Leaders who practice foresight stay ahead of the innovation curve — from tfsx.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

According to famed futurist Richard Slaughter, foresight (also known as futures thinking or futuring) is “the ability to create and maintain a high-quality, coherent and functional forward view, and to use the insights arising in useful organizational ways.”2 In other words, foresight is a way to examine the paths the future might take, using qualitative and quantitative metrics, and then use the insights gained from this analysis to navigate our uncertain and changing world with purpose.

“The art and science of futuring is fast becoming a necessary skill, where we read signals, see trends and ruthlessly test our own assumptions…Like the ability to make a budget or think critically, it’s a skill that anyone who has to make long-range decisions should, and can, acquire.”3

From DSC:
The development of these futuring skills needs to begin in K-12 and continue into vocational programs as well as in college.


Also relevant/see:

The future isn’t what it used to be: Here’s how strategic foresight can help — from weforum.org

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

  • Three-quarters (75%) of organizations are not prepared for the pace of change in and around their industry.
  • Across sectors, we all need to rethink how we operate to both survive and thrive in the future.
  • Foresight can help individuals and organizations be more future prepared, innovative and agile.

The exponential pace of change

 

Mixed media online project serves as inspiration for student journalists — from jeadigitalmedia.org by Michelle Balmeo

Excerpt:

If you’re on the hunt for inspiration, go check out Facing Life: Eight stories of life after life in California’s prisons.

This project, created by Pendarvis Harshaw and Brandon Tauszik, has so many wonderful and original storytelling components, it’s the perfect model for student journalists looking for ways to tell important stories online.

Facing Life -- eight stories of life after life in California's prisons

 


Speaking of AI-related items, also see:

OpenAI debuts Whisper API for speech-to-text transcription and translation — from techcrunch.com by Kyle Wiggers

Excerpt:

To coincide with the rollout of the ChatGPT API, OpenAI today launched the Whisper API, a hosted version of the open source Whisper speech-to-text model that the company released in September.

Priced at $0.006 per minute, Whisper is an automatic speech recognition system that OpenAI claims enables “robust” transcription in multiple languages as well as translation from those languages into English. It takes files in a variety of formats, including M4A, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPGA, WAV and WEBM.

Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs — from openai.com
Developers can now integrate ChatGPT and Whisper models into their apps and products through our API.

Excerpt:

ChatGPT and Whisper models are now available on our API, giving developers access to cutting-edge language (not just chat!) and speech-to-text capabilities.



Everything you wanted to know about AI – but were afraid to ask — from theguardian.com by Dan Milmo and Alex Hern
From chatbots to deepfakes, here is the lowdown on the current state of artificial intelligence

Excerpt:

Barely a day goes by without some new story about AI, or artificial intelligence. The excitement about it is palpable – the possibilities, some say, are endless. Fears about it are spreading fast, too.

There can be much assumed knowledge and understanding about AI, which can be bewildering for people who have not followed every twist and turn of the debate.

 So, the Guardian’s technology editors, Dan Milmo and Alex Hern, are going back to basics – answering the questions that millions of readers may have been too afraid to ask.


Nvidia CEO: “We’re going to accelerate AI by another million times” — from
In a recent earnings call, the boss of Nvidia Corporation, Jensen Huang, outlined his company’s achievements over the last 10 years and predicted what might be possible in the next decade.

Excerpt:

Fast forward to today, and CEO Jensen Huang is optimistic that the recent momentum in AI can be sustained into at least the next decade. During the company’s latest earnings call, he explained that Nvidia’s GPUs had boosted AI processing by a factor of one million in the last 10 years.

“Moore’s Law, in its best days, would have delivered 100x in a decade. By coming up with new processors, new systems, new interconnects, new frameworks and algorithms and working with data scientists, AI researchers on new models – across that entire span – we’ve made large language model processing a million times faster,” Huang said.

From DSC:
NVIDA is the inventor of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which creates interactive graphics on laptops, workstations, mobile devices, notebooks, PCs, and more. They are a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence hardware and software.


 


9 ways ChatGPT will help CIOs — from enterprisersproject.com by Katie Sanders
What are the potential benefits of this popular tool? Experts share how it can help CIOs be more efficient and bring competitive differentiation to their organizations.

Excerpt:

Don’t assume this new technology will replace your job. As Mark Lambert, a senior consultant at netlogx, says, “CIOs shouldn’t view ChatGPT as a replacement for humans but as a new and exciting tool that their IT teams can utilize. From troubleshooting IT issues to creating content for the company’s knowledge base, artificial intelligence can help teams operate more efficiently and effectively.”



Would you let ChatGPT control your smart home? — from theverge.com by

While the promise of an inherently competent, eminently intuitive voice assistant — a flawless butler for your home — is very appealing, I fear the reality could be more Space Odyssey than Downton Abbey. But let’s see if I’m proven wrong.


How ChatGPT Is Being Used To Enhance VR Training — from vrscout.com by Kyle Melnick

Excerpt:

The company claims that its VR training program can be used to prepare users for a wide variety of challenging scenarios, whether you’re a recent college graduate preparing for a difficult job interview or a manager simulating a particularly tough performance review. Users can customize their experiences depending on their role and receive real-time feedback based on their interactions with the AI.


From DSC:
Below are some example topics/articles involving healthcare and AI. 


Role of AI in Healthcare — from doctorsexplain.media
The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare is becoming increasingly important as technology advances. AI has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry, from diagnosis and treatment to patient care and management. AI can help healthcare providers make more accurate diagnoses, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes.

60% of patients uncomfortable with AI in healthcare settings, survey finds — from healthcaredive.com by Hailey Mensik

Dive Brief:

  • About six in 10 U.S. adults said they would feel uncomfortable if their provider used artificial intelligence tools to diagnose them and recommend treatments in a care setting, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center.
  • Some 38% of respondents said using AI in healthcare settings would lead to better health outcomes while 33% said it would make them worse, and 27% said it wouldn’t make much of a difference, the survey found.
  • Ultimately, men, younger people and those with higher education levels were the most open to their providers using AI.

The Rise of the Superclinician – How Voice AI Can Improve the Employee Experience in Healthcare — from medcitynews.com by Tomer Garzberg
Voice AI is the new frontier in healthcare. With its constantly evolving landscape, the healthcare […]

Excerpt:

Voice AI can generate up to 30% higher clinician productivity, by automating these healthcare use cases

  • Updating records
  • Provider duress
  • Platform orchestration
  • Shift management
  • Client data handoff
  • Home healthcare
  • Maintenance
  • Equipment ordering
  • Meal preferences
  • Case data queries
  • Patient schedules
  • Symptom logging
  • Treatment room setup
  • Patient condition education
  • Patient support recommendations
  • Medication advice
  • Incident management
  • … and many more

ChatGPT is poised to upend medical information. For better and worse. — from usatoday.com by Karen Weintraub

Excerpt:

But – and it’s a big “but” – the information these digital assistants provide might be more inaccurate and misleading than basic internet searches.

“I see no potential for it in medicine,” said Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. By their very design, these large-language technologies are inappropriate sources of medical information, she said.

Others argue that large language models could supplement, though not replace, primary care.

“A human in the loop is still very much needed,” said Katie Link, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, a company that develops collaborative machine learning tools.

Link, who specializes in health care and biomedicine, thinks chatbots will be useful in medicine someday, but it isn’t yet ready.

 

Eliminate a Degree of Difficulty: Hire for Skills, Not School — from bain.com by Joe Lischwe, Alex Noether, Maria Gordian, Andrea D’Arcy, and Jon Barfield; resource via GSV
Too many jobs require college degrees, locking out qualified Black talent. Skills-first hiring helps companies rethink what really matters.

At a Glance

  • Black Americans are 30% less likely than white Americans to have jobs that pay family-sustaining wages—a key factor in the income and family wealth gaps between Black and white Americans.
  • One key barrier to Black talent obtaining these jobs is that 70% to 80% require a four-year college degree, which 75% of Black Americans do not have.
  • Requiring four-year degrees is not the only way to assess talent or identify the best candidates, and skills-first hiring can mitigate this credentials barrier, making the process fairer for all job applicants.
  • The business case is strong: Skills-first hiring criteria are 5 times more predictive of future job performance than educational background and 2.5 times more predictive than work experience.
  • While the transition to skills-first hiring—particularly the shift in culture and mindset it entails—is challenging, there are proven steps companies can take to make the switch successfully, as illustrated by the example of companies in the OneTen coalition such as Merck.
 

AI starter tools for video content creation — from techthatmatters.beehiiv.com by Harsh Makadia

Excerpt:

One of the most exciting applications of AI is in the realm of content creation. What if I told you there are tools to generate videos in mins?

Try these tools today:

  • Supercreator AI: Create short form videos 10x faster
  • Lumen5: Automatically turn blog posts into videos
  • InVideo: Idea to YouTube video
  • Synthesia: Create videos from plain text in minutes
  • Narakeet: Get a professionally sounding audio or video in minutes
  • Movio: Create engaging video content
 

Allen & Overy breaks the internet (and new ground) with co-pilot Harvey — from legaltechnology.com by Caroline Hill

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

We’re told that at the end of the trial, around 3,500 of A&O’s lawyers had asked Harvey around 40,000 queries for their day-to-day client work. MIG head David Wakeling said in a statement yesterday: “I have been at the forefront of legal tech for 15 years but I have never seen anything like Harvey. It is a game-changer that can unleash the power of generative AI to transform the legal industry. Harvey can work in multiple languages and across diverse practice areas, delivering unprecedented efficiency and intelligence. In our trial, we saw some amazing results.”

Also related/see:

OpenAI-backed startup brings chatbot technology to first major law firm — from reuters.com by Sara Merken

Summary:

  • Allen & Overy partners with legal startup Harvey
  • Harvey received $5 million in a funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund last year


Global Firm Allen & Overy Rolling Out Harvey.ai — from legallydisrupted.com by Zach Abramowitz

Excerpt:

Here’s another way to think about what it can do: read, understand, analyze, issue spot and draft responsive documents. Does that apply to a lot of contract work? Sure. Litigation? Yep, that too. The reason this is hard to swallow is that we’re stuck in a framework where there are contract tools for contracts, eDiscovery tools for discovery, drafting tools for drafting etc. The AI revolution could potentially change that paradigm.


The Top Legal Tech Startups to Watch in 2023 — from gritdaily.com by Spencer Hulse

Excerpt:

There are certain industries that have been slower to embrace technology than others, and the legal profession is one of those at the very top. However, legal tech startups have been gaining ground in recent years, with the market expected to reach around $32 billion in 2025. There is also a significant rise in legal department spending on legal tech, which is only going to rise in the coming years.

Legal tech offers numerous solutions, which include everything from offering legal advice digitally to AI and automating some of the time-consuming processes formerly handled with pen and paper.

The following list includes legal tech startups and companies of all sorts, from those that have been around for years to up-and-coming innovators.


Embracing The Tectonic Shift: How Technology Is Transforming The Legal Profession — from livelaw.in by Khushboo Luthra

According to a Gartner Report, 4 of 5 legal departments plan to increase technology spending. By 2024, legal departments will replace one out of five lawyers with a nonlawyer staff, and 1/4th of the expenditure on corporate legal applications will go to non-specialist technology providers. By 2025, legal departments will have automated 50% of legal work related to significant corporate transactions.


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

Excerpt:

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

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

Generative AI is having a cultural and commercial moment, being touted as the future of search, sparking legal disputes over copyright, and causing panic in schools and universities.



Addendum on 3/6/23:

Will artificial intelligence replace your lawyer–and will its name be Harvey? — from fortunes.com by Aron Solomon


 

Podcast Special: Using Generative AI in Education — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
An exploration of the risks and benefits of Generative AI in education, in conversation with Mike Palmer

Excerpt:

Among other things, we discussed:

  • The immediate challenges that Generative AI presents for learning designers, educators and students.
  • The benefits & opportunities that Generative AI might offer the world of education, both in terms of productivity and pedagogy.
  • How bringing together the world of AI and the world of learning science, we might revolutionise the way we design and deliver learning experiences.

Speaking of podcasts, this article lists some podcasts to check out for those working in — or interested in — higher education.


Also relevant/see:

 


Also relevant/see:

Are librarians the next prompt engineers? — from linkedin.com by Laura Solomon

Excerpt:

  • Without the right prompt, AI fails to provide what someone might be looking for. This probably is a surprise to no one, especially librarians. If you remember the days before Google, you know exactly how this tended to play out. Google became dominant in large part to its inherent ability to accept natural language queries.
  • A small industry is now popping up to provide people with the correct, detailed prompts to get what they want when interacting with AI. The people doing this work are referred to as “prompt engineers.”
  • Prompt engineers aren’t just people who write queries to be directed to an AI. They also have tend to have a great deal of technical expertise and a deep understanding of how artificial intelligences and natural language can intersect.
  • Prompt engineers don’t work for free.

The above item links to The Most Important Job Skill of This Century — from theatlantic.com by Charlie Warzel
Your work future could depend on how well you can talk to AI. 


Also relevant/see:

My class required AI. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. — from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick
(Spoiler alert: it has been very successful, but there are some lessons to be learned)

Excerpt:

I fully embraced AI for my classes this semester, requiring students to use AI tools in a number of ways. This policy attracted a lot of interest, and I thought it worthwhile to reflect on how it is going so far. The short answer is: great! But I have learned some early lessons that I think are worth passing on.

AI is everywhere already
Even if I didn’t embrace AI, it is also clear that AI is now everywhere in classes. For example, students used it to help them come up with ideas for class projects, even before I even taught them how to do that. As a result, the projects this semester are much better than previous pre-AI classes. This has led to greater project success rates and more engaged teams. On the downside, I find students also raise their hands to ask questions less. I suspect this might be because, as one of them told me, they can later ask ChatGPT to explain things they didn’t get without needing to speak in front of the class. The world of teaching is now more complicated in ways that are exciting, as well as a bit unnerving.

 

The Broken Higher Education System: Addressing Stakeholder Needs for a More Adaptive Model — from educationoneducation.substack.com

Excerpt:

Higher education Chief Academic Officers (CAOs) must shift their perspective and strive to increase customer satisfaction to ensure the highest quality of educational products. A recent survey by Higher Education found that only 25% of customers were satisfied with the results higher education provided, contradicting the satisfaction differences of 99% of CAOs. Clearly, a disconnect exists between what higher education leaders deliver and what students, employers, and the changing labor market requirements are. To bridge this gap, higher education must develop products focusing on stakeholder feedback in product design, job requirements, and practical skills development.

From DSC:
So in terms of Design Thinking for reinventing lifelong learning, it seems to me that we need much more collaboration between the existing siloes. That is, we need students, educators, administrators, employers, and other stakeholders at the (re)design table. More experiments and what I call TrimTab Groups are needed.

But I think that the culture of many institutions of traditional higher education will prevent this from occurring. Many in academia shy away from (to put it politely) the world of business (even though they themselves ARE a business). I know, it’s not fair nor does it make sense. But many faculty members lean towards much more noble purposes, while never seeing the mounting gorillas of debt that they’ve heaped upon their students’/graduates’ backs. Those in academia shouldn’t be so quick to see themselves as being so incredibly different from those working in the corporate/business world.

The following quote seems appropriate to place here:


Along the lines of other items in the higher education space, see:

New Data Shows Emergency Pandemic Aid Helped Keep 18 Million Students Enrolled — from forbes.com by Edward Conroy

Excerpt:

The Department of Education (ED) has released new data showing that 18 million students were helped by emergency aid for colleges and universities throughout the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of which was used to provide emergency grants to students. These funds were provided through three rounds of Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds (HEERF) In total, $76.2 billion was provided, with half of those funds going to support students directly. Unusually for funding in higher education, the money was not heavily means-tested, and was distributed very quickly.

The report indicates that the funds were used for several essential purposes, including student basic needs, keeping staff employed, and helping keep students enrolled. For example, students used funds to cover things like food and housing at a time when employment was drying up for many students, ensuring that the Pandemic did not plunge students who already had limited funds deeper into basic needs insecurity.

Flagships prosper, while regionals suffer — from chronicle.com by Lee Gardner
Competition is getting fierce, and the gap is widening

Excerpts:

Some key numbers are moving in the right direction at the University of Oregon. The flagship institution enrolled 5,338 freshmen in the fall of 2022, its largest entering class ever. First-year enrollment increased 16 percent over 2021, which was also a record year. Meanwhile, Western Oregon University, a regional public institution an hour’s drive north, just outside Salem, lost nearly 7 percent of its enrollment over the same period.

In 28 states, flagships have seen enrollment rise between 2010 to 2021, while regionals have trended down, according to a Chronicle analysis of U.S. Education Department data. Across all states, enrollment at 78 public flagships rose 12.3 percent from 2010 to 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. Enrollment at 396 public regional universities slumped more than 4 percent during the same period.

Chronicle analysis of federal data showed, for example, that in Michigan, a state being hit hard by demographic shifts and with no central higher-ed authority, the flagship University of Michigan at Ann Arbor saw undergraduate enrollment rise 16 percent between 2010 and 2020. Over the same period, it fell at 11 of the state’s 12 other four-year public campuses.

 

Preparing Today’s Students for the Future Workforce — from rdene915.com by Rachelle Dené Poth

Excerpt:

Today’s high school students are the future of our workforce. Before long they will be in college or starting full-time jobs of their own. But how are today’s students preparing for their futures? What will the workforce look like when these students move on to the next stage of their lives?

Schools, districts, and even state education departments provide various programs for students to gain relevant work experience and gain necessary skills outside of the classroom.

What Are These Programs?
There are a number of school-based programs that support student growth through work such as…


Also relevant/see:


One Foot in the Future — from the BIG questions institute

As an excerpt from an email describing this new/free ebook, Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson write:

We need a fresh set of tools, frameworks, and lenses if we are to meet the future effectively.

With this new ebook, “One Foot in the Future,” we’re charting a different path forward, introducing readers to things like:

  • Design Fiction – A tool to help us become “archeologists of the future” and help us
  • Regenerative Learning – A lens that helps us see our work as it impacts all living things
  • Schoolpunk – A movement and a community to help imagine the future of education together.

And much more.

Our sense is that there is growing appetite to get out of the traditional school box and to design a more aspirational future. This new ebook is a great starting point for anyone who wants to do just that.

ONE FOOT IN THE FUTURE -- a free ebook from the BIG questions institute regarding new frameworks, tools, and lenses to help educators imagine what comes next

 

Why Educators And Employers Must Come Together To Cross The Skills Gap — from forbes.com by Mark C. Perna

Excerpts:

Beyond the IT sector, skills gaps also exist in other areas of the economy, such as manufacturing and retail. There is a shortage of workers in the skilled trades industries, for example, which is growing more acute every year.

The other major factor in the growth of the skills gap is the aging of the Boomer generation, who are exiting the workforce—leaving open highly-skilled jobs that members of younger generations have not had the time or training to fill.

By 2030, forecasts predict that all Boomers will have left the job market—leaving some 85 million open jobs, according to a Korn Ferry study on the Global Talent Crunch. The cost? A projected $8.5 trillion in lost revenue.

Put another way, schools and employers need to team up in new ways to help provide access to members of the younger generation to gain the kinds of skills that make the skills gap a thing of the past. We need to connect the dots between school and work, because far too many people are getting lost in the middle.

And on a somewhat relevant note, also see:

General Assembly Launches Apprenticeship Solution to Help Employers Source, Deploy, and Retain Hard-to-Find Tech Talent — from finance.yahoo.com; via Paul Fain

Excerpt:

NEW YORK, Feb. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — General Assembly (GA) today announced the launch of GA Apprenticeships, Powered by Interapt, a tech apprenticeship solution designed to fast-track high-potential, overlooked talent into careers in software engineering, data, and cybersecurity. In light of growing labor market challenges and ongoing skill shortages across a range of industries, this new model will provide employers with a derisked opportunity to onboard entry-level tech talent while also enabling apprentices to earn a salary as they learn alongside senior-level developers.

See Workers as Workers, Not as a College Credential — an opinion item out at nytimes.com (paywall)

In one of the richest nations on earth, the path to prosperity has narrowed significantly in recent decades — especially for those without a college education. More than 62 percent of Americans ages 25 and up do not hold bachelor’s degrees, and the earnings gapbetween those with a college education and those without one has never been wider.

 

ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base – analyst note — from reuters.com by Krystal Hu

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Feb 1 (Reuters) – ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.

The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.

“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.


From DSC:
This reminds me of the current exponential pace of change that we are experiencing…

..and how we struggle with that kind of pace.

 

Introducing: ChatGPT Edu-Mega-Prompts — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman; with thanks to Ray Schroeder out on LinkedIn for this resource
How to combine the power of AI + learning science to improve your efficiency & effectiveness as an educator

From DSC:
Before relaying some excerpts, I want to say that I get the gist of what Dr. Hardman is saying re: quizzes. But I’m surprised to hear she had so many pedagogical concerns with quizzes. I, too, would like to see quizzes used as an instrument of learning and to practice recall — and not just for assessment. But I would give quizzes a higher thumbs up than what she did. I think she was also trying to say that quizzes don’t always identify misconceptions or inaccurate foundational information. 

Excerpts:

The Bad News: Most AI technologies that have been built specifically for educators in the last few years and months imitate and threaten to spread the use of broken instructional practices (i.e. content + quiz).

The Good News: Armed with prompts which are carefully crafted to ask the right thing in the right way, educators can use AI like GPT3 to improve the effectiveness of their instructional practices.

As is always the case, ChatGPT is your assistant. If you’re not happy with the result, you can edit and refine it using your expertise, either alone or through further conversation with ChatGPT.

For example, once the first response is generated, you can ask ChatGPT to make the activity more or less complex, to change the scenario and/or suggest more or different resources – the options are endless.

Philippa recommended checking out Rob Lennon’s streams of content. Here’s an example from his Twitter account:


Also relevant/see:

3 trends that may unlock AI's potential for Learning and Development in 2023

3 Trends That May Unlock AI’s Potential for L&D in 2023 — from learningguild.com by Juan Naranjo

Excerpts:

AI-assisted design and development work
This is the trend most likely to have a dramatic evolution this year.

Solutions like large language models, speech generators, content generators, image generators, translation tools, transcription tools, and video generators, among many others, will transform the way IDs create the learning experiences our organizations use. Two examples are:

1. IDs will be doing more curation and less creation:

  • Many IDs will start pulling raw material from content generators (built using natural language processing platforms like Open AI’s GPT-3, Microsoft’s LUIS, IBM’s Watson, Google’s BERT, etc.) to obtain ideas and drafts that they can then clean up and add to the assets they are assembling. As technology advances, the output from these platforms will be more suitable to become final drafts, and the curation and clean-up tasks will be faster and easier.
  • Then, the designer can leverage a solution like DALL-E 2 (or a product developed based on it) to obtain visuals that can (or not) be modified with programs like Illustrator or Photoshop (see image below for Dall-E’s “Cubist interpretation of AI and brain science.”

2. IDs will spend less, and in some cases no time at all, creating learning pathways

AI engines contained in LXPs and other platforms will select the right courses for employees and guide these learners from their current level of knowledge and skill to their goal state with substantially less human intervention.

 


The Creator of ChatGPT Thinks AI Should Be Regulated — from time.com by John Simons

Excerpts:

Somehow, Mira Murati can forthrightly discuss the dangers of AI while making you feel like it’s all going to be OK.

A growing number of leaders in the field are warning of the dangers of AI. Do you have any misgivings about the technology?

This is a unique moment in time where we do have agency in how it shapes society. And it goes both ways: the technology shapes us and we shape it. There are a lot of hard problems to figure out. How do you get the model to do the thing that you want it to do, and how you make sure it’s aligned with human intention and ultimately in service of humanity? There are also a ton of questions around societal impact, and there are a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we need to consider. And it’s important that we bring in different voices, like philosophers, social scientists, artists, and people from the humanities.


Whispers of A.I.’s Modular Future — from newyorker.com by James Somers; via Sam DeBrule

Excerpts:

Gerganov adapted it from a program called Whisper, released in September by OpenAI, the same organization behind ChatGPTand dall-e. Whisper transcribes speech in more than ninety languages. In some of them, the software is capable of superhuman performance—that is, it can actually parse what somebody’s saying better than a human can.

Until recently, world-beating A.I.s like Whisper were the exclusive province of the big tech firms that developed them.

Ever since I’ve had tape to type up—lectures to transcribe, interviews to write down—I’ve dreamed of a program that would do it for me. The transcription process took so long, requiring so many small rewindings, that my hands and back would cramp. As a journalist, knowing what awaited me probably warped my reporting: instead of meeting someone in person with a tape recorder, it often seemed easier just to talk on the phone, typing up the good parts in the moment.

From DSC:
Journalism majors — and even seasoned journalists — should keep an eye on this type of application, as it will save them a significant amount of time and/or money.

Microsoft Teams Premium: Cut costs and add AI-powered productivity — from microsoft.com by Nicole Herskowitz

Excerpt:

Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience of Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected—whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars.


 

Meet MathGPT: a Chatbot Tutor Built Specific to a Math Textbook — from thejournal.com by Kristal Kuykendall

Excerpt:

Micro-tutoring platform PhotoStudy has unveiled a new chatbot built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT APIs that can teach a complete elementary algebra textbook with “extremely high accuracy,” the company said.

“Textbook publishers and teachers can now transform their textbooks and teaching with a ChatGPT-like assistant that can teach all the material in a textbook, assess student progress, provide personalized help in weaker areas, generate quizzes with support for text, images, audio, and ultimately a student customized avatar for video interaction,” PhotoStudy said in its news release.

Some sample questions the MathGPT tool can answer:

    • “I don’t know how to solve a linear equation…”
    • “I have no idea what’s going on in class but we are doing Chapter 2. Can we start at the top?”
    • “Can you help me understand how to solve this mixture of coins problem?”
    • “I need to practice for my midterm tomorrow, through Chapter 6. Help.”
 

Unbundled: Designing Personalized Pathways for Every Learner — from gettingsmart.com by Nate McClennen “with contributions from the Getting Smart team and numerous friends and partners in the field”

Excerpts:

In this publication, we articulate the critical steps needed to unbundle the learning ecosystem, build core competencies, design learning experiences, curate new opportunities, and rebundle these experiences into coherent pathways.
.

Building the Unbundled Ecosystem

Vision

Every learner deserves an unlimited number of unbundled opportunities to explore, engage, and define experiences that advance their progress along a co-designed educational pathway. Each pathway provides equitable and personalized access to stacked learning experiences leading to post-secondary credentials and secure family-sustaining employment. Throughout the journey, supportive coaches focus on helping learners build skills to navigate with agency. In parallel, learners develop foundational skills (literacy, math), technical skills, and durable skills and connect these to challenging co-designed experiences. The breadth and depth of experiences increase over time, and, in partnership, learners and coaches map progress towards reaching community-defined goals. This vision is only enabled by an unbundled learning ecosystem.

Recommendations

Solutions already exist in the ecosystem and need to be combined and scaled. Funding models (like My Tech High), badging/credentialing at the competency level (like VLACS), coaching models (like Big Thought), and open ecosystems (like NH Learn Everywhere) provide an excellent foundation. Thus, building unbundled systems has already begun but needs systemic changes to become widely available and accepted.

      1. Build a robust competency-based system.
      2. Create a two-way marketplace for unbundled learning.
      3. Implement policy to support credit for out-of-system experiences.
      4. Invest in technology infrastructure for Learning and Employment Records.
      5. Design interoperable badging systems that connect to credentials.
 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian