sessions with about 200 L&D leaders and I essentially heard the same thing over and over. What is going to happen to our jobs when these Generative AI tools start automatically building content, assessments, teaching guides, rubrics, videos, and simulations in seconds?
The answer is pretty clear: you’re going to get disrupted. I’m not saying that L&D teams need to worry about their careers, but it’s very clear to me they’re going to have to swim upstream in a big hurry. As with all new technologies, it’s time for learning leaders to get to know these tools, understand how they work, and start to experiment with them as fast as you can.
Speaking of the ASU+GSV Summit, see this posting from Michael Moe:
Last week, the 14th annual ASU+GSV Summit hosted over 7,000 leaders from 70+ companies well as over 900 of the world’s most innovative EdTech companies. Below are some of our favorite speeches from this year’s Summit…
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard—AI is infiltrating the lives of billions.
The 1% who understand it will run the world.
Here’s a list of key terms to jumpstart your learning:
Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.The current AI systems are already very good at figuring out your intent, and they are getting better. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer. In fact, it already isn’t in GPT-4 and Bing. If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel, what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far.
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The best way to use AI systems is not to craft the perfect prompt, but rather to use it interactively. Try asking for something. Then ask the AI to modify or adjust its output. Work with the AI, rather than trying to issue a single command that does everything you want. The more you experiment, the better off you are. Just use the AI a lot, and it will make a big difference – a lesson my class learned as they worked with the AI to create essays.
From DSC: Agreed –> “Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.” The User Interfaces that are/will be appearing will help greatly in this regard.
From DSC: Bizarre…at least for me in late April of 2023:
FaceTiming live with AI… This app came across the @ElunaAI Discord and I was very impressed with its responsiveness, natural expression and language, etc…
Feels like the beginning of another massive wave in consumer AI products.
The rise of AI-generated music has ignited legal and ethical debates, with record labels invoking copyright law to remove AI-generated songs from platforms like YouTube.
Tech companies like Google face a conundrum: should they take down AI-generated content, and if so, on what grounds?
Some artists, like Grimes, are embracing the change, proposing new revenue-sharing models and utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts for royalties.
The future of AI-generated music presents both challenges and opportunities, with the potential to create new platforms and genres, democratize the industry, and redefine artist compensation.
The Need for AI PD — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Educators need training on how to effectively incorporate artificial intelligence into their teaching practice, says Lance Key, an award-winning educator.
“School never was fun for me,” he says, hoping that as an educator he could change that with his students. “I wanted to make learning fun.” This ‘learning should be fun’ philosophy is at the heart of the approach he advises educators take when it comes to AI.
At its 11th annual conference in 2023, educational company Coursera announced it is adding ChatGPT-powered interactive ed tech tools to its learning platform, including a generative AI coach for students and an AI course-building tool for teachers. It will also add machine learning-powered translation, expanded VR immersive learning experiences, and more.
Coursera Coach will give learners a ChatGPT virtual coach to answer questions, give feedback, summarize video lectures and other materials, give career advice, and prepare them for job interviews. This feature will be available in the coming months.
From DSC: Yes…it will be very interesting to see how tools and platforms interact from this time forth. The term “integration” will take a massive step forward, at least in my mind.
Technology has become the main driver for increasing access to justice, and there are huge opportunities for legal service providers to leverage both existing and emerging tech to reach new clients. Dennis and Tom welcome Natalie Knowlton to discuss the current state of legal services, the justice gap, and ways technology is helping attorneys provide better and more affordable services to consumers. As always, stay tuned for the parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can use the second the podcast ends.
The survey, conducted in late-March by the Thomson Reuters Institute, gathered insight from more than 440 respondent lawyers at large and midsize law firms in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. The survey forms the basis of a new report, ChatGPT & Generative AI within Law Firms, which takes a deep look at the evolving attitudes towards generative AI and ChatGPT within law firms, measuring awareness and adoption of the technology as well as lawyers’ views on its potential risks.
The report also reveals several key findings that deserve special attention from law firm leaders and other legal professionals as ChatGPT and generative AI evolve from concept to reality for the vast majority of the legal industry participants. These findings include:
There are lots of tropes related to lawyers and law firms that frequently show up in works of fiction. The thing is, those tropes are tropes because they’re sort of old; they’ve been around for a long time. Now, however, modern technology can solve a heck of a lot of those issues. So, for this edition of the “Reference Manual of Lists,” we’re going to relay a trope, offer an example, and talk about how legal tech actually fixes the problem today.
If you made it this far, you should by now understand that ChatGPT is not by itself a search engine, nor an eDiscovery data reviewer, a translator, knowledge base, or tool for legal analytics. But it can contribute to these functionalities.
April 20, 2023 – Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), a common technique parties can use to settle disputes with the help of a third party, offers several unique benefits over traditional litigation. It is typically more cost-effective, confidential and generally a preferred method to resolving disputes. As a result, counsel and their clients often view ADR as a no-brainer. But the once simple decision to engage in ADR is now complicated by whether to proceed in-person, virtually or with a hybrid approach.
The emergence of ChatGPT comes with tremendous promise of increased automation and efficiency. But at what cost? In this blog post, we’ll explore the potential ethical time bomb of using ChatGPT and examine the responsibility of lawyers in the age of AI.
From DSC: I haven’t used this app or their website (which seems to have a lot of broken links!). But my question/reflection is…is this a piece of legal education’s future? Or even larger than that? I can easily see a LegalGPT type of service out there for ***society at large.***
From DSC: I don’t know anything about Jack Harlow. I just liked the idea of the NBA using AI to market the playoffs! I find this piece to be clever and creative. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the future.
Over the past few months, the field of artificial intelligence has seen rapid growth, with wave after wave of new models like Dall-E and GPT-4 emerging one after another. Every week brings the promise of new and exciting models, products, and tools. It’s easy to get swept up in the waves of hype, but these shiny capabilities come at a real cost to society and the planet.
Downsides include the environmental toll of mining rare minerals, the human costs of the labor-intensive process of data annotation, and the escalating financial investment required to train AI models as they incorporate more parameters.
Let’s look at the innovations that have fueled recent generations of these models—and raised their associated costs.
Also relevant/see:
ChatGPT is Thirsty: a mini exec briefing — from BrainyActs #040 | ChatGPT’s Thirst Problem Between the growing number of data centers + the exponential growth in consumer-grade Generative AI tools, water is becoming a scarce resource.
Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.
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A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
The bottom line: Google is replacing the old-school method of displaying 10 results per page with an intelligent chatbot that provides instant answers.
A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers, Again — from nytimes.com by Steve Lohr (behind paywall) Previous advances in A.I. inspired predictions that the law was the lucrative profession most likely to suffer job losses. It didn’t happen. Is this time different?
Excerpt:
But unless the past isn’t a guide, the impact of the new technology is more likely to be a steadily rising tide than a sudden tidal wave. New A.I. technology will change the practice of law, and some jobs will be eliminated, but it also promises to make lawyers and paralegals more productive, and to create new roles. That is what happened after the introduction of other work-altering technologies like the personal computer and the internet.
One new study, by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, concluded that the industry most exposed to the new A.I. was “legal services.” Another research report, by economists at Goldman Sachs, estimated that 44 percent of legal work could be automated. Only the work of office and administrative support jobs, at 46 percent, was higher.
Lawyers are only one occupation in the path of A.I. progress. A study by researchers at OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and the University of Pennsylvania found that about 80 percent of American workers would have at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by the latest A.I. software.
AI Tools for Lawyers: A Practical Guide is now “highly recommended” by @lsolum. It provides practical, & specific advice about how to use tools like ChatGPT to improve efficiency & effectiveness of various legal tasks. Download it now! https://t.co/gtbzB7Xvfg
Here’s why Karpathy recently said “AutoGPT is the next frontier of prompt engineering”
AutoGPT is the equivalent of giving GPT-based models a memory and a body. You can now give a task to an AI agent and have it autonomously come up… pic.twitter.com/mYIJm2IEZy
AutoGPT has been making waves on the internet recently, trending on both GitHub and Twitter. If you thought ChatGPT was crazy, AutoGPT is about to blow your mind.
AutoGPT creates AI “agents” that operate automatically on their own and complete tasks for you. In case you’ve missed our previous issues covering it, here’s a quick rundown:
It’s open-sourced [code]
It works by chaining together LLM “thoughts”
It has internet access, long-term and short-term memory, access to popular websites, and file storage
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From DSC: I want to highlight that paper from Stanford, as I’ve seen it cited several times recently:.
From DSC: And for a rather fun idea/application of these emerging technologies, see:
Quick Prompt: Kitchen Design — from linusekenstam.substack.com by Linus Ekenstam Midjourney Prompt. Create elegant kitchen photos using this starting prompt. Make it your own, experiment, add, remove and tinker to create new ideas.
…which made me wonder how we might use these techs in the development of new learning spaces (or in renovating current learning spaces).
From DSC: On a much different — but still potential — note, also see:
Many experts in A.I. and computer science say the technology is likely a watershed moment for human society. But 36% don’t mean that as a positive, warning that decisions made by A.I. could lead to “nuclear-level catastrophe,” according to researchers surveyed in an annual report on the technology by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered A.I., published earlier this month.
AutoGPTs are improving at a blazingly fast speed and could soon transform the face of business.
Imagine introducing high-quality AI tutors into the flipped classroom model. These AI-powered systems have the potential to significantly enhance the learning experience for students and make flipped classrooms even more effective. They provide personalized learning, where AI tutors can tailor instruction to each student’s unique needs while continually adjusting content based on performance. This means that students can engage with the content at home more effectively, ensuring they come to class better prepared and ready to dive into hands-on activities or discussions.
With AI tutors taking care of some of the content delivery outside of class, teachers can devote more time to fostering meaningful interactions with their students during class. They can also use insights from the AI tutors to identify areas where students might need extra support or guidance, enabling them to provide more personalized and effective instruction. And with AI assistance, they can design better active learning opportunities in class to make sure learnings stick.
Also relevant/see:
ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it — from technologyreview.com by Will Douglas Heaven The narrative around cheating students doesn’t tell the whole story. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.
Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.
What the Past Can Teach Us About the Future of AI and Education — from campustechnology.com by Dr. David Wiley Current attitudes toward generative AI hearken back to early skepticism about the impact of the internet on education. Both then and now, technology has created challenges but also opportunities that can’t be ignored.
Last week I received a text message from a friend to check out a March 29th Campus Technology article about French AI startup, Nolej. Nolej (pronounced “Knowledge”) has developed an OpenAI-based instructional content generator for educators called NolejAI.
Access to NolejAI is through a browser. Users can upload video, audio, text documents, or a website url. NolejAI will generate an interactive micro-learning package which is a standalone digital lesson including content transcript, summaries, a glossary of terms, flashcards, and quizzes. All the lesson materials generated is based upon the uploaded materials.
From DSC: I wonder if this will turn out to be the case:
I am sure it’s only a matter of time before NolejAI or another product becomes capable of generating a standard three credit hour college course. Whether that is six months or two years, it’s likely sooner than we think.
From DSC: Before we get to Scott Belsky’s article, here’s an interesting/related item from Tobi Lutke:
I just clued in how insane text2vid will get soon. As crazy as this sounds, we will be able to generate movies from just minor prompts and the path there is pretty clear.
Recent advances in technology will stir shake the pot of culture and our day-to-day experiences. Examples? A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge, online social dynamics will become “hybrid experiences” where AI personas are equal players, and we will sync ourselves with applications as opposed to using applications.
A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge as the world’s video archives – as well as actors’ bodies and voices – will be used to train models. Expect sequels made without actor participation, a new era of ai-outfitted creative economy participants, a deluge of imaginative media that would have been cost prohibitive, and copyright wars and legislation.
Unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, some amazing stuff, and a legal dumpster fire: Now lets shift beyond Hollywood to the fast-growing long tail of prosumer-made entertainment. This is where entirely new genres of entertainment will emerge including the unauthorized sequels and spinoffs that I expect we will start seeing.
This is how I viewed a fascinating article about the so-called #AICinema movement. Benj Edwards describes this nascent current and interviews one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland. It’s a great example of people creating small stories using tech – in this case, generative AI, specifically the image creator Midjourney.
From DSC: How will text-to-video impact the Learning and Development world? Teaching and learning? Those people communicating within communities of practice? Those creating presentations and/or offering webinars?
