Weekly (and then some) Link Roundup
Pithy precis of potentially powerful perhaps pedestrian prognostications and pointers
Dawned on me that it might be helpful to explain just a tiny bit of how I pick stuff to look at or include here. I used to call my tabs a mental heat map of things that caught my attention and that if I started having multiple tabs open on the same topic, that was a vector of import. Then I went to the Institute for the Future and found out they had a much more elegant definition of what I was doing - I was finding Signals. To wit:
"A signal is typically a small or local innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scale and geographic distribution. A signal can be a new product, a new practice, a new market strategy, a new policy, or new technology. It can be an event, a local trend, or an organization. It can also be a recently revealed problem or state of affairs. In short, it is something that catches our attention at one scale and in one locale and points to larger implications for other locales or even globally.”
An Opinionated Guide to Which AI to Use: ChatGPT Anniversary Edition: tl;dr - ChatGPT 4 via Bing. >Read this after you read the first link.
StabilityAI launches new AI chatbot — this one runs on your laptop and generates text faster than you can read: I just wonder how long it will be before small model AIs will just be part of the gold load from IT when you start a new job. Or an option when you buy a new laptop. Would you like to include an extended warranty and an AI with that purchase? One question will be, will employees have any right to portability of those AIs when they leave a company?
Google's AI-infused NotebookLM note-taking app is open to everyone in the US: Just starting to play with this one… “Google’s NotebookLM, a note-taking app that’s infused with a large language model, is now available to everyone in the US. The company built NotebookLM to only pull information from a custom dataset. So you might use it, for instance, to help write a paper based on a specific set of PDFs and only rely on details from those documents.” >Again, I’m betting that within 12 months, these things start to be standard issue on new corporate laptops. Another review.
Rhythms launches out of stealth to make successful team habits replicable: Seems like “things that will eventually be standard issue on corporate laptops” is a big theme of the week. “Rhythms orchestrates the set of activities that align with a particular rhythm,” Vellore told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Rhythms’ AI-powered … system will transform the way teams work, dramatically simplify everyday workflows and allow organizations of all types to advance to new frontiers of performance.” >What happens when the Rhythm of Business is automated for everyone?
Bluesky says it will allow users to opt out of the public web interface after backlash: Not a huge story per se but another reminder that very smart people (the developers of Blue Sky) can also totally misread how their own users are thinking about the platform (in this case, privacy first).
TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen: Another warning of a story - this one is about relative size and how we can misunderstand the impact of something overall just because it’s ‘viral’ in our little corner of the net.
Cara’s Glaze Integration Provides Artists Protection Against AI Scraping: The looming battle won’t be between humans and AIs but between the AI armies of two different camps of humans.
Call for Papers <> Futures in Transition: Designing Transitions and Future-Making for Systems-Level Change: “In partnership with the Transition Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and the UH Foresight Activation Lab at the University of Houston and coming out of the WFSF 50th Anniversary Conference “Exploring Liminalities: Creating Spaces for Unlimited Futures”, we are pleased to invite you to participate in the following special issue of the World Futures Review: Futures in Transition: Designing Transitions and Future-Making for Systems-Level Change.”
EU settles on rules for generative AI, moves to surveillance: EU setting the pace on new regs….
OpenAI Boss Sam Altman Declared Time’s CEO Of The Year 2023 And The Internet Erupts In Memes: Should’ve been Nadella.
Respell wants to help non-technical end users spin up AI-powered workflows: “That’s because he sees a market where there are way too many tools built by engineers for engineers. He wanted to change that with Respell, using the power of generative AI to help less technical users build workflows very quickly by simply describing what they want to do and letting the software do the rest.” So I consider this a fairly important signal. Think about it - this will require people who not only understand the workflows but who will be able to use the tools to automate what can be automated. This means we will have to honest about what our workflows are. We will confront the BS and bloat in our systems and we will also find out that not moving as fast as possible is sometimes a good thing. This will create new roles and disrupt old flows. >More on AI-infused workflows.
Kyron Learning secures $14.6M to expand its conversational AI technology: #EdTech signal > “Kyron Learning, an AI-based learning startup, announced today its $14.6 million Series A funding round plus an $850,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The new capital will further develop the platform’s generative AI capabilities and build out its K-12 math curriculum.”
Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever: “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” ~ Philip Graham >Great reporting by the NYT >See also: The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI.
HP executive boasts that its controversial ink subscription model is "locking" in customers: See also Unauthorized Bread and “Enshittifcation”
The History of Human-Made Ice: I think we need to think more about the things we typically don’t think about. Things that are critical to our way of life but that disappeared into the background.
The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the Limits of Logic: “Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective…” ~Benjamin Labatut
Newsletter platform Substack takes aim at YouTube: “Substack, a platform created largely for newsletters, is rolling out a suite of new video creation and editing tools — a sign of how critical video has become to gaining audience on the internet.”
Use GenAI to Improve Scenario Planning: While I agree, I think this is an area that demands the presence of someone trained in foresight or scenario planning and a transparent knowledge about the training data for the LLM.
How to build knowledge graphs with large language models (LLMs): “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could collate your vast amounts of information and interconnect it in a web of knowledge, where every piece of data is linked to another, creating a map that helps you understand complex relationships and extract meaningful insights. This is the power of a knowledge graph, and it’s within your reach by combining the strengths of graph databases and advanced language models. Let’s explore how these two technologies can work together to transform the way we handle and analyze data.”
Casual, distant, aesthetically limited: Five ways smartphone photography is changing how we see the world: Love this kind of work - “But compare the camera roll of a 60-year-old with that of a 13-year-old, as we recently did, and you'll find some surprising differences.”
Study: Immersive engagement in mixed reality can be measured with reaction time: “In the real world/digital world cross-over of mixed reality, a user's immersive engagement with the program is called presence. Now, UMass Amherst researchers are the first to identify reaction time as a potential presence measurement tool. Their findings, published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, have implications for calibrating mixed reality to the user in real time.”