DC: I wonder if this will come standard in the future. Nice feature.#accessibility https://t.co/vC4xoMLQYI
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) April 24, 2023
DC: I wonder if this will come standard in the future. Nice feature.#accessibility https://t.co/vC4xoMLQYI
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) April 24, 2023
How ChatGPT3 Impacts the Future of L&D in an AI World — from learningguild.com by Markus Bernhardt and Clark Quinn
Excerpt:
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are promising great things for learning. The potential here is impressive, but there also exist many questions and insecurities around deploying AI technology for learning: What can AI do? Where is it best utilized? What are the limits? And particularly: What does that leave for the instructional designer and other human roles in learning, such as coaching and training?
We want to suggest that these developments are for the benefit of everyone—from organizational development strategy devised in the C-suite, via content creation/curation by instructional designers, right through to the learners, as well as coaches and trainers who work with the learners.
Also somewhat relevant/see:
“Tech predictions for 2023 and beyond” — from allthingsdistributed.com by Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon
Excerpts:
Amazon ups its cloud training investments — from workshift.opencampusmedia.org by Byelyse Ashburn
Amazon Web Services just launched a new skills center near D.C. and is expanding both its in-person and online training programs for cloud careers.
Excerpt:
The big idea: The skills center is just one part of AWS’ plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars providing free training in cloud computing to 29 million people globally by 2025. In the past year, the company has dramatically increased its free cloud skills offerings, adding AWS Skill Builder, an online library of 500-plus self-paced courses. It’s also twice expanded re/Start, its cohort-based training program for workers who are unemployed or underemployed.
Thus far, the company has helped more than 13 million people gain cloud skills for free through its various offerings—seven million more than this time last year.
Inside a radical new project to democratize AI — from technologyreview.com by Melissa Heikkilä
A group of over 1,000 AI researchers has created a multilingual large language model bigger than GPT-3—and they’re giving it out for free.
Excerpt:
PARIS — This is as close as you can get to a rock concert in AI research. Inside the supercomputing center of the French National Center for Scientific Research, on the outskirts of Paris, rows and rows of what look like black fridges hum at a deafening 100 decibels.
They form part of a supercomputer that has spent 117 days gestating a new large language model (LLM) called BLOOM that its creators hope represents a radical departure from the way AI is usually developed.
Unlike other, more famous large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s LaMDA, BLOOM (which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) is designed to be as transparent as possible, with researchers sharing details about the data it was trained on, the challenges in its development, and the way they evaluated its performance. OpenAI and Google have not shared their code or made their models available to the public, and external researchers have very little understanding of how these models are trained.
Another item re: AI:
Not my job: AI researchers building surveillance tech and deepfakes resist ethical concerns — from protocol.com by Kate Kaye
The computer vision research community is behind on AI ethics, but it’s not just a research problem. Practitioners say the ethics disconnect persists as young computer vision scientists make their way into the ranks of corporate AI.
For the first time, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference — a global event that attracted companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla to recruit new AI talent this year — “strongly encouraged”researchers whose papers were accepted to the conference to include a discussion about potential negative societal impacts of their research in their submission forms.
Radar Trends to Watch: June 2022 — from oreilly.com
Excerpt:
The explosion of large models continues. Several developments are especially noteworthy. DeepMind’s Gato model is unique in that it’s a single model that’s trained for over 600 different tasks; whether or not it’s a step towards general intelligence (the ensuing debate may be more important than the model itself), it’s an impressive achievement. Google Brain’s Imagen creates photorealistic images that are impressive, even after you’ve seen what DALL-E 2 can do. And Allen AI’s Macaw (surely an allusion to Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru’s Stochastic Parrots paper) is open source, one tenth the size of GPT-3, and claims to be more accurate. Facebook/Meta is also releasing an open source large language model, including the model’s training log, which records in detail the work required to train it.
Inclusive Hiring in Tech: How to Write More Inclusive Job Descriptions — from one of our nieces, Ms. Jill Bender
Addendum on 3/8/22:
Amazon Boosts Upskilling Opportunities for Hourly Employees by Partnering with More Than 140 Universities and Colleges to Fully Fund Tuition — from press.aboutamazon.com
Excerpt:
Also see:
Amazon’s announcement is an eye-catching development in the yearslong effort across higher education to enroll more adult learners and increase the share of the U.S. population that has some education beyond high school. While the jury’s still out on whether tuition-benefit programs deliver on all their promises, as most are relatively new, they have become an increasingly popular offering for major corporations. Last fall, Amazon announced a $1.2 billion investment to expand its efforts.
Amazon employees will have choices. They can enroll at a local participating college and take a few courses en route to a certificate or credential, or they can enroll in a full associate- or bachelor’s-degree program
What’s ahead for AI, VR, NFTs, and more? — from oreilly.com by Mike Loukides
Here are some predictions for tech in 2022.
Excerpt:
Just as we saw new professions and job classifications when the web appeared in the ’90s, we’ll see new professions and services appear as a result of AI—specifically, as a result of natural language processing. We don’t yet know what these new professions will look like or what new skills they’ll require. But they’ll almost certainly involve collaboration between humans and intelligent machines.
Also see:
Amazon Gift Signals Confidence in Community Colleges — from insidehighered.com by Suzanne Smalley
The company is giving $3 million to kick-start a computer science bachelor’s degree program at community and technical colleges throughout Washington State.
Excerpt:
Amazon is funding a pilot that will support the launch of new computer science bachelor’s degree programs at community and technical colleges in Seattle and across Washington State, an investment meant to address a workforce shortage plaguing the e-commerce giant and other employers who can’t find qualified candidates for unfilled computer science positions.