From DSC:
Which reminds me of some graphics:

The pace has changed -- don't come onto the track in a Model T

 

Disconnect grows between law firm service and client expectation, survey finds — from legaltechnology.com by Caroline Hill

Over 90% of in-house counsel and three quarters of private practice lawyers said that the legal sector is slow to embrace data, technology and new delivery models – a significant increase on the 64% who felt the same way last year.

In terms of the disconnect, 96% of in-house counsel agreed with the statement that what law firms provide is out of kilter with what clients expect. The majority (78%) of private practice lawyers also largely agreed.


ndaOK Unleashes Next-Level Efficiency in Legal Tech with GPT-4 Powered NDA Review — from legaldive.com by Christina Pennell
AI-driven legal tool promises to reduce NDA review times by over 90%

AUSTIN, Tex. —  ndaOK, an innovator in AI-powered legal technology, today announces the launch of its next-generation non-disclosure agreement (NDA) review system. This advanced solution leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4 large multimodal model, a first among legal technology companies, offering unprecedented performance and efficiency in reviewing NDAs.

Capitalizing on the computational power and versatility of GPT-4, ndaOK accurately reviews and edits documents based on a user’s pre-determined requirements without the need for human assistance or input. This unique capability makes ndaOK faster and easier to deploy than any other AI-based contract review solution.


And here are two relevant postings that I missed a while back:

ANALYSIS: Meet the Law Schools Leading the Way in Innovation — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Francis Boustany

As law firms, businesses, and their clients adapt to the new realities of the legal and business worlds, law schools must prepare students in new ways—beyond traditional law school curricula and teaching methods—to give students an experience and education that better prepares them for their post-graduation careers.

Bloomberg Law launched its inaugural Law School Innovation Program as a means of promoting, acknowledging, and connecting the law schools that are innovating in the legal education space and providing their students with new ways of learning the law.

In this reimagined version of law school, students are taught to have ‘an entrepreneur’s mind’ — from fastcompany.com by Grace Buono
The University of Richmond program asks students not only to think like lawyers, but as entrepreneurs.

The demand for good lawyers is nothing new and, each year, law schools churn out graduates equipped with virtually the same skills as decades of law students before them. But one school is trying to change that.

The University of Richmond’s Legal Business Design Hub has students focus on the strategy, design, and operations of legal services in addition to their regular coursework, applying what the program calls “an entrepreneur’s mind” to their studies.

 

101 creative ideas to use AI in education, A crowdsourced collection — from zenodo.org by Chrissi Nerantzi, Sandra Abegglen, Marianna Karatsiori, & Antonio Martínez-Arboleda (Eds.); with thanks to George Veletsianos for this resource

101 creative ideas to use AI in education, A crowdsourced collection

As an example, here’s one of the ideas from the crowdsourced collection:

Chat with anyone in the past

Chatting with Napoleon Bonaparte

 


On a somewhat related note, also see:

Merlyn Mind launches education-focused LLMs for classroom integration of generative AI — from venturebeat.com by Victor Dey

Excerpt:

Merlyn Mind, an AI-powered digital assistant platform, announced the launch of a suite of large language models (LLMs) specifically tailored for the education sector under an open-source license.

Designing courses in an age of AI — from teachinginhighered.com by Maria Andersen
Maria Andersen shares about designing courses in an age of artificial intelligence (AI) on episode 469 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

With generative AI, we have an incredible acceleration of change happening.

Maria Andersen

 

Being a new teacher is hard. Having a good mentor can help — from npr.org by Cory Turner

Excerpt:

[Besides this article’s focus on mentorship]

In March, I reported a pair of stories from Jackson, Miss., where the school district is paying for unlicensed classroom aides to go back to school and get their master’s degrees.

In April, I told the story of a remarkable idea: A new high school in San Antonio dedicated entirely to training high-schoolers in the art and science of good teaching.

From DSC:
I would add a few more items:

  • Significantly reduce the impact of legislators on K-12. If they do vote on something that would impact schools, each legislator that votes on such legislation must first spend at least ___ week(s) observing in some of the schools that would be impacted before even starting to draft legislation and/or debate on the topic(s).
  • Instead, turn over more control and power to the students, teachers, K12 administrators, parents, and school boards.
  • Provide more choice, more control as each student can handle it.
  • Stop the one-size fits all system. Instead use AI-based systems to provide more personalized learning.
  • Develop more hybrid programs — but this time I’m talking mixing what we’ve known as public education with homeschooling and smaller learning pods. Let’s expand what’s included when we discuss “learning spaces.”
  • Strive for a love of learning — vs. competition and developing gameplayers
  • Support makerspaces, entrepreneurship, and experiments
  • Speaking of experiments, I would recommend developing more bold experiments outside of the current systems.

Along the lines of potential solutions/visions, see:

Why ‘System Transformation’ Is Likely A Pipe Dream — from michaelbhorn.substack.com by Michael Horn
But I’m for System Replacement

Excerpt:

Foremost among them is this: Despite all the fancy models and white papers around what are all the levers to pull in order to transform a system, system transformation almost never happens by changing the fundamental tenets of the system itself. Instead, it comes from replacing the system with a brand-new system.

To start to understand why, consider the complicated system in which public schools find themselves. As Thomas Arnett explained, they are one part of a vast value network of federal, state, and local regulators, voters and taxpayers, parents and students, teachers, administrators, unions, curriculum providers, school vendors, public infrastructure, higher education institutions, and more.

New ideas, programs, or entities that don’t fit into these processes, priorities, and cost structures are simply not plug-compatible into that value network. They consequently get rejected, tossed to the fringe, or altered to meet the needs of the existing actors in the value network.

 

Pathways With a Purpose: Supporting Students in Revealing Meaning — from gettingsmart.com by Michalle Blanchet

Key Points

  • As we look at career pathways for students we might do more to support students to find meaningful work.
  • Data suggests young people care about having jobs that make an impact.

Difference-making, social innovation, social entrepreneurship – there’s a thread that unites these various themes. They are purpose-driven. As we look at career pathways for students we might do more to support students to find meaningful work. Data suggests young people care about having jobs that make an impact. They want to do something that contributes positively to society, and the environment while earning a paycheck. This is something that we must nurture as educators.

 

‘Legal Tech Lists’: The 10 Most Significant Legal Tech Developments Since 2010 — from abovethelaw.com by Robert Ambrogi
Startups, AI, the cloud, and much more.

Excerpt:

Every year, I write a year-end wrap-up of the most significant developments in legal technology.

At the end of the past decade, I decided to look back on the most significant developments of the 2010s as a whole. It may well have been the most tumultuous decade ever in changing how legal services are delivered.

Here, I revisit those changes — and add a few post-2020 updates.

 

From DSC:
Before we get to Scott Belsky’s article, here’s an interesting/related item from Tobi Lutke:


Our World Shaken, Not Stirred: Synthetic entertainment, hybrid social experiences, syncing ourselves with apps, and more. — from implications.com by Scott Belsky
Things will get weird. And exciting.

Excerpts:

Recent advances in technology will stir shake the pot of culture and our day-to-day experiences. Examples? A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge, online social dynamics will become “hybrid experiences” where AI personas are equal players, and we will sync ourselves with applications as opposed to using applications.

A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge as the world’s video archives – as well as actors’ bodies and voices – will be used to train models. Expect sequels made without actor participation, a new era of ai-outfitted creative economy participants, a deluge of imaginative media that would have been cost prohibitive, and copyright wars and legislation.

Unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, some amazing stuff, and a legal dumpster fire: Now lets shift beyond Hollywood to the fast-growing long tail of prosumer-made entertainment. This is where entirely new genres of entertainment will emerge including the unauthorized sequels and spinoffs that I expect we will start seeing.


Also relevant/see:

Digital storytelling with generative AI: notes on the appearance of #AICinema — from bryanalexander.org by Bryan Alexander

Excerpt:

This is how I viewed a fascinating article about the so-called #AICinema movement.  Benj Edwards describes this nascent current and interviews one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland.  It’s a great example of people creating small stories using tech – in this case, generative AI, specifically the image creator Midjourney.

Bryan links to:

Artists astound with AI-generated film stills from a parallel universe — from arstechnica.com by Benj Edwards
A Q&A with “synthographer” Julie Wieland on the #aicinema movement.

An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called Vinyl Vengeance by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney.


From DSC:
How will text-to-video impact the Learning and Development world? Teaching and learning? Those people communicating within communities of practice? Those creating presentations and/or offering webinars?

Hmmm…should be interesting!


 

 

The above Tweet links to:

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter — from futureoflife.org
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.



However, the letter has since received heavy backlash, as there seems to be no verification in signing it. Yann LeCun from Meta denied signing the letter and completely disagreed with the premise. (source)


In Sudden Alarm, Tech Doyens Call for a Pause on ChatGPT — from wired.com by Will Knight (behind paywall)
Tech luminaries, renowned scientists, and Elon Musk warn of an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy ever-more-powerful AI systems.


 


Also relevant/see:

We have moved from Human Teachers and Human Learners, as a diad to AI Teachers and AI Learners as a tetrad.


 

Begun, the AI lawsuits have — from bloomberg.com by Brad Stone

Excerpt:

A few intellectual property lawsuits have already been lobbed at the makers of these AI services. Getty sued Stability AI for building its image database by scraping millions of online images, many protected by copyright. In a similar suit, a San Francisco-based class action firm representing three artists sued Stability AI, DeviantArt and Midjourney for training their model with billions of copyrighted images. News publishers have also criticized OpenAI for using their articles to train its AI tools.

But the complaints focus on the creation and training of databases that feed these new AI engines — the inputs. It remains to be seen how rights holders will interpret the output — Yoda’s ramblings, for example — which have been coopted by Character.AI and its ilk without permission from Walt Disney Co.-owned Lucasfilm and other rights holders.

 

 

Explore Breakthroughs in AI, Accelerated Computing, and Beyond at NVIDIA's GTC -- keynote was held on March 21 2023

Explore Breakthroughs in AI, Accelerated Computing, and Beyond at GTC — from nvidia.com
The Conference for the Era of AI and the Metaverse

 


Addendums on 3/22/23:

Generative AI for Enterprises — from nvidia.com
Custom-built for a new era of innovation and automation.

Excerpt:

Impacting virtually every industry, generative AI unlocks a new frontier of opportunities—for knowledge and creative workers—to solve today’s most important challenges. NVIDIA is powering generative AI through an impressive suite of cloud services, pre-trained foundation models, as well as cutting-edge frameworks, optimized inference engines, and APIs to bring intelligence to your enterprise applications.

NVIDIA AI Foundations is a set of cloud services that advance enterprise-level generative AI and enable customization across use cases in areas such as text (NVIDIA NeMo™), visual content (NVIDIA Picasso), and biology (NVIDIA BioNeMo™). Unleash the full potential with NeMo, Picasso, and BioNeMo cloud services, powered by NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud—the AI supercomputer.

 

Are High Schools Preparing Students for the Future? — from xqsuperschool.org; with thanks to Marisa Sergnese out on LinkedIn for this resource

Excerpt:

High school is the last stop before students enter the real world of college, career, and adult life. It’s where adolescents are supposed to develop both academically and socially, so they’ll graduate prepared for all the future has to offer. But does it?

Along with students, educators, families, and employers across the country, we at XQ believe it’s time to rethink high school to ensure that it does. We invited our readers to weigh in and here is what they told us:

Out of more than 300 participants polled, the vast majority—93 percent—said they didn’t think high schools are fully preparing students to succeed in the future.

That’s a dramatically high percentage—and it lines up with current research. A study from the Hechinger Report reveals that the vast majority of the nation’s two- and four-year colleges report enrolling students who are unprepared for college-level work. Furthermore, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that up to 65 percent of community college students take at least one remedial course.

 


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.


 

Why The Education Economy Is The Next Big Thing For The American Workforce — from fastcompany.com by Brandon Busteed
How can integrating our educational system, our employers, and our job creators affect our modern economy?

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Though the economy and education have long been topics of top concern to Americans, we haven’t created strong linkages between the two.

The topics are more like two castles with a large moat between them. Yet there is nothing more important we can do as a country than to build the world’s most effective “educonomy,” which would seamlessly integrate our educational system, our employers, and our job creators.

All told, we collected the voices of close to 1 million Americans on this subject in the past year alone. And what we’ve learned is alarming:

Student engagement in school drops precipitously from 5th grade through 12th grade. About three quarters of elementary school kids (76%) are engaged in school, while only 44% of high school kids are engaged. The longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. If we were doing this right, the trend would be going in the exact opposite direction.

From DSC:
I appreciated the imagery of the economy and education being like two castles with a large moat between them. I, like many others, also use the term siloed to describe our various learning ecosystems — PreK-12, higher education and vocational programming, and the corporate/business world (I realize I could also include those who work in other areas such as the government, but hopefully folks get the gist of what I’m trying to say).

But here’s the most disturbing part (albeit likely not a surprise to those working within K-12 environments):

About seven in 10 K-12 teachers are not engaged in their work (69%), and as a profession, teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their “opinions count” at work and their “supervisors create an open and trusting environment.” We also found that teacher engagement is the most important driver of student engagement. We’ll never improve student engagement until we boost teachers’ own workplace engagement first.

Our older daughter works in an elementary school where several of the teachers left prior to Christmas and more have announced that they are leaving after this academic year. For teachers to leave halfway through the year, you know something is majorly wrong!

I think that legislators are part of the problem, as they straight-jacket teachers, principals, and administrators with all kinds of standardized testing.

Standardized testing is like a wrecking ball on our educational systems -- impacting things like our students' and teachers' sense of joy, play, wonder, and motivation

I would think that such testing dictates the pace and the content and the overall agendas out there. I don’t recall taking nearly as many standardized tests as our youth do today. Looking back, each of my teachers was engaged and seemed to be happy and enthusiastic. I don’t think that’s the case any longer. Let’s ask the teachers — not the legislators — why that is the case and what they would recommend to change things (before it’s too late).

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian