Weekly Link Roundup #26
More and more bots/agents that will work for you and a laptop with no screen
HR’s new operating model: I noticed that this is from 2022 but it just popped in my LI feed so I figured I’d weigh in. Whenever I see articles talking about a transformation in HR or something, I look for a couple of things. First I look to see if there is any proposal in way, shape or form, to address the foundational fact that the only way employees can be accounted for in our payroll/finance systems is as costs, liabilities to be managed. If that's not in there, then its really just re-arranging deck chairs. Second, I like to look for any conscious effort at recognizing that post-pandemic, we've been confronted with the truth that our "workforce" isn't some monolith but actually a number of different demographics each with its own intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Not in there? More deck chairs. Is there any effort in the grand, transformational plan to recognize that hybrid work is here to stay and that we need to put serious work into thinking about building culture at a distance? Not in there either. Not very transformational is it?
FCC ends affordable internet program due to lack of funds: Way to go America. <insert mega shameful facepalm here>
How a Self-Published Book Broke ‘All the Rules’ and Became a Best Seller: Super interesting read you know if you have like customers and stuff. This goes right at the shift in the relationship between buyer and seller (at any level) that the Cluetrain Manifesto was talking about years ago.
Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5 billion buyout: “It's also a company whose future could be dimmed by advances in artificial intelligence, since some of the developer skills it teaches are becoming automated.”
Hollywood Nightmare? New Streaming Service Lets Viewers Create Their Own Shows Using AI: This one kind of really got me thinking about the impact something like this could have on L&D. Wrote a whole other post about it here.
The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills: Kind of a nice intro to the main models out right now if you haven’t been playing with them > > “We put five of the leading bots through a series of blind tests to determine their usefulness. While we hoped to find the Caitlin Clark of chatbots, that wasn’t exactly what happened. They excel in some areas and fail in others. Plus, they’re all evolving rapidly. During our testing, OpenAI released an upgrade to ChatGPT that improved its speed and current-events knowledge.”
Anthropic’s AI now lets you create bots to work for you: “Anthropic is releasing a new feature for its AI chatbot Claude that will let anyone create an email assistant, a bot to purchase shoes, or other personalized solutions. It’s called “tool use” (or the nerdier “function calling”), and it hooks up to any external API of your choosing.” > > It’s coming for your To Do list - what will you do when all that is automated?
The Spacetop G1 Arrives This Fall. We Try the AR Laptop With No Screen: “There’s no physical display—just a 100-inch virtual screen you can see through the glasses, floating over the real world.” > > This is getting close. Maybe next generation but working from home could take another leap forward here.
Perplexity will research and write reports: This is a lovely new feature and I can see enterprise Pages growing faster than corporate wikis. “Pages taps Perplexity’s AI search models to find information and then creates what I can loosely call a research presentation that can be published and shared with others. In a blog post, Perplexity says it designed Pages to help educators, researchers, and “hobbyists” share their knowledge.”
An interview with the most prolific jailbreaker of ChatGPT and other leading LLMs: Meet your new attack vector > > In short, jailbreaking an LLM is a way of removing any guardrails that have been placed on responses that can be generated by the LLM “allowing them to produce all sorts of interesting, risky — some might even say dangerous or harmful — responses, such as how to make meth or to generate images of pop stars like Taylor Swift consuming drugs and alcohol.”
Tribeca to Screen AI-Generated Short Films Created by OpenAI’s Sora: Need to see what Sora is trained on “The 2024 Tribeca Festival announced Friday it will host Sora Shorts, a new program featuring five original short films all made using OpenAI’s text-to-video AI model Sora. It’s not the first time AI films have made their way to a major film festival, but it is the first time movies made with Sora have.”
Kinetix and Overdare put generative AI in gamers’ hands: A small step but its early days “Kinetix technology has been integrated into Overdare to enable players to turn videos into dynamic 3D animations (also called ‘emotes’).”
Combining the Best of Both Worlds: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive Natural Language Processing: Two things - #1 this is a small but key step. #2 I’m not saying you need to be able to write this paper but you should be able to read it and at least at 1 level, understand the implications. The tech around AI is moving so fast that it demands that we all increase our technical understanding of how these system work.
Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing: You knew this would happen. Now wait for the articles on which AI model drains your phone’s battery the least “When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous. Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isn’t even warm.”
Microsoft announces the Proteus Controller, a gamepad for Xbox gamers with disabilities: Well done MSFT.
ICQ, One of the Oldest Instant Messengers, Is Shutting Down: End of an era.
Trying to figure how to actually embed here so forgive the visible html…
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