“Who to follow in AI” in 2024? [Part I] — from ai-supremacy.com by Michael Spencer [some of posting is behind a paywall]
#1-20 [of 150] – I combed the internet, I found the best sources of AI insights, education and articles. LinkedIn | Newsletters | X | YouTube | Substack | Threads | Podcasts

Also see:

Along these lines, also see:


AI In Medicine: 3 Future Scenarios From Utopia To Dystopia — from medicalfuturist.com by Andrea Koncz
There’s a vast difference between baseless fantasizing and realistic forward planning. Structured methodologies help us learn how to “dream well”.

Key Takeaways

  • We’re often told that daydreaming and envisioning the future is a waste of time. But this notion is misguided.
  • We all instinctively plan for the future in small ways, like organizing a trip or preparing for a dinner party. This same principle can be applied to larger-scale issues, and smart planning does bring better results.
  • We show you a method that allows us to think “well” about the future on a larger scale so that it better meets our needs.

Adobe Unveils Powerful New Innovations in Illustrator and Photoshop Unlocking New Design Possibilities for Creative Pros — from news.adobe.com

  • Latest Illustrator and Photoshop releases accelerate creative workflows, save pros time and empower designers to realize their visions faster
  • New Firefly-enabled features like Generative Shape Fill in Illustrator along with the Dimension Tool, Mockup, Text to Pattern, the Contextual Taskbar and performance enhancement tools accelerate productivity and free up time so creative pros can dive deeper into the parts of their work they love
  • Photoshop introduces all-new Selection Brush Tool and the general availability of Generate Image, Adjustment Brush Tool and other workflow enhancements empowering creators to make complex edits and unique designs
    .


Nike is using AI to turn athletes’ dreams into shoes — from axios.com by Ina Fried

Zoom in: Nike used genAI for ideation, including using a variety of prompts to produce images with different textures, materials and color to kick off the design process.

What they’re saying: “It’s a new way for us to work,” Nike lead footwear designer Juliana Sagat told Axios during a media tour of the showcase on Tuesday.
.


AI meets ‘Do no harm’: Healthcare grapples with tech promises — from finance.yahoo.com by Maya Benjamin

Major companies are moving at high speed to capture the promises of artificial intelligence in healthcare while doctors and experts attempt to integrate the technology safely into patient care.

“Healthcare is probably the most impactful utility of generative AI that there will be,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at AI hardware giant Nvidia (NVDA), which has partnered with Roche’s Genentech (RHHBY) to enhance drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, among other investments in healthcare companies, declared at the company’s AI Summit in June.


Mistral reignites this week’s LLM rivalry with Large 2 (source) — from superhuman.ai

Today, we are announcing Mistral Large 2, the new generation of our flagship model. Compared to its predecessor, Mistral Large 2 is significantly more capable in code generation, mathematics, and reasoning. It also provides a much stronger multilingual support, and advanced function calling capabilities.


Meta releases the biggest and best open-source AI model yet — from theverge.com by Alex Heath
Llama 3.1 outperforms OpenAI and other rivals on certain benchmarks. Now, Mark Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant to surpass ChatGPT’s usage in the coming months.

Back in April, Meta teased that it was working on a first for the AI industry: an open-source model with performance that matched the best private models from companies like OpenAI.

Today, that model has arrived. Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT.


4 ways to boost ChatGPT — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan & The PyCoach
Simple tactics for getting useful responses

To help you make the most of ChatGPT, I’ve invited & edited today’s guest post from the author of a smart AI newsletter called The Artificial Corner. I appreciate how Frank Andrade pushes ChatGPT to produce better results with four simple, clever tactics. He offers practical examples to help us all use AI more effectively.

Frank Andrade: Most of us fail to make the most of ChatGPT.

  1. We omit examples in our prompts.
  2. We fail to assign roles to ChatGPT to guide its behavior.
  3. We let ChatGPT guess instead of providing it with clear guidance.

If you rely on vague prompts, learning how to create high-quality instructions will get you better results. It’s a skill often referred to as prompt engineering. Here are several techniques to get you to the next level.

 

How to use Perplexity in your daily workflow — from ai-supremacy.com by Michael Spencer and Alex McFarland
“I barely use Google anymore (for anything)” says today’s guest author.

Make Perplexity your go-to research companion with these strategies:

  • Morning briefings: Start your day by asking Perplexity for the latest news in your field. (I personally like to use Perplexity to curate the top AI news of the day to consider writing about for Unite AI and Techopedia.)
  • Fact-checking: Use it to quickly verify information before including it in your work.
  • Brainstorming: Generate ideas for projects or content by asking open-ended questions.
  • Learning new concepts: When you encounter an unfamiliar term or idea, turn to Perplexity for a quick, comprehensive explanation.
  • Writing assistance: Use it to find relevant statistics, examples, or counterarguments for your content.

From DSC:
So I used it to ask “What is Elon Musk’s Memphis Supercluster?” (which went online yesterday I believe) — which resulted in this reply:

Elon Musk’s Memphis Supercluster is a newly activated AI training cluster that is claimed to be the most powerful in the world. Here are the key details about this supercomputer:

1. Location: The supercluster is located in Memphis, Tennessee[1][2].

2. Hardware: It consists of 100,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia H100 GPUs connected through a single RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) fabric[1][3].

3. Purpose: The supercluster is designed for training large language models (LLMs) and other advanced AI technologies for Musk’s xAI company[1][2].

4. Activation: The Memphis Supercluster began training at approximately 4:20 AM local time on July 22, 2024[1][3].

5. Collaboration: The project is a result of collaboration between xAI, X (formerly Twitter), Nvidia, and other supporting companies[1][2].

6. Investment: With each H100 GPU estimated to cost between $30,000 to $40,000, the total investment in GPUs alone is estimated to be between $3 billion to $4 billion[5].

7. Goals: Musk claims that this supercluster will be used to develop “the world’s most powerful AI by every measure” by December 2024[1].

8. Comparison: The Memphis Supercluster’s 100,000 H100 GPUs significantly outclass other supercomputers in terms of GPU horsepower, such as Frontier (37,888 AMD GPUs) and Microsoft Eagle (14,400 Nvidia H100 GPUs)[3].

9. Infrastructure: The project required significant infrastructure development, including fiber optic networking[5].

While Musk’s claims about the supercluster’s capabilities are ambitious, it remains to be seen how it will perform in practice and whether it will meet the stated goals within the given timeframe[1].

Citations:
[1] https://venturebeat.com/ai/elon-musk-announces-most-powerful-ai-training-cluster-in-the-world/
[2] https://www.tuaw.com/2024/07/22/elon-musks-xai-unveils-worlds-most-powerful-ai-training-cluster/
[3] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/elon-musk-fires-up-the-most-powerful-ai-training-cluster-in-the-world-uses-100000-nvidia-h100-gpus-on-a-single-fabric
[4] https://www.thestack.technology/xai-elon-musk-ai-supercomputer/
[5] https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/07/39881748/elon-musks-xai-flips-the-switch-on-100k-nvidia-h100-gpus-worth-up-to-4b-in-memphis-supercluster-most
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JhtJa05C2Y

—–
Elon’s AI empire expands — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey
Elon Musk’s team at xAI just powered on the “World’s Most Powerful AI Training Cluster.”
If you don’t know what a supercluster is, it’s basically a massive network of Nvidia GPUs (computer chips) working together as a single unit to solve “super” complex calculations at unprecedented speeds.

And this Memphis Supercluster is the most “super” supercluster we’ve ever seen. The new facility, dubbed the “Gigafactory of Compute”, is a beast:

  • 100,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia H100 GPUs on a single RDMA fabric (for context, Google snagged only 50,000 H100 GPUs last year).
  • Up to 150 megawatts of electricity usage per hour—enough for 100K homes.
  • At least one million gallons of water per day to keep cool!

What to expect: Better models, more frequently. That’s been the trend, at least—look at how the last few model releases have become more squished together. 


OpenAI to make GPT-4o Advanced Voice available by the end of the month to select group of users — from tomsguide.com by Ryan Morrison

GPT-4o Advanced Voice is an entirely new type of voice assistant, similar to but larger than the recently unveiled French model Moshi, which argued with me over a story.

In demos of the model, we’ve seen GPT-4o Advanced Voice create custom character voices, generate sound effects while telling a story and even act as a live translator.

This native speech ability is a significant step in creating more natural AI assistants. In the future, it will also come with live vision abilities, allowing the AI to see what you see.


Could AGI break the world? — from theneurondaily.com by Noah Edelman

“Biggest IT outage in history” proves we’re not ready for AGI.

Here’s the TL;DR
—a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike made this happen:

  • Grounded 5,000+ flights around the world.
  • Slowed healthcare across the UK.
  • Forced retailers to revert to cash-only transactions in Australia (what is this, the stone ages?!).


Here’s where AI comes in: Imagine today’s AI as a new operating system. In 5-10 years, it’ll likely be as integrated into our economy as Microsoft’s cloud servers are now. This isn’t that far-fetched—Microsoft is already planning to embed AI into all its programs.

So what if a Crowdstrike-like incident happens with a more powerful AI system? Some experts predict an AI-powered IT outage could be 10x worse than Friday’s fiasco.


The Crowdstrike outage and global software’s single-point failure problem — from cnbc.com by Kaya Ginsky

KEY POINTS

  • The CrowdStrike software bug that took down global IT infrastructure exposed a single-point-of-failure risk unrelated to malicious cyberattack.
  • National and cybersecurity experts say the risk of this kind of technical outage is increasing alongside the risk of hacks, and the market will need to adopt better competitive practices.
  • Government is also likely to look at new regulations related to software updates and patches.

The “largest IT outage in history,” briefly explained — from vox.com by Li Zhou
Airlines, banks, and hospitals saw computer systems go down because of a CrowdStrike software glitch.

 

The race to deploy GenAI in the legal sector — from sifted.eu by Kai Nicol-Schwarz
LegalFly’s €15m Series A is the latest in a string of raises for European GenAI legaltech startups

Speak to any lawyer and you’ll soon discover that the job is a far cry from the fevered excitement of a courtroom drama. Behind the scenes, there’s an endless amount of laborious and typically manual tasks like drafting, reviewing and negotiating contracts and other legal documents that have to be done manually daily.

It was this realisation that led four product managers at dating app giant Tinder, frustrated by what they saw as a lack of AI adoption at the company, to jump ship and found Belgium-based LegalFly last year. The startup is building a generative AI copilot for lawyers which eventually, it says, will be able to automate entire workflows in the legal profession.

“We were looking at what GenAI was good at, which is synthesising data and generating content,” says founder and CEO Ruben Miessen. “What industry works like that? Law, and it does it all in a very manual way.”

“The legal industry is a global behemoth that’s seen minimal innovation since the advent of Microsoft Word in the 90s,” says Carina Namih, partner at Plural. “GenAI — especially with a human in the loop to keep accuracy high — is ideally suited to drafting, editing and negotiating legal documents.”


Legal Technology Company Relativity Announces OpenAI ChatGPT Integration — from lawfuel.com

CHICAGO– July 18 – Relativity, a global legal technology company, today announced it is integrating with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise Compliance API. The integration adds ChatGPT Enterprise as a Collect in RelativityOne data source, allowing users to seamlessly collect and process human-to-AI conversational data.

“The future around human and AI interaction is changing rapidly, calling for innovative legal data management solutions to include novel data sources, such as conversations with AI agents,” said Chris Brown, Chief Product Officer at Relativity. “In answering that call, we are committed to equipping our community with the tools they need to traverse the evolving future of human-to-AI conversational data and putting users in control of this new data landscape.”

 

AI-assisted job fraud is spiking — from thedeepview.co by Ian Krietzberg

A recent report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) found that data from 2023 shows “an environment where bad actors are more effective, efficient and successful in launching attacks. The result is fewer victims (or at least fewer victim reports), but the impact on individuals and businesses is arguably more damaging.”

One of these attacks involves fake job postings.

The details: The ITRC said that victim reports of job and employment scams spiked some 118% in 2023. These scams were primarily carried out through LinkedIn and other job search platforms.

    • The bad actors here would either create fake (but professional-looking) job postings, profiles and websites or impersonate legitimate companies, all with the hopes of landing victims to move onto the interview process.
    • These actors would then move the conversation onto a third-party messaging platform, and ask for identity verification information (driver’s licenses, social security numbers, direct deposit information, etc.).

Hypernatural — AI videos you can actually use. — via Jeremy Caplan’s Wonder Tools

Hypernatural is an AI video platform that makes it easy to create beautiful, ready-to share videos from anything. Stop settling for glitchy 3s generated videos and boring stock footage. Turn your ideas, scripts, podcasts and more into incredible short-form videos in minutes.


GPT-4o mini: advancing cost-efficient intelligence — from openai.com
Introducing our most cost-efficient small model

OpenAI is committed to making intelligence as broadly accessible as possible. Today, we’re announcing GPT-4o mini, our most cost-efficient small model. We expect GPT-4o mini will significantly expand the range of applications built with AI by making intelligence much more affordable. GPT-4o mini scores 82% on MMLU and currently outperforms GPT-41 on chat preferences in LMSYS leaderboard(opens in a new window). It is priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models and more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo.

GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its low cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots).

Also see what this means from Ben’s Bites, The Neuron, and as The Rundown AI asserts:

Why it matters: While it’s not GPT-5, the price and capabilities of this mini-release significantly lower the barrier to entry for AI integrations — and marks a massive leap over GPT 3.5 Turbo. With models getting cheaper, faster, and more intelligent with each release, the perfect storm for AI acceleration is forming.


Nvidia: More AI Waves Are Taking Shape — from seekingalpha.com by Eric Sprague

Summary

  • Nvidia Corporation is transitioning from a GPU designer to an AI factory builder.
  • AI spending will continue to grow in healthcare, government, and robotics.
  • CEO Jensen Huang says the AI robot industry could be bigger than the auto and consumer electronics industries combined.

Byte-Sized Courses: NVIDIA Offers Self-Paced Career Development in AI and Data Science — from blogs.nvidia.com by Andy Bui
Industry experts gather to share advice on starting a career in AI, highlighting technical training and certifications for career growth.

 

Introducing Eureka Labs — “We are building a new kind of school that is AI native.” — by Andrej Karpathy, Previously Director of AI @ Tesla, founding team @ OpenAI

However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted).


After Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy’s startup aims to apply AI assistants to education — from techcrunch.com by Rebecca Bellan

Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. In tech speak, that usually means built from the ground up with AI at its core. And while Eureka Labs’ AI ambitions are lofty, the company is starting with a more traditional approach to teaching.

San Francisco-based Eureka Labs, which Karpathy registered as an LLC in Delaware on June 21, aims to leverage recent progress in generative AI to create AI teaching assistants that can guide students through course materials.


What does it mean for students to be AI-ready? — from timeshighereducation.com by David Joyner
Not everyone wants to be a computer scientist, a software engineer or a machine learning developer. We owe it to our students to prepare them with a full range of AI skills for the world they will graduate into, writes David Joyner

We owe it to our students to prepare them for this full range of AI skills, not merely the end points. The best way to fulfil this responsibility is to acknowledge and examine this new category of tools. More and more tools that students use daily – word processors, email, presentation software, development environments and more – have AI-based features. Practising with these tools is a valuable exercise for students, so we should not prohibit that behaviour. But at the same time, we do not have to just shrug our shoulders and accept however much AI assistance students feel like using.


Teachers say AI usage has surged since the school year started — from eschoolnews.com by Laura Ascione
Half of teachers report an increase in the use of AI and continue to seek professional learning

Fifty percent of educators reported an increase in AI usage, by both students and teachers, over the 2023–24 school year, according to The 2024 Educator AI Report: Perceptions, Practices, and Potential, from Imagine Learning, a digital curriculum solutions provider.

The report offers insight into how teachers’ perceptions of AI use in the classroom have evolved since the start of the 2023–24 school year.


OPINION: What teachers call AI cheating, leaders in the workforce might call progress — from hechingerreport.org by C. Edward Waston and Jose Antonio Bowen
Authors of a new guide explore what AI literacy might look like in a new era

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

But this very ease has teachers wondering how we can keep our students motivated to do the hard work when there are so many new shortcuts. Learning goals, curriculums, courses and the way we grade assignments will all need to be reevaluated.

The new realities of work also must be considered. A shift in employers’ job postings rewards those with AI skills. Many companies report already adopting generative AI tools or anticipate incorporating them into their workflow in the near future.

A core tension has emerged: Many teachers want to keep AI out of our classrooms, but also know that future workplaces may demand AI literacy.

What we call cheating, business could see as efficiency and progress.

It is increasingly likely that using AI will emerge as an essential skill for students, regardless of their career ambitions, and that action is required of educational institutions as a result.


Teaching Writing With AI Without Replacing Thinking: 4 Tips — from by Erik Ofgang
AI has a lot of potential for writing students, but we can’t let it replace the thinking parts of writing, says writing professor Steve Graham

Reconciling these two goals — having AI help students learn to write more efficiently without hijacking the cognitive benefits of writing — should be a key goal of educators. Finding the ideal balance will require more work from both researchers and classroom educators, but Graham shares some initial tips for doing this currently.




Why I ban AI use for writing assignments — from timeshighereducation.com by James Stacey Taylor
Students may see handwriting essays in class as a needlessly time-consuming approach to assignments, but I want them to learn how to engage with arguments, develop their own views and convey them effectively, writes James Stacey Taylor

Could they use AI to generate objections to the arguments they read? Of course. AI does a good job of summarising objections to Singer’s view. But I don’t want students to parrot others’ objections. I want them to think of objections themselves. 

Could AI be useful for them in organising their exegesis of others’ views and their criticisms of them? Yes. But, again, part of what I want my students to learn is precisely what this outsources to the AI: how to organise their thoughts and communicate them effectively. 


How AI Will Change Education — from digitalnative.tech by Rex Woodbury
Predicting Innovation in Education, from Personalized Learning to the Downfall of College 

This week explores how AI will bleed into education, looking at three segments of education worth watching, then examining which business models will prevail.

  1. Personalized Learning and Tutoring
  2. Teacher Tools
  3. Alternatives to College
  4. Final Thoughts: Business Models and Why Education Matters

New Guidance from TeachAI and CSTA Emphasizes Computer Science Education More Important than Ever in an Age of AI — from csteachers.org by CSTA
The guidance features new survey data and insights from teachers and experts in computer science (CS) and AI, informing the future of CS education.

SEATTLE, WA – July 16, 2024 – Today, TeachAI, led by Code.org, ETS, the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), Khan Academy, and the World Economic Forum, launches a new initiative in partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to support and empower educators as they grapple with the growing opportunities and risks of AI in computer science (CS) education.

The briefs draw on early research and insights from CSTA members, organizations in the TeachAI advisory committee, and expert focus groups to address common misconceptions about AI and offer a balanced perspective on critical issues in CS education, including:

  • Why is it Still Important for Students to Learn to Program?
  • How Are Computer Science Educators Teaching With and About AI?
  • How Can Students Become Critical Consumers and Responsible Creators of AI?
 

OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say — from washingtonpost.com by Pranshu Verma, Cat Zakrzewski, and Nitasha Tiku
In a letter exclusively obtained by The Washington Post, whistleblowers asked the SEC to probe company’s allegedly restrictive non-disclosure agreements

OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

The whistleblowers said OpenAI issued its employees overly restrictive employment, severance and nondisclosure agreements that could have led to penalties against workers who raised concerns about OpenAI to federal regulators, according to a seven-page letter sent to the SEC commissioner earlier this month that referred to the formal complaint. The letter was obtained exclusively by The Washington Post.

 


Bill Gates Reveals Superhuman AI Prediction — from youtube.com by Rufus Griscom, Bill Gates, Andy Sack, and Adam Brotman

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.


OpenAI Introduces CriticGPT: A New Artificial Intelligence AI Model based on GPT-4 to Catch Errors in ChatGPT’s Code Output — from marktechpost.com

The team has summarized their primary contributions as follows.

  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.

Character.AI now allows users to talk with AI avatars over calls — from techcrunch.com by Ivan Mehta

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 Just Added 110 More Languages — from lifehacker.com by
You can now use the app to communicate in languages you’ve never even heard of.

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.




Listen to your favorite books and articles voiced by Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier — from elevenlabs.io
ElevenLabs partners with estates of iconic stars to bring their voices to the Reader App

 



 

Homeschoolers Embrace AI, Even As Many Educators Keep It at Arms’ Length — from .the74million.org by Greg Toppo
Ed tech expert: Once you persuade parents & kids to use AI, ‘There’s nobody else you have to convince.’

Then came ChatGPT, Open AI’s widely used artificial intelligence bot. For Fender, it was a no-brainer to query it for help developing deep opening questions.

The chatbot and other AI tools like it have found an eager audience among homeschoolers and microschoolers, with parents and teachers readily embracing it as a brainstorming and management tool, even as public schools take a more cautious approach, often banning it outright.

A few observers say AI may even make homeschooling more practical, opening it up to busy parents who might have balked previously.

“Not everyone is using it, but some are very excited about it,” said Amir Nathoo, co-founder of Outschool, an online education platform.

 

Latent Expertise: Everyone is in R&D — from oneusefulthing.org by Ethan Mollick
Ideas come from the edges, not the center

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

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.


OpenAI’s former chief scientist is starting a new AI company — from theverge.com by Emma Roth
Ilya Sutskever is launching Safe Superintelligence Inc., an AI startup that will prioritize safety over ‘commercial pressures.’

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.

Safe Superintelligence — from theneurondaily.com by Noah Edelman

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.


AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution. — from washingtonpost.com by Evan Halper and Caroline O’Donovan
As power needs of AI push emissions up and put big tech in a bind, companies put their faith in elusive — some say improbable — technologies.

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.


Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia join feds for first AI attack simulation — from axios.com by Sam Sabin

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.


Hot summer of AI video: Luma & Runway drop amazing new models — from heatherbcooper.substack.com by Heather Cooper
Plus an amazing FREE video to sound app from ElevenLabs

Immediately after we saw Sora-like videos from KLING, Luma AI’s Dream Machine video results overshadowed them.

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.

Don’t believe us? You need to check out Runway ML’s new Gen-3 model they released this week.

They’re not the only ones. We also have Pika, which just raised $80M. And Google’s Veo. And OpenAI’s Sora. (+ many others)

 

Daniel Christian: My slides for the Educational Technology Organization of Michigan’s Spring 2024 Retreat

From DSC:
Last Thursday, I presented at the Educational Technology Organization of Michigan’s Spring 2024 Retreat. I wanted to pass along my slides to you all, in case they are helpful to you.

Topics/agenda:

  • Topics & resources re: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
    • Top multimodal players
    • Resources for learning about AI
    • Applications of AI
    • My predictions re: AI
  • The powerful impact of pursuing a vision
  • A potential, future next-gen learning platform
  • Share some lessons from my past with pertinent questions for you all now
  • The significant impact of an organization’s culture
  • Bonus material: Some people to follow re: learning science and edtech

 

Education Technology Organization of Michigan -- ETOM -- Spring 2024 Retreat on June 6-7

PowerPoint slides of Daniel Christian's presentation at ETOM

Slides of the presentation (.PPTX)
Slides of the presentation (.PDF)

 


Plus several more slides re: this vision.

 

 

Apple Intelligence: every new AI feature coming to the iPhone and Mac — from theverge.com by Wes Davis

Apple announced “Apple Intelligence” at WWDC 2024, its name for a new suite of AI features for the iPhone, Mac, and more. Starting later this year, Apple is rolling out what it says is a more conversational Siri, custom, AI-generated “Genmoji,” and GPT-4o access that lets Siri turn to OpenAI’s chatbot when it can’t handle what you ask it for.

Apple jumps into the AI arms race with OpenAI deal — from washingtonpost.com by Gerrit De Vynck
The iPhone maker has mostly stayed on the sidelines as the tech industry goes wild for AI. Not anymore.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple officially launched itself into the artificial intelligence arms race, announcing a deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI to use the company’s technology in its products and showing off a slew of its own new AI features.

The announcements, made at the tech giant’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday in Cupertino, Calif., are aimed at helping the tech giant keep up with competitors such as Google and Microsoft, which have boasted in recent months that AI makes their phones, laptops and software better than Apple’s. In addition to Apple’s own homegrown AI tech, the company’s phones, computers and iPads will also have ChatGPT built in “later this year,” a huge validation of the importance of the highflying start-up’s tech.

Apple Intelligence: AI for the rest of us. — from apple.com

  • Built into your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.
  • Draws on your personal context while setting a brand-new standard for privacy in AI.

Introducing Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac — from apple.com
Setting a new standard for privacy in AI, Apple Intelligence understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant

Apple doubles down on artificial intelligence, announcing partnership with OpenAI — from npr.org by Lola Murti and Dara Kerr

The highly anticipated AI partnership is the first of its kind for Apple, which has been regarded by analysts as slower to adopt artificial intelligence than other technology companies such as Microsoft and Google.

The deal allows Apple’s millions of users to access technology from OpenAI, one of the highest-profile artificial intelligence companies of recent years. OpenAI has already established partnerships with a variety of technology and publishing companies, including a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft.

 

The real deal here is that Apple is literally putting AI into the hands of >1B people, most of whom will probably be using AI for the 1st time. And it’s delivering AI that’s actually useful (forget those Genmojis, we’re talking about implanting ChatGPT-4o’s brain into Apple devices).

Noah Edelman (source)

Here’s everything Apple announced at the WWDC 2024 keynote, including Apple Intelligence, Siri makeover — from techcrunch.com by Christine Hall

It’s WWDC 2024 keynote time! Each year Apple kicks off its Worldwide Developers Conference with a few hours of just straight announcements, like the long-awaited Apple Intelligence and a makeover for smart AI assistant, Siri. We expected much of them to revolve around the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions (and here), and Apple didn’t disappoint. We also bring you news about Vision Pro and lots of feature refreshes.

Here’s how to watch the archive of WWDC 2024.


Why Gamma is great for presentations — from Jeremy Caplan

Gamma has become one of my favorite new creativity tools. You can use it like Powerpoint or Google Slides, adding text and images to make impactful presentations. It lets you create vertical, square or horizontal slides. You can embed online content to make your deck stand out with videos, data or graphics. You can even use it to make quick websites.

Its best feature, though, is an easy-to-use application of AI. The AI will learn from any document you import, or you can use a text prompt to create a strong deck or site instantly.
.


107 Up-to-Date ChatGPT Statistics & User Numbers [April 2024] — from nerdynav.com

Top ChatGPT Statistics

  • ChatGPT has 180.5 million users out of which 100 million users are active weekly.
  • In January 2024, ChatGPT got 2.3 billion website visits and 2 million developers are using its API.
  • The highest percentage of ChatGPT users belong to USA (46.75%), followed by India (5.47%). ChatGPT is banned in 7 countries including Russia and China.
  • OpenAI’s projected revenue from ChatGPT is $2billion in 2024.
  • Running ChatGPT costs OpenAI around $700,000 daily.
  • Sam Altman is seeking $7 trillion for a global AI chip project while Open AI is also listed as a major shareholder in Reddit.
  • ChatGPT offers a free version with GPT-3.5 and a Plus version with GPT-4, which is 40% more accurate and 82% safer costing $20 per month.
  • ChatGPT is being used for automation, education, coding, data-analysis, writing, etc.
  • 43% of college students and 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are using ChatGPT.
  • A 2023 study found 25% of US companies surveyed saved $50K-$70K using ChatGPT, while 11% saved over $100K.
 

A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence — from righttowarn.ai

We are current and former employees at frontier AI companies, and we believe in the potential of AI technology to deliver unprecedented benefits to humanity.

We also understand the serious risks posed by these technologies. These risks range from the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction. AI companies themselves have acknowledged these risks [123], as have governments across the world [456] and other AI experts [789].

We are hopeful that these risks can be adequately mitigated with sufficient guidance from the scientific community, policymakers, and the public. However, AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.

 

Can Microsoft Copilot Replace Popular AI Tools Like ChatGPT, Gamma AI, and Midjourney? — from flexos.work by Daan van Rossum
Can Microsoft Copilot win from popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Gamma AI, and Midjourney, and which AI best fits your business?

From DSC:
The article talks about the pros and cons of Microsoft Copilot. But I really appreciated the following table/information:


Also regarding Microsoft and AI, see:

Windows Recall stores all your history UNENCRYPTED. — from bensbites.beehiiv.com by Ben Tossell

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 teams with Khan Academy to make its AI tutor free for K-12 educators and will develop a Phi-3 math model — from venturebeat.com by Ken Yeung

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-Third of Teachers Have Already Tried AI, Survey Finds — from the74million.org by Kevin Mahnken
A RAND poll released last month finds English and social studies teachers embracing tools like ChatGPT.

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.


Professors Try ‘Restrained AI’ Approach to Help Teach Writing — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young
Can ChatGPT make human writing more efficient, or is writing an inherently time-consuming process best handled without AI tools?

This article is part of the guide: For Education, ChatGPT Holds Promise — and Creates Problems.

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.


AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China — from techcrunch.com by Rita Liao

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.


Is your school behind on AI? If so, there are practical steps you can take for the next 12 months — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard

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.

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian