From DSC: I also wanted to highlight the item below, which Barsee also mentioned above, as it will likely hit the world of education and training as well:
Last night, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA gave his very first live keynote in 4-years.
The most show-stopping moment from the event was when he showed off the real-time AI in video games. A human speaks, the NPC responds, in real time and the dialogue was generated with AI on the fly. pic.twitter.com/TDoUM1zSiy
In the fifth free webinar on AI for Education, I am joined by Dean Pearman, Head of Education at Beaconhills College and Tom Oliphant, Head of Technology and Enterprise at St John’s Grammar School. We explore questions about creativity, design and the new skills that are emerging. Join us to invest in your AI Literacy. Expand your toolset, broaden your understanding, and challenge your thinking.
You are watching the fourth free webinar, a dialogue about AI for education with Sophie Fenton, Steve Brophy and hosted by Tom Barrett Building Blocks – key AI concepts to learn. Practical frameworks for navigating the challenges of AI for education. Be part of a dialogue on provocations about AI and human centred education, truth and identity.
Using ChatGPT in Math Lesson Planning — from edutopia.org by Kristen Moore Artificial intelligence tools are useful beyond language arts classes. Math teachers can use them to save time and create interesting lessons.
Democratic Inputs to AI — from openai.com Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.
AI Canon — from a16z.com (Andreessen Horowitz) by Derrick Harris, Matt Bornstein, and Guido Appenzeller; via The Neuron newsletter
Excerpts:
Research in artificial intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s difficult for AI experts to keep up with everything new being published, and even harder for beginners to know where to start. So, in this post, we’re sharing a curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI. We call it the “AI Canon” because these papers, blog posts, courses, and guides have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years.
NVIDIA ACE for Games is a new foundry for intelligent in-game characters powered by generative AI. Developers of middleware, tools, and games can use NVIDIA ACE for Games to build and deploy customized speech, conversation, and animation AI models in their software and games.
From DSC: I can’t wait to see this type of thing integrated into educational games/simulations/training.
Last night, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA gave his very first live keynote in 4-years.
The most show-stopping moment from the event was when he showed off the real-time AI in video games. A human speaks, the NPC responds, in real time and the dialogue was generated with AI on the fly. pic.twitter.com/TDoUM1zSiy
Bill Gates says AI is poised to destroy search engines and Amazon — from futurism.com by Victor Tangermann Who will win the AI [competition]? (DSC: I substituted the word competition here, as that’s what it is. It’s not a war, it’s a part of America’s way of doing business.)
“Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” Gates said during a Goldman Sachs event on AI in San Francisco this week, as quoted by CNBC.
These AI assistants could “read the stuff you don’t have time to read,” he said, allowing users to get to information without having to use a search engine like Google.
The online learning platform edX introduced two new tools on Friday based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology: an edX plugin for ChatGPT and a learning assistant embedded in the edX platform, called Xpert.
According to the company, its plugin will enable ChatGPT Plus subscribers to discover educational programs and explore learning content such as videos and quizzes across edX’s library of 4,200 courses.
Bing is now the default search for ChatGPT— from theverge.com by Tom Warren; via superhuman.beehiiv.com The close partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI leads to plug-in interoperability and search defaults.
Excerpt:
OpenAI will start using Bing as the default search experience for ChatGPT. The new search functionality will be rolling out to ChatGPT Plus users today and will be enabled for all free ChatGPT users soon through a plug-in in ChatGPT.
Students with mobility challenges may find it easier to use generative AI tools — such as ChatGPT or Elicit — to help them conduct research if that means they can avoid a trip to the library.
Students who have trouble navigating conversations — such as those along the autism spectrum — could use these tools for “social scripting.” In that scenario, they might ask ChatGPT to give them three ways to start a conversation with classmates about a group project.
Students who have trouble organizing their thoughts might benefit from asking a generative AI tool to suggest an opening paragraph for an essay they’re working on — not to plagiarize, but to help them get over “the terror of the blank page,” says Karen Costa, a faculty-development facilitator who, among other things, focuses on teaching, learning, and living with ADHD. “AI can help build momentum.”
ChatGPT is good at productive repetition. That is a practice most teachers use anyway to reinforce learning. But AI can take that to the next level by allowing students who have trouble processing information to repeatedly generate examples, definitions, questions, and scenarios of concepts they are learning.
It’s not all on you to figure this out and have all the answers. Partner with your students and explore this together.
There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own.
The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step.
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From DSC: The idea of personalized storytelling is highly intriguing to me. If you write a story for someone with their name and character in it, they will likely be even more engaged with the story/content. Our daughter recently did this with a substitute teacher, who she really wanted to thank before she left (for another assignment at another school). I thought it was very creative of her.
We’re building resources to teach AI literacies for high school and college instructors and assembling them into a full curriculum that will be deployed in a course with the National Educational Equity Lab offered in Fall 2023. .
AI video is getting insanely powerful.
Soon, you’ll be able to create a Hollywood-grade movie from your pocket.
Here’s the most breathtaking AI-generated videos I’ve seen:
— The AI Solopreneur (@aisolopreneur) May 11, 2023
ChatGPT has changed the world.
It does lack in some areas, but my favorite use case is leveraging it to teach me things twice as fast.
Here are the 10 best prompts to learn anything faster:
Why I’m Excited About ChatGPT— from insidehighered.com by Jennie Young Here are 10 ways ChatGPT will be a boon to first-year writing instruction, Jennie Young writes.
Excerpt:
But from my perspective as a first-year writing program director, I’m excited about how this emerging technology will help students from all kinds of educational backgrounds learn and focus on higher-order thinking skills faster. Here are 10 reasons I’m excited about ChatGPT.
? stfu and take my money
This is the most impressive campaign I’ve seen from a mega brand so far using AI & StableDiffusion.
edX Debuts Two AI-Powered Learning Assistants Built on ChatGPT — from press.edx.org; with thanks to Matthew Tower for this resource edX plugin launches in ChatGPT plugin store to give users access to content and course discovery edX Xpert delivers AI-powered learning and customer support within the edX platform
Excerpt:
LANHAM, Md. – May 12, 2023 – edX, a leading global online learning platform from 2U, Inc. (Nasdaq: TWOU), today announced the debut of two AI-powered innovations: the new edX plugin for ChatGPT and edX Xpert, an AI-powered learning assistant on the edX platform. Both tools leverage the technology of AI research and deployment company OpenAI to deliver real-time academic support and course discovery to help learners achieve their goals.
Let’s look at some ideas of how law schools could use AI tools like Khanmigo or ChatGPT to support lectures, assignments, and discussions, or use plagiarism detection software to maintain academic integrity.
In particular, we’re betting on four trends for AI and L&D.
Rapid content production
Personalized content
Detailed, continuous feedback
Learner-driven exploration
In a world where only 7 percent of the global population has a college degree, and as many as three quarters of workers don’t feel equipped to learn the digital skills their employers will need in the future, this is the conversation people need to have.
…
Taken together, these trends will change the cost structure of education and give learning practitioners new superpowers. Learners of all backgrounds will be able to access quality content on any topic and receive the ongoing support they need to master new skills. Even small L&D teams will be able to create programs that have both deep and broad impact across their organizations.
Generative AI is set to play a pivotal role in the transformation of educational technologies and assisted learning. Its ability to personalize learning experiences, power intelligent tutoring systems, generate engaging content, facilitate collaboration, and assist in assessment and grading will significantly benefit both students and educators.
With today’s advancements in generative AI, that vision of personalized learning may not be far off from reality. We spoke with Dr. Kim Round, associate dean of the Western Governors University School of Education, about the potential of technologies like ChatGPT for learning, the need for AI literacy skills, why learning experience designers have a leg up on AI prompt engineering, and more. And get ready for more Star Trek references, because the parallels between AI and Sci Fi are futile to resist.
NVIDIA today introduced a wave of cutting-edge AI research that will enable developers and artists to bring their ideas to life — whether still or moving, in 2D or 3D, hyperrealistic or fantastical.
Around 20 NVIDIA Research papers advancing generative AI and neural graphics — including collaborations with over a dozen universities in the U.S., Europe and Israel — are headed to SIGGRAPH 2023, the premier computer graphics conference, taking place Aug. 6-10 in Los Angeles.
The papers include generative AI models that turn text into personalized images; inverse rendering tools that transform still images into 3D objects; neural physics models that use AI to simulate complex 3D elements with stunning realism; and neural rendering models that unlock new capabilities for generating real-time, AI-powered visual details.
Also relevant to the item from Nvidia (above), see:
This all means that a time may be coming when companies need to compensate star employees for their input to AI tools rather than their just their output, which may not ultimately look much different from their AI-assisted colleagues.
“It wouldn’t be far-fetched for them to put even more of a premium on those people because now that kind of skill gets amplified and multiplied throughout the organization,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a Stanford professor and one of the study’s authors. “Now that top worker could change the whole organization.”
Of course, there’s a risk that companies won’t heed that advice. If AI levels performance, some executives may flatten the pay scale accordingly. Businesses would then potentially save on costs — but they would also risk losing their top performers, who wouldn’t be properly compensated for the true value of their contributions under this system.
WASHINGTON, April 24 – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s refusal to issue patents for inventions his artificial intelligence system created.
The justices turned away Thaler’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that he has said it generated.
Geoffrey Hinton, a VP and engineering fellow at Google and a pioneer of deep learning who developed some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern AI, is leaving the company after 10 years, the New York Times reported today.
According to the Times, Hinton says he has new fears about the technology he helped usher in and wants to speak openly about them, and that a part of him now regrets his life’s work.
***
In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
What Is Agent Assist? — from blogs.nvidia.com Agent assist technology uses AI and machine learning to provide facts and make real-time suggestions that help human agents across retail, telecom and other industries conduct conversations with customers.
Excerpt:
Agent assist technology uses AI and machine learning to provide facts and make real-time suggestions that help human agents across telecom, retail and other industries conduct conversations with customers.
It can integrate with contact centers’ existing applications, provide faster onboarding for agents, improve the accuracy and efficiency of their responses, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
From DSC: Is this type of thing going to provide a learning assistant/agent as well?
AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard are excellent at crafting sentences that sound like human writing. But they often present falsehoods as facts and have inconsistent logic, and that can be hard to spot.
One way around this problem, a new study suggests, is to change the way the AI presents information. Getting users to engage more actively with the chatbot’s statements might help them think more critically about that content.
In the most recent update, Adobe is now using AI to Denoise, Enhance and create Super Resolution or 2x the file size of the original photo. Click here to read Adobe’s post and below are photos of how I used the new AI Denoise on a photo. The big trick is that photos have to be shot in RAW.
Microsoft has launched a GPT-4 enhanced Edge browser.
By integrating OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology with Microsoft Edge, you can now use ChatGPT as a copilot in your Bing browser. This delivers superior search results, generates content, and can even transform your copywriting skills (read on to find out how).
Benefits mentioned include: Better Search, Complete Answers, and Creative Spark.
The new interactive chat feature means you can get the complete answer you are looking for by refining your search by asking for more details, clarity, and ideas.
From DSC: I have to say that since the late 90’s, I haven’t been a big fan of web browsers from Microsoft. (I don’t like how Microsoft unfairly buried Netscape Navigator and the folks who had out-innovated them during that time.) As such, I don’t use Edge so I can’t fully comment on the above article.
But I do have to say that this is the type of thing that may make me reevaluate my stance regarding Microsoft’s browsers. Integrating GPT-4 into their search/chat functionalities seems like it would be a very solid, strategic move — at least as of late April 2023.
Speaking of new items coming from Microsoft, also see:
[On 4/27/23], Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features.
Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.
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Designer will remain free during the preview period, Microsoft says — it’s available via the Designer website and in Microsoft’s Edge browser through the sidebar. Once the Designer app is generally available, it’ll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and have “some” functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn’t elaborate.
A few current categories of AI in Edtech particularly jump out:
Teacher Productivity and Joy: Tools to make educators’ lives easier (and more fun?) by removing some of the more rote tasks of teaching, like lesson planning (we counted at least 8 different tools for lesson planning), resource curation and data collection.
Personalization and Learning Delivery: Tools to tailor instruction to the particular interests, learning preferences and preferred media consumption of students. This includes tools that convert text to video, video to text, text to comic books, Youtube to notes, and many more.
Study and Course Creation Tools: Tools for learners to automatically make quizzes, flashcards, notes or summaries of material, or even to automatically create full courses from a search term.
AI Tutors, Chatbots and Teachers: There will be no shortage of conversational AI “copilots” (which may take many guises) to support students in almost any learning context. Many Edtech companies launched their own during the conference. Possible differentiators here could be personality, safety, privacy, access to a proprietary or specific data set, or bots built on proprietary LLMs.
Simplifying Complex Processes: One of the most inspiring conversations of the conference for me was with Tiffany Green, founder of Uprooted Academy, about how AI can and should be used to remove bureaucratic barriers to college for underrepresented students (for example, used to autofill FAFSA forms, College Applications, to search for schools and access materials, etc). This is not the only complex bureaucratic process in education.
Educational LLMs: The race is on to create usable large language models for education that are safe, private, appropriate and classroom-ready. Merlyn Mind is working on this, and companies that make LLMs are sprouting up in other sectors…
This week I spent a few days at the ASU/GSV conference and ran into 7,000 educators, entrepreneurs, and corporate training people who had gone CRAZY for AI.
No, I’m not kidding. This community, which makes up people like training managers, community college leaders, educators, and policymakers is absolutely freaked out about ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and all sorts of issues with AI. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of this. But the frenzy is unprecedented: this is bigger than the excitement at the launch of the i-Phone.
Second, the L&D market is about to get disrupted like never before. I had two interactive sessions with about 200 L&D leaders and I essentially heard the same thing over and over. What is going to happen to our jobs when these Generative AI tools start automatically building content, assessments, teaching guides, rubrics, videos, and simulations in seconds?
The answer is pretty clear: you’re going to get disrupted. I’m not saying that L&D teams need to worry about their careers, but it’s very clear to me they’re going to have to swim upstream in a big hurry. As with all new technologies, it’s time for learning leaders to get to know these tools, understand how they work, and start to experiment with them as fast as you can.
Speaking of the ASU+GSV Summit, see this posting from Michael Moe:
Last week, the 14th annual ASU+GSV Summit hosted over 7,000 leaders from 70+ companies well as over 900 of the world’s most innovative EdTech companies. Below are some of our favorite speeches from this year’s Summit…
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard—AI is infiltrating the lives of billions.
The 1% who understand it will run the world.
Here’s a list of key terms to jumpstart your learning:
Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.The current AI systems are already very good at figuring out your intent, and they are getting better. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer. In fact, it already isn’t in GPT-4 and Bing. If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel, what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far.
…
The best way to use AI systems is not to craft the perfect prompt, but rather to use it interactively. Try asking for something. Then ask the AI to modify or adjust its output. Work with the AI, rather than trying to issue a single command that does everything you want. The more you experiment, the better off you are. Just use the AI a lot, and it will make a big difference – a lesson my class learned as they worked with the AI to create essays.
From DSC: Agreed –> “Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.” The User Interfaces that are/will be appearing will help greatly in this regard.
From DSC: Bizarre…at least for me in late April of 2023:
FaceTiming live with AI… This app came across the @ElunaAI Discord and I was very impressed with its responsiveness, natural expression and language, etc…
Feels like the beginning of another massive wave in consumer AI products.
The rise of AI-generated music has ignited legal and ethical debates, with record labels invoking copyright law to remove AI-generated songs from platforms like YouTube.
Tech companies like Google face a conundrum: should they take down AI-generated content, and if so, on what grounds?
Some artists, like Grimes, are embracing the change, proposing new revenue-sharing models and utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts for royalties.
The future of AI-generated music presents both challenges and opportunities, with the potential to create new platforms and genres, democratize the industry, and redefine artist compensation.
The Need for AI PD — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Educators need training on how to effectively incorporate artificial intelligence into their teaching practice, says Lance Key, an award-winning educator.
“School never was fun for me,” he says, hoping that as an educator he could change that with his students. “I wanted to make learning fun.” This ‘learning should be fun’ philosophy is at the heart of the approach he advises educators take when it comes to AI.
At its 11th annual conference in 2023, educational company Coursera announced it is adding ChatGPT-powered interactive ed tech tools to its learning platform, including a generative AI coach for students and an AI course-building tool for teachers. It will also add machine learning-powered translation, expanded VR immersive learning experiences, and more.
Coursera Coach will give learners a ChatGPT virtual coach to answer questions, give feedback, summarize video lectures and other materials, give career advice, and prepare them for job interviews. This feature will be available in the coming months.
From DSC: Yes…it will be very interesting to see how tools and platforms interact from this time forth. The term “integration” will take a massive step forward, at least in my mind.
Here’s why Karpathy recently said “AutoGPT is the next frontier of prompt engineering”
AutoGPT is the equivalent of giving GPT-based models a memory and a body. You can now give a task to an AI agent and have it autonomously come up… pic.twitter.com/mYIJm2IEZy
AutoGPT has been making waves on the internet recently, trending on both GitHub and Twitter. If you thought ChatGPT was crazy, AutoGPT is about to blow your mind.
AutoGPT creates AI “agents” that operate automatically on their own and complete tasks for you. In case you’ve missed our previous issues covering it, here’s a quick rundown:
It’s open-sourced [code]
It works by chaining together LLM “thoughts”
It has internet access, long-term and short-term memory, access to popular websites, and file storage
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From DSC: I want to highlight that paper from Stanford, as I’ve seen it cited several times recently:.
From DSC: And for a rather fun idea/application of these emerging technologies, see:
Quick Prompt: Kitchen Design — from linusekenstam.substack.com by Linus Ekenstam Midjourney Prompt. Create elegant kitchen photos using this starting prompt. Make it your own, experiment, add, remove and tinker to create new ideas.
…which made me wonder how we might use these techs in the development of new learning spaces (or in renovating current learning spaces).
From DSC: On a much different — but still potential — note, also see:
Many experts in A.I. and computer science say the technology is likely a watershed moment for human society. But 36% don’t mean that as a positive, warning that decisions made by A.I. could lead to “nuclear-level catastrophe,” according to researchers surveyed in an annual report on the technology by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered A.I., published earlier this month.
AutoGPTs are improving at a blazingly fast speed and could soon transform the face of business.
Learning happens throughout life and is not isolated to the K-12 or higher education sectors. Yet, often, validations of learning only happen in these specific areas. The system of evaluation based on courses, grades, and credit serves as a poor proxy for communicating skills given the variation in course content, grade inflation, and inclusion of participation and extra credit within course grades.
Credentialed learning provides a way to accurately document human capability for all learners throughout their life. A lifetime credentialed learning ecosystem provides better granularity around learning, better documentation of the learning, and more relevance for both the credential recipient and reviewer. This improves the match between higher education and/or employment with the individual, while also providing a more clear and accurate lifetime learning pathway.
With a fully-credentialed system, individuals can own well-documented evidence of a lifetime of learning and choose what and when to share this data. This technology enables every learner to have more opportunities for finding the best career match without today’s existing barriers around cost, access, and proxies.
Addendum on 4/28/23 — speaking of credentials:
First Rung — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain New research shows stacking credentials pays off for low-income learners.
Stacking credentials pays off for many low-income students, new research finds, but only if learners move up the education ladder. Also, Kansas is hoping a new grant program will attract more companies to participate in microinternships.
Imagine introducing high-quality AI tutors into the flipped classroom model. These AI-powered systems have the potential to significantly enhance the learning experience for students and make flipped classrooms even more effective. They provide personalized learning, where AI tutors can tailor instruction to each student’s unique needs while continually adjusting content based on performance. This means that students can engage with the content at home more effectively, ensuring they come to class better prepared and ready to dive into hands-on activities or discussions.
With AI tutors taking care of some of the content delivery outside of class, teachers can devote more time to fostering meaningful interactions with their students during class. They can also use insights from the AI tutors to identify areas where students might need extra support or guidance, enabling them to provide more personalized and effective instruction. And with AI assistance, they can design better active learning opportunities in class to make sure learnings stick.
Also relevant/see:
ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it — from technologyreview.com by Will Douglas Heaven The narrative around cheating students doesn’t tell the whole story. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.
Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.
What the Past Can Teach Us About the Future of AI and Education — from campustechnology.com by Dr. David Wiley Current attitudes toward generative AI hearken back to early skepticism about the impact of the internet on education. Both then and now, technology has created challenges but also opportunities that can’t be ignored.
