Weekly Link Roundup #28
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Lots of Claude News..out of all this, I think Artifacts is the most important. One because it starts to peel back the cover of the black box and two, because UX will be a deciding factor in the AI dominance.
Claude's big update makes it the best ChatGPT rival so far – and you can try it for free: Pointers on where to try out the star of so many stories from last week.
Why Anthropic’s Artifacts may be this year’s most important AI feature: Unveiling the interface battle: Reads a little too press-release-ish for me but the conversational UX is what broke open decades of research in ML and there’s zero reason to believe it will stop being maybe the most important race - “Artifacts represents a bold attempt to answer that question. By creating a space where AI-generated content can be easily edited, refined, and incorporated into ongoing projects, Anthropic is bridging the gap between AI as a tool and AI as a teammate. This shift has the potential to revolutionize knowledge work across industries.”
Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms OpenAI and Google in enterprise AI race: “This latest iteration of the Claude model family is set to revolutionize the enterprise AI landscape, offering businesses cutting-edge capabilities at a fraction of the cost of its competitors.” > > Here’s the thing, and I really believe this is the the thing - none of the leaps past almost the initial release matter one bit at the enterprise level. At the individual level yes, but orgs will be put under increasing tension to figure out how to use even the most basic AI functions at scale and how to adapt HR policies to recognize this new skillset.
Anthropic has a fast new AI model — and a clever new way to interact with chatbots: Another article about Claude beating benchmarks and it doesn’t matter. Honestly the most important leaps right now are not in model performance but in UX and business models…oh, and lawsuits.
Intentionality Trumps Proximity: From last year but still bears repeating. If an RTO is just a quiet way of laying off people, I really wish leaders had the courage to just say the tough thing. If an RTO is just a knee-jerk reaction because you can’t think of any other way to manage, then I hope your people are looking for other places to work. If you want to go hybrid, or remote then I hope your willing to put the work in (BE INTENTIONAL) about designing the work calendar so that when we are all in the office, we’re there for coordinated reasons and we don’t spend all day wandering empty floors or getting on zoom calls.
Decagon raises $35 million for AI-powered customer service: “Accel partner Ivan Zhou told Reuters that Decagon's product is differentiated because in addition to powering a customer-support chatbot, it also functions as a company's internal customer support liaison and provides services like creating software bug reports, analyzing customer emails to suggest product improvements or writing internal documentation.” > > Now read that paragraph and substitute “knowledge management” and/or “responding to IT tickets” and/or whatever other baseline interactions you have to have and you can just see the train coming.
Emergence thinks it can crack the AI agent code: Just like how computer languages became more and more abstracted…more and more removed from writing directly in machine language, these AI services are becoming more abstracted from the underlying models. Now this can be good…you don’t have to swap out the end user processes and UX if you want to change the underlying LLM. On the other hand, it can become another black box layer on top of what is already a little understood foundational tech. > > More: Exclusive: Kong launches AI Gateway to help enterprises govern and scale generative AI.
81% of workers using AI are more productive. Here's how to implement it: Looks like this is from a fairly large survey group, on the order of 10,000. Much like mobile devices, AI isn’t waiting for an invite to come in. The call is coming from inside the house. It will interesting to watch how the successful orgs adapt to its presence.
Executive urgency to incorporate AI tools into business operations has increased sevenfold since January 2024 and is now a top concern, surpassing inflation or the broader economy.
73 percent of desk workers say that AI hype is warranted and the technology "will have a big impact." Those who have used AI tools are even more convinced.
Enthusiasm is growing: today, 47% of global desk workers express enthusiasm for AI to handle job tasks (compared with 42% at the start of the year).
The desire to use AI at work varies by age and gender. "The youngest workers show the most enthusiasm for AI, with 55% of workers ages 18 to 29 saying they're excited for AI and automation to handle parts of their work, compared with 33% of workers over age 60," the survey explains.
Exclusive: Leading chatbots are spreading Russian propaganda: File this under “Things No One Should Be Shocked By”
A Generation of AI Guinea Pigs -AI is quickly becoming a regular part of children’s lives. What happens next?: If you haven’t read Diamond Age, maybe you should. “This spring, the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest public school district in the United States—introduced students and parents to a new “educational friend” named Ed. A learning platform that includes a chatbot represented by a small illustration of a smiling sun, Ed is being tested in 100 schools within the district and is accessible at all hours through a website.” > > This is a signal. One that will travel right through the education system and into the workforce.
How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin”: I think O’Reilly has a point here: “And rather than asking who has the market power to win the tug of war, we should be asking, What institutions and business models are needed to allocate the value that is created by the “generative AI supply chain” in proportion to the role that various parties play in creating it? And how do we create a virtuous circle of ongoing value creation, an ecosystem in which everyone benefits?” > > The issue is one of models…what are the analogies here?
YouTube is experimenting with Notes, a crowdsourced feature that lets users add context to videos: “YouTube is introducing a new experimental feature that will allow viewers to add “Notes” to provide more context and information under videos, the company told TechCrunch exclusively.” > > I used to ask instructional designers this all the time - what if we just gave users the ability to leave contextual notes on the training videos that you create? It usually didn’t go over well.
Nvidia-backed AI startup Synthesia now lets you make multilingual video presentations using just your phone or webcam: Why is this news? It’s a 7-year old firm already in use by a number of the Fortune 500 and it’s backed by Nvidia. Now it can generate multi-lingual (We can jump back into how dangerous AI-generated translation can be later) presentations using a phone. Just think of the ability to create globally-accessible content on the fly and at a level of quality that has been unheard of outside of a studio or well-equipped office.
Former Snap engineer launches Butterflies, a social network where AIs and humans coexist: So this is what I think of as a Signal - not super strong - but anything that’s exploring how AI and human interactions blend, is of interest.
Prosus zeroes out its 9.6% stake in Byju: “Prosus, one of Byju’s largest investors, on Monday said its once-$2.1 billion worth stake in the Indian edtech startup is now worth nothing, but it is still hopeful that the formerly most-valuable Indian startup can be salvaged.” > > Cautionary tales from the EdTech world…
Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google: Really interesting look back at this history of the Internet and its relationship with mobile phones. Also a lesson in how both new tech and new biz models can disrupt jobs. Fun fact - my first “Web” job was working for About.com - then known as The Mining Company - to create and maintain a site for Washington DC that would help tourists find things of interest.
From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction: “From the bare-bones text adventures of the 1980s to the heartfelt hypertext works of Twine creators, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience. The community for interactive fiction, or IF, attracts readers and players alongside developers and creators. It champions an open source ethos and a punk-like individuality.” > > Here’s why I love this article and these works - so much of why so many of us love games today is built on the foundations of games like Adventure and companies like Infocom. They built entire systems of logic and design they underpin so much of current game design. Why is that important? Well, if you’d read Theory of Fun like I said to, you’d know that the real addictive quality about games is learning and for folks working in “Learning and Development” - that’s kind of the point isn’t it?
Fast Crimes at Lambda School: This is a deep history of a rise and fall that I watched happen largely on Twitter in the Before Times.
AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human (If you're worried about how AI will affect your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse of the future): “Now, people like Miller are finding themselves being asked to team up with the same robots that are stealing their jobs to give the algorithms a bit of humanity – a hidden army making AI seem better than it really is.” > > Another signal of transition.
The 5 most overrated tech products of 2024 (so far): Agreed.