A while back, I wrote about some of my thoughts on generative AI around the copyright issues. Not much has changed since then, but a new article (Academic authors ‘shocked’ after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI) is definitely stirring up all sorts of concerns by academic authors. The basics of that article are that Taylor & Francis sold access to authors’ research to Microsoft for AI development without informing the authors, sparking significant concern among academics and the Society of Authors about transparency, consent, and the implications for authors’ rights and future earnings.
The stir can be seen as both valid and redundant. Two folks’ points stick out to me in this regard.
This episode of the Next Big Idea podcast, host Rufus Griscom and Bill Gates are joined by Andy Sack and Adam Brotman, co-authors of an exciting new book called “AI First.” Together, they consider AI’s impact on healthcare, education, productivity, and business. They dig into the technology’s risks. And they explore its potential to cure diseases, enhance creativity, and usher in a world of abundance.
Key moments:
00:05 Bill Gates discusses AI’s transformative potential in revolutionizing technology.
02:21 Superintelligence is inevitable and marks a significant advancement in AI technology.
09:23 Future AI may integrate deeply as cognitive assistants in personal and professional life.
14:04 AI’s metacognitive advancements could revolutionize problem-solving capabilities.
21:13 AI’s next frontier lies in developing human-like metacognition for sophisticated problem-solving.
27:59 AI advancements empower both good and malicious intents, posing new security challenges.
28:57 Rapid AI development raises questions about controlling its global application.
33:31 Productivity enhancements from AI can significantly improve efficiency across industries.
35:49 AI’s future applications in consumer and industrial sectors are subjects of ongoing experimentation.
46:10 AI democratization could level the economic playing field, enhancing service quality and reducing costs.
51:46 AI plays a role in mitigating misinformation and bridging societal divides through enhanced understanding.
The team has summarized their primary contributions as follows.
The team has offered the first instance of a simple, scalable oversight technique that greatly assists humans in more thoroughly detecting problems in real-world RLHF data.
Within the ChatGPT and CriticGPT training pools, the team has discovered that critiques produced by CriticGPT catch more inserted bugs and are preferred above those written by human contractors.
Compared to human contractors working alone, this research indicates that teams consisting of critic models and human contractors generate more thorough criticisms. When compared to reviews generated exclusively by models, this partnership lowers the incidence of hallucinations.
This study provides Force Sampling Beam Search (FSBS), an inference-time sampling and scoring technique. This strategy well balances the trade-off between minimizing bogus concerns and discovering genuine faults in LLM-generated critiques.
a16z-backed Character.AI said today that it is now allowing users to talk to AI characters over calls. The feature currently supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
The startup tested the calling feature ahead of today’s public launch. During that time, it said that more than 3 million users had made over 20 million calls. The company also noted that calls with AI characters can be useful for practicing language skills, giving mock interviews, or adding them to the gameplay of role-playing games.
Google Translate can come in handy when you’re traveling or communicating with someone who speaks another language, and thanks to a new update, you can now connect with some 614 million more people. Google is adding 110 new languages to its Translate tool using its AI PaLM 2 large language model (LLM), which brings the total of supported languages to nearly 250. This follows the 24 languages added in 2022, including Indigenous languages of the Americas as well as those spoken across Africa and central Asia.
Gen-3 Alpha Text to Video is now available to everyone.
A new frontier for high-fidelity, fast and controllable video generation.
Meanwhile, a separate survey of faculty released Thursday by Ithaka S+R, a higher education consulting firm, showcased that faculty—while increasingly familiar with AI—often do not know how to use it in classrooms. Two out of five faculty members are familiar with AI, the Ithaka report found, but only 14 percent said they are confident in their ability to use AI in their teaching. Just slightly more (18 percent) said they understand the teaching implications of generative AI.
“Serious concerns about academic integrity, ethics, accessibility, and educational effectiveness are contributing to this uncertainty and hostility,” the Ithaka report said.
The diverging views about AI are causing friction. Nearly a third of students said they have been warned to not use generative AI by professors, and more than half (59 percent) are concerned they will be accused of cheating with generative AI, according to the Pearson report, which was conducted with Morning Consult and surveyed 800 students.
What teachers want from AI — from hechingerreport.org by Javeria Salman When teachers designed their own AI tools, they built math assistants, tools for improving student writing, and more
An AI chatbot that walks students through how to solve math problems. An AI instructional coach designed to help English teachers create lesson plans and project ideas. An AI tutor that helps middle and high schoolers become better writers.
These aren’t tools created by education technology companies. They were designed by teachers tasked with using AI to solve a problem their students were experiencing.
Over five weeks this spring, about 300 people – teachers, school and district leaders, higher ed faculty, education consultants and AI researchers – came together to learn how to use AI and develop their own basic AI tools and resources. The professional development opportunity was designed by technology nonprofit Playlab.ai and faculty at the Relay Graduate School of Education.
Next-Gen Classroom Observations, Powered by AI — from educationnext.org by Michael J. Petrilli The use of video recordings in classrooms to improve teacher performance is nothing new. But the advent of artificial intelligence could add a helpful evaluative tool for teachers, measuring instructional practice relative to common professional goals with chatbot feedback.
Multiple companies are pairing AI with inexpensive, ubiquitous video technology to provide feedback to educators through asynchronous, offsite observation. It’s an appealing idea, especially given the promise and popularity of instructional coaching, as well as the challenge of scaling it effectively (see “Taking Teacher Coaching To Scale,” research, Fall 2018).
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Enter AI. Edthena is now offering an “AI Coach” chatbot that offers teachers specific prompts as they privately watch recordings of their lessons. The chatbot is designed to help teachers view their practice relative to common professional goals and to develop action plans to improve.
To be sure, an AI coach is no replacement for human coaching.
We need to shift our thinking about GenAI tutors serving only as personal learning tools. The above activities illustrate how these tools can be integrated into contemporary classroom instruction. The activities should not be seen as prescriptive but merely suggestive of how GenAI can be used to promote social learning. Although I specifically mention only one online activity (“Blended Learning”), all can be adapted to work well in online or blended classes to promote social interaction.
Stealth AI — from higherai.substack.com by Jason Gulya (a Professor of English at Berkeley College) talks to Zack Kinzler What happens when students use AI all the time, but aren’t allowed to talk about it?
In many ways, this comes back to one of my general rules: You cannot ban AI in the classroom. You can only issue a gag rule.
And if you do issue a gag rule, then it deprives students of the space they often need to make heads and tails of this technology.
We need to listen to actual students talking about actual uses, and reflecting on their actual feelings. No more abstraction.
In this conversation, Jason Gulya (a Professor of English at Berkeley College) talks to Zack Kinzler about what students are saying about Artificial Intelligence and education.
Welcome to our monthly update for Teams for Education and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! We’re thrilled to share over 20 updates and resources and show them in action next week at ISTELive 24 in Denver, Colorado, US.
… Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Educator features Guided Content Creation
Coming soon to Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a guided content generation experience to help educators get started with creating materials like assignments, lesson plans, lecture slides, and more. The content will be created based on the educator’s requirements with easy ways to customize the content to their exact needs. Standards alignment and creation Quiz generation through Copilot in Forms Suggested AI Feedback for Educators Teaching extension
To better support educators with their daily tasks, we’ll be launching a built-in Teaching extension to help guide them through relevant activities and provide contextual, educator-based support in Copilot. Education data integration
Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Student features Interactive practice experiences
Flashcards activity
Guided chat activity Learning extension in Copilot for Microsoft 365
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New AI tools for Google Workspace for Education — from blog.google by Akshay Kirtikar and Brian Hendricks We’re bringing Gemini to teen students using their school accounts to help them learn responsibly and confidently in an AI-first future, and empowering educators with new tools to help create great learning experiences.
And to understand the value of AI, they need to do R&D. Since AI doesn’t work like traditional software, but more like a person (even though it isn’t one), there is no reason to suspect that the IT department has the best AI prompters, nor that it has any particular insight into the best uses of AI inside an organization. IT certainly plays a role, but the actual use cases will come from workers and managers who find opportunities to use AI to help them with their job. In fact, for large companies, the source of any real advantage in AI will come from the expertise of their employees, which is needed to unlock the expertise latent in AI.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, is starting a new AI company focused on safety. In a post on Wednesday, Sutskever revealed Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a startup with “one goal and one product:” creating a safe and powerful AI system.
Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence — from bloomberg.com by Ashlee Vance (behind a paywall) OpenAI’s co-founder discloses his plans to continue his work at a new research lab focused on artificial general intelligence.
Ilya Sutskever is kind of a big deal in AI, to put it lightly.
Part of OpenAI’s founding team, Ilya was Chief Data Scientist (read: genius) before being part of the coup that fired Sam Altman.
… Yesterday, Ilya announced that he’s forming a new initiative called Safe Superintelligence.
If AGI = AI that can perform a wide range of tasks at our level, then Superintelligence = an even more advanced AI that surpasses human capabilities in all areas.
As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.
Federal officials, AI model operators and cybersecurity companies ran the first joint simulation of a cyberattack involving a critical AI system last week.
Why it matters: Responding to a cyberattack on an AI-enabled system will require a different playbook than the typical hack, participants told Axios.
The big picture: Both Washington and Silicon Valley are attempting to get ahead of the unique cyber threats facing AI companies before they become more prominent.
Immediately after we saw Sora-like videos from KLING, Luma AI’s Dream Machine video results overshadowed them.
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Dream Machine is a next-generation AI video model that creates high-quality, realistic shots from text instructions and images.
Introducing Gen-3 Alpha — from runwayml.com by Anastasis Germanidis A new frontier for high-fidelity, controllable video generation.
AI-Generated Movies Are Around the Corner — from news.theaiexchange.com by The AI Exchange The future of AI in filmmaking; participate in our AI for Agencies survey
AI-Generated Feature Films Are Around the Corner.
We predict feature-film length AI-generated films are coming by the end of 2025, if not sooner.
Introducing Gen-3 Alpha: Runway’s new base model for video generation.
Gen-3 Alpha can create highly detailed videos with complex scene changes, a wide range of cinematic choices, and detailed art directions.https://t.co/YQNE3eqoWf
Introducing GEN-3 Alpha – The first of a series of new models built by creatives for creatives. Video generated with @runwayml‘s new Text-2-Video model.
Learning personalisation. LinkedIn continues to be bullish on its video-based learning platform, and it appears to have found a strong current among users who need to skill up in AI. Cohen said that traffic for AI-related courses — which include modules on technical skills as well as non-technical ones such as basic introductions to generative AI — has increased by 160% over last year.
You can be sure that LinkedIn is pushing its search algorithms to tap into the interest, but it’s also boosting its content with AI in another way.
For Premium subscribers, it is piloting what it describes as “expert advice, powered by AI.” Tapping into expertise from well-known instructors such as Alicia Reece, Anil Gupta, Dr. Gemma Leigh Roberts and Lisa Gates, LinkedIn says its AI-powered coaches will deliver responses personalized to users, as a “starting point.”
These will, in turn, also appear as personalized coaches that a user can tap while watching a LinkedIn Learning course.
Personalized learning for everyone: Whether you’re looking to change or not, the skills required in the workplace are expected to change by 68% by 2030.
Expert advice, powered by AI: We’re beginning to pilot the ability to get personalized practical advice instantly from industry leading business leaders and coaches on LinkedIn Learning, all powered by AI. The responses you’ll receive are trained by experts and represent a blend of insights that are personalized to each learner’s unique needs. While human professional coaches remain invaluable, these tools provide a great starting point.
Personalized coaching, powered by AI, when watching a LinkedIn course: As learners —including all Premium subscribers — watch our new courses, they can now simply ask for summaries of content, clarify certain topics, or get examples and other real-time insights, e.g. “Can you simplify this concept?” or “How does this apply to me?”
Remember Microsoft’s shiny new AI tool, “Recall”? It’s like your personal time machine, answering questions about your browsing history and laptop activity by taking screenshots every 5 seconds. Sounds cool, right? Well, it gets problematic.
What’s going on here?
Security researchers have found a potential privacy nightmare lurking within this seemingly convenient tool.
What does this mean?
Recall stores all those screenshots in an unencrypted database on your laptop. This means anyone with access to your device could potentially see everything you’ve been doing. Cybersecurity experts are already comparing it to spyware, and one ethical hacker even built a tool called “TotalRecall” (yes, like the movie) that can pull all the information Recall saves. Yikes.
Microsoft is partnering with Khan Academy in a multifaceted deal to demonstrate how AI can transform the way we learn. The cornerstone of today’s announcement centers on Khan Academy’s Khanmigo AI agent. Microsoft says it will migrate the bot to its Azure OpenAI Service, enabling the nonprofit educational organization to provide all U.S. K-12 educators free access to Khanmigo.
In addition, Microsoft plans to use its Phi-3 model to help Khan Academy improve math tutoring and collaborate to generate more high-quality learning content while making more courses available within Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Teams for Education.
One in three American teachers have used artificial intelligence tools in their teaching at least once, with English and social studies teachers leading the way, according to a RAND Corporation survey released last month. While the new technology isn’t yet transforming how kids learn, both teachers and district leaders expect that it will become an increasingly common feature of school life.
When ChatGPT emerged a year and half ago, many professors immediately worried that their students would use it as a substitute for doing their own written assignments — that they’d click a button on a chatbot instead of doing the thinking involved in responding to an essay prompt themselves.
But two English professors at Carnegie Mellon University had a different first reaction: They saw in this new technology a way to show students how to improve their writing skills.
“They start really polishing way too early,” Kaufer says. “And so what we’re trying to do is with AI, now you have a tool to rapidly prototype your language when you are prototyping the quality of your thinking.”
He says the concept is based on writing research from the 1980s that shows that experienced writers spend about 80 percent of their early writing time thinking about whole-text plans and organization and not about sentences.
On Building AI Models for Education — from aieducation.substack.com by Claire Zau Google’s LearnLM, Khan Academy/MSFT’s Phi-3 Models, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu
This piece primarily breaks down how Google’s LearnLM was built, and takes a quick look at Microsoft/Khan Academy’s Phi-3 and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu as alternative approaches to building an “education model” (not necessarily a new model in the latter case, but we’ll explain). Thanks to the public release of their 86-page research paper, we have the most comprehensive view into LearnLM. Our understanding of Microsoft/Khan Academy small language models and ChatGPT Edu is limited to the information provided through announcements, leaving us with less “under the hood” visibility into their development.
Answer AI is among a handful of popular apps that are leveraging the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models to help students with everything from writing history papers to solving physics problems. Of the top 20 education apps in the U.S. App Store, five are AI agents that help students with their school assignments, including Answer AI, according to data from Data.ai on May 21.
If your school (district) or university has not yet made significant efforts to think about how you will prepare your students for a World of AI, I suggest the following steps:
July 24 – Administrator PD & AI Guidance In July, administrators should receive professional development on AI, if they haven’t already. This should include…
August 24 –Professional Development for Teachers and Staff…
Fall 24 — Parents; Co-curricular; Classroom experiments…
December 24 — Revision to Policy…
New ChatGPT Version Aiming at Higher Ed — from insidehighered.com by Lauren Coffey ChatGPT Edu, emerging after initial partnerships with several universities, is prompting both cautious optimism and worries.
OpenAI unveiled a new version of ChatGPT focused on universities on Thursday, building on work with a handful of higher education institutions that partnered with the tech giant.
The ChatGPT Edu product, expected to start rolling out this summer, is a platform for institutions intended to give students free access. OpenAI said the artificial intelligence (AI) toolset could be used for an array of education applications, including tutoring, writing grant applications and reviewing résumés.
[On 5/21/24] at Microsoft Build, Microsoft and Khan Academy announced a new partnership that aims to bring these time-saving and lesson-enhancing AI tools to millions of educators. By donating access to Azure AI-optimized infrastructure, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to offer all K-12 educators in the U.S. free access to the pilot of Khanmigo for Teachers, which will now be powered by Azure OpenAI Service.
The two companies will also collaborate to explore opportunities to improve AI tools for math tutoring in an affordable, scalable and adaptable way with a new version of Phi-3, a family of small language models (SLMs) developed by Microsoft.
Khan Academy’s AI assistant, Khanmigo, has earned praise for helping students to understand and practice everything from math to English, but it can also help teachers devise lesson plans, formulate questions about assigned readings, and even generate reading passages appropriate for students at different levels. More than just a chatbot, the software offers specific AI-powered tools for generating quizzes and assignment instructions, drafting lesson plans, and formulating letters of recommendation.
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Having a virtual teaching assistant is especially valuable in light of recent research from the RAND Corporation that found teachers work longer hours than most working adults, which includes administrative and prep work outside the classroom.
Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC. Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English.
From DSC: As a first off-the-hip look, Recall could be fraught with possible security/privacy-related issues. But what do I know? The Neuron states “Microsoft assures that everything Recall sees remains private.” Ok…
From The Rundown AI concerning the above announcements:
The details:
A new system enables Copilot+ PCs to run AI workloads up to 20x faster and 100x more efficiently than traditional PCs.
Windows 11 has been rearchitected specifically for AI, integrating the Copilot assistant directly into the OS.
New AI experiences include a new feature called Recall, which allows users to search for anything they’ve seen on their screen with natural language.
Copilot’s new screen-sharing feature allows AI to watch, hear, and understand what a user is doing on their computer and answer questions in real-time.
Copilot+ PCs will start at $999, and ship with OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o models.
Why it matters: Tony Stark’s all-powerful JARVIS AI assistant is getting closer to reality every day. Once Copilot, ChatGPT, Project Astra, or anyone else can not only respond but start executing tasks autonomously, things will start getting really exciting — and likely initiate a whole new era of tech work.
Microsoft’s new ChatGPT competitor… — from The Rundown AI
The Rundown: Microsoft is reportedly developing a massive 500B parameter in-house LLM called MAI-1, aiming to compete with top AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Hampton runs a private community for high-growth tech founders and CEOs. We asked our community of founders and owners how AI has impacted their business and what tools they use
Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside:
The budgets they set aside for AI research and development
The most common (and obscure) tools founders are using
Measurable business impacts founders have seen through using AI
Where they are purposefully not using AI and much more
To help leaders and organizations overcome AI inertia, Microsoft and LinkedIn looked at how AI will reshape work and the labor market broadly, surveying 31,000 people across 31 countries, identifying labor and hiring trends from LinkedIn, and analyzing trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals as well as research with Fortune 500 customers. The data points to insights every leader and professional needs to know—and actions they can take—when it comes to AI’s implications for work.
The theme of the day was Human Connection V Innovative Technology. I see this a lot at conferences, setting up the human connection (social) against the machine (AI). I think this is ALL wrong. It is, and has always been a dialectic, human connection (social) PLUS the machine. Everyone had a smartphone, most use it for work, comms and social media. The binary between human and tech has long disappeared.
I recently created an AI version of myself—REID AI—and recorded a Q&A to see how this digital twin might challenge me in new ways. The video avatar is generated by Hour One, its voice was created by Eleven Labs, and its persona—the way that REID AI formulates responses—is generated from a custom chatbot built on GPT-4 that was trained on my books, speeches, podcasts and other content that I’ve produced over the last few decades. I decided to interview it to test its capability and how closely its responses match—and test—my thinking. Then, REID AI asked me some questions on AI and technology. I thought I would hate this, but I’ve actually ended up finding the whole experience interesting and thought-provoking.
From DSC: This ability to ask questions of a digital twin is very interesting when you think about it in terms of “interviewing” a historical figure. I believe character.ai provides this kind of thing, but I haven’t used it much.
AI Resources and Teaching | Kent State University offers valuable resources for educators interested in incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices. The university recognizes that the rapid emergence of AI tools presents both challenges and opportunities in higher education.
The AI Resources and Teaching page provides educators with information and guidance on various AI tools and their responsible use within and beyond the classroom. The page covers different areas of AI application, including language generation, visuals, videos, music, information extraction, quantitative analysis, and AI syllabus language examples.
For all its jaw-dropping power, Watson the computer overlord was a weak teacher. It couldn’t engage or motivate kids, inspire them to reach new heights or even keep them focused on the material — all qualities of the best mentors.
It’s a finding with some resonance to our current moment of AI-inspired doomscrolling about the future of humanity in a world of ascendant machines. “There are some things AI is actually very good for,” Nitta said, “but it’s not great as a replacement for humans.”
His five-year journey to essentially a dead-end could also prove instructive as ChatGPT and other programs like it fuel a renewed, multimillion-dollar experiment to, in essence, prove him wrong.
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To be sure, AI can do sophisticated things such as generating quizzes from a class reading and editing student writing. But the idea that a machine or a chatbot can actually teach as a human can, he said, represents “a profound misunderstanding of what AI is actually capable of.”
Nitta, who still holds deep respect for the Watson lab, admits, “We missed something important. At the heart of education, at the heart of any learning, is engagement. And that’s kind of the Holy Grail.”
From DSC: This is why the vision that I’ve been tracking and working on has always said that HUMAN BEINGS will be necessary — they are key to realizing this vision. Along these lines, here’s a relevant quote:
Another crucial component of a new learning theory for the age of AI would be the cultivation of “blended intelligence.” This concept recognizes that the future of learning and work will involve the seamless integration of human and machine capabilities, and that learners must develop the skills and strategies needed to effectively collaborate with AI systems. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to human intelligence, a blended intelligence approach seeks to harness the complementary strengths of humans and machines, creating a symbiotic relationship that enhances the potential of both.
Per Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin, Head of the National Institute on AI in Society at California State University Sacramento.
Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
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A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.
The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I.— from newyorker.com by Elizabeth Kolbert How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?
“There’s a fundamental mismatch between this technology and environmental sustainability,” de Vries said. Recently, the world’s most prominent A.I. cheerleader, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, voiced similar concerns, albeit with a different spin. “I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Altman said at a public appearance in Davos. He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, “without a breakthrough.” He added, “We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”
A generative AI reset: Rewiring to turn potential into value in 2024 — from mckinsey.com by Eric Lamarre, Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, and Rodney Zemmel; via Philippa Hardman The generative AI payoff may only come when companies do deeper organizational surgery on their business.
Figure out where gen AI copilots can give you a real competitive advantage
Upskill the talent you have but be clear about the gen-AI-specific skills you need
Form a centralized team to establish standards that enable responsible scaling
Set up the technology architecture to scale
Ensure data quality and focus on unstructured data to fuel your models
Build trust and reusability to drive adoption and scale
Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase your query to a large language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results or sidestep protections. The Internet is replete with prompt-engineering guides, cheat sheets, and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM.
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However, new research suggests that prompt engineering is best done by the model itself, and not by a human engineer. This has cast doubt on prompt engineering’s future—and increased suspicions that a fair portion of prompt-engineering jobs may be a passing fad, at least as the field is currently imagined.
There is one very clear parallel between the digital spreadsheet and generative AI: both are computer apps that collapse time. A task that might have taken hours or days can suddenly be completed in seconds. So accept for a moment the premise that the digital spreadsheet has something to teach us about generative AI. What lessons should we absorb?
It’s that pace of change that gives me pause. Ethan Mollick, author of the forthcoming book Co-Intelligence, tells me “if progress on generative AI stops now, the spreadsheet is not a bad analogy”. We’d get some dramatic shifts in the workplace, a technology that broadly empowers workers and creates good new jobs, and everything would be fine. But is it going to stop any time soon? Mollick doubts that, and so do I.
Text to video via OpenAI’s Sora. (I had taken this screenshot on the 15th, but am posting it now.)
We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.
At the University of Pennsylvania, undergraduate students in its school of engineering will soon be able to study for a bachelor of science degree in artificial intelligence.
What can one do with an AI degree? The University of Pennsylvania says students will be able to apply the skills they learn in school to build responsible AI tools, develop materials for emerging chips and hardware, and create AI-driven breakthroughs in healthcare through new antibiotics, among other things.
Google on Monday announced plans to help train people in Europe with skills in artificial intelligence, the latest tech giant to invest in preparing workers and economies amid the disruption brought on by technologies they are racing to develop.
The acceleration of AI deployments has gotten so absurdly out of hand that a draft post I started a week ago about a new development is now out of date.
… The Pace is Out of Control
A mere week since Ultra 1.0’s announcement, Google has now introduced us to Ultra 1.5, a model they are clearly positioning to be the leader in the field. Here is the full technical report for Gemini Ultra 1.5, and what it can do is stunning.
[St. Louis, MO, February 14, 2024] – In a bold move that counters the conventions of more traditional schools, Maryville University has unveiled a substantial $21 million multi-year investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and cutting-edge technologies. This groundbreaking initiative is set to transform the higher education experience to be powered by the latest technology to support student success and a five-star experience for thousands of students both on-campus and online.
