Weekly Link Roundup #18.5
That's a lot of links ya got there pardner....
AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class: Super great read. This is key “The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization — to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise to a larger set of workers. Because artificial intelligence can weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can enable a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors. In essence, AI — used well — can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.” And in case you’re wondering why you should take this seriously, the author is David Autor and he is “a labor economist and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how technological change and globalization affect workers. He is also co-director of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program.” Here is the link to the NY Times piece on the same.
Why AI can (and should) lead to a renaissance in the humanities: Couldn’t agree more - see above ^
A Wharton professor explains why most jobs will be impacted by AI: “One of the first questions people ask when they start using AI seriously is whether it will affect their job. The answer is probably yes. The question is important enough that at least four different research teams have tried to quantify exactly how much overlap there is between jobs that humans can do and jobs that AI can do, using a very detailed database of the work required in 1,016 different professions. Each study has concluded the same thing: Almost all of our jobs will overlap with the capabilities of AI.”
Modal raises $25M to train corporate workers on data and AI: Time to get after it y’all. Remember, in a gold rush, look for the folks selling picks and shovels - that’s where the long money is. “Modal provides personalized technical skills training for a company’s staff, offering on-demand coaching and a pedagogical approach that groups users into semi-structured online learning communities.”
This education tech company beat its competitors to a ChatGPT plugin: EdX also introduced an AI-powered assistant on its own platform called edX Xpert, which provides additional personalized support to students, from lecture summaries to quizzes.
These Women Came to Antarctica for Science. Then the Predators Emerged: An amazingly enraging story.
YC’s Winter 2024 Demo Day confirms that we are indeed in an AI bubble: There’s some good stuff in here but I hate this headline. Bubbles aren’t based on a technology that’s got decades of research behind it, was already in widespread use before OpenAI and is now single-handedly creating ecosystems. There may be bandwagons but it’s not a bubble…IMHO.
The impressive progress of Omniverse and digital twins | Nvidia GTC 24 panel: Great and I still think even the impressive minds on this panel aren’t thinking big enough about the potential of digital twins. See here: What Happens When No One Ever Leaves the Company?
Anthropic researchers wear down AI ethics with repeated questions: Turns out AI is just like us…you can kinda do social engineering hacks with them too… “How do you get an AI to answer a question it’s not supposed to? There are many such “jailbreak” techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model (LLM) can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen less-harmful questions first.”
Top musicians among hundreds warning against replacing human artists with AI: Where have I heard someone say, that all the landscapes around AI - the tech, the biz models and even the legal environment is changing quickly? Right. I said it :-) “More than 200 musical artists — including heavy hitters such as Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Smokey Robinson — have penned an open letter to AI developers, tech firms and digital platforms to "cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists."
Read AI raises $21M to bring connected intelligence to meetings, email, and messaging: Read this sentence - “Read AI, a leader in AI-powered meeting summaries, today announced a $21 million Series A financing round…” - Things move pretty fast don’t they? Now this one > “This expansion allows Read AI’s intelligent agents to work in the background, enabling meetings, emails, and messages to interact with each other and provide users with personalized, actionable briefings tailored to their needs and priorities.” Now try to picture how short a leap it would be to link all this intelligence into a loop that can generate training content on the fly and pipe it into courses, or discussions or even have a chatbot text it to you. It’s a short leap and it’s getting shorter every day.
An A.I. Researcher Takes On Election Deepfakes: This makes me hopeful - “On Tuesday, the organization released free tools for identifying digital disinformation, with a plan to put them in the hands of journalists, fact checkers and anyone else trying to figure out what is real online.” I hope to see more free, consumer-side research and tools become available.
Opera allows users to download and use LLMs locally: I’ve long been a fan of Opera -was actually a paying customer at one point and couldn’t be happier to see them not only around but staying innovative.
Building a rig with MSI's Project Zero is a glimpse into the (almost) cable-less future of PC gaming: I’m geeky enough to read this article and go “ooooh pretty.”
Welcome to the AI gadget era: OK…you want a bubble? Here’s a bubble. I have this little belief that people are for the most part, at the limit of things they want to carry and that new functionality might be born in standalone devices but will soon be incorporated into the existing inventory.
An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Church That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years: While we’re all amazed at what AI can do, let’s not forget how amazing humans can be.
Big Tech companies form new consortium to allay fears of AI job takeovers: Reading this with cautious/jaded optimism. “And therein lies the problem with industry consortiums like this. If the goal is to allay fears of a mass AI threatening of livelihoods, tech incumbents will need to deliver a lot more than vague promises and reports. IBM has pledged to skill 2 million people in AI by 2030; Intel has said it’ll upskill over 30 million with AI in the same timeframe. “Consortium members have established forward-thinking goals with skills development and training programs to positively impact over 95 million individuals around the world over the next 10 years,” the spokesperson said. Yet it’s not clear how many AI roles will be available then.”
TikTok is bringing its dedicated STEM feed to Europe: “As TikTok continues to face increased pressure in the U.S. and the U.K., the company is signaling its commitment to fostering educational content on its app. The company announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year.”