Weekly Link Roundup
SHOCKING NEWS: AI DOMINATES LINK ROUNDUP! I know but there's just sooo much.
Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different: ended up writing a whole post about this here. See this too.
Studio’s new online school for musicians uses AI to create custom curriculums: “The online accelerator features an AI-powered coach that leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4 to deliver personalized curriculums every month based on someone’s interests, specific goals, learning style and level of experience. It can also design the curriculum around a student’s specific schedule and commitment level, so if they have a vacation, the AI coach will work around that to ensure they still make progress. Students can input a set number of hours to dedicate to their lessons.” >What will you do when curriculum design can be done in seconds? #ValueVsActivity
ChatGPT users can now invoke GPTs directly in chats: This is one of those signals that I want to pass along because it has ‘big signal energy’ but I don’t quite grok all the implications yet. Just know you’ll see more of it.
Meta is bucking just about every AI trend, including the ‘boys club’: This is a positive sign but it also reminds of when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court. She replied “when there are nine.” No one ever asked what’s the right number of men on the court. > “Its Fundamental AI Research lab, responsible for Llama and other breakthroughs, is made up largely of women. Around 60% of its leadership team are women and some reporting chains, according to interviews with people inside the organization, are female from top to bottom.”
Microsoft’s AI Copilot for Sales and Service now generally available: From the THIS IS ACTUALLY HUGE NEWS DEPARTMENT > I mean all Satya Nadella said was "Excited to announce the general availability of Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, as we continue to extend Copilot to every role and function." Read it again. >>For every role and function. AI isn’t coming. It’s here. In a big way. And in a thousand small ways.
The Rise of Knowledge Economics: This is one of those articles that has links to 5 other articles that I now have to go read. I just think that if one is going to call one’s self a “knowledge worker”, they might need to understand the economy of knowledge.
Pinecone: New vector database architecture a ‘breakthrough’ to curb AI hallucinations: In a gold rush, look to the people selling picks and shovels. See also: Protect AI expands efforts to secure LLMs with open source acquisition.
Hugging Face launches open source AI assistant maker to rival OpenAI’s custom GPTs: The ecosystem grows > “The new, free product offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the startup’s open source alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to easily create their own customized AI chatbots with specific capabilities, similar both in functionality and intention to OpenAI’s custom GPT Builder”
How Spotify helped turn Afrobeats into a global phenomenon: I love stories/signals that bring awareness to the fact that a global market isn’t just one to sell into.
Kore.ai, a startup building conversational AI for enterprises, raises $150M: “the startup provides a no-code platform to help companies power various “business interactions” via AI — essentially any customer-to-employee or employee-to-employee interaction over the phone or text (think support chats with an IT/HR service desk).”
The 10 Absolute Best Science Fiction Books of 2023: I utterly loath headlines like this but its a solid list and have I mentioned before that I think you should read science fiction? Why should you read scifi? It has the freedom to ask really serious, deep questions as well as whacky, crazy questions and then has the additional freedom to explore an insane range of answers to those questions. Those Q&As might not be directly applicable to your life or work but building that capability is.
Companies’ hard-line stance on returning to the office is backfiring: It’s gonna backfire more as thoughtful companies put in the work to realize the benefits of a remote workforce while also working out how to reinforce culture virtually.
8 of the Best Historical Fiction of 2023: Better headline. Same reason to read.
Assistive technology is AI's next billion-person market: Aside from it being the right thing to do and the positive karma accrual, it makes business sense > “WHO estimates 1 in 6 people, or 1.3 billion globally, live with at least one "significant disability" — while the CDC calculates 1 in 4 American adults live with a disability. It's a huge market: Up to 3.5 billion people will need assistive products by 2050.”
Sci-Fi Interfaces: This site has the following goals of reviewing the interfaces seen in scifi movies: “Build skepticism. Farm for good ideas. Use their bad ideas. Avoid their mistakes. Practice design critique. Build literacy. Mine its blind spots. Think big.” >Trust me, send this to the UI/UX designers in your life.
Patagonia’s Profits Are Funding Conservation — and Politics: Outstanding. Well done.
DARPA Reboots AI Tools for Adult Learning Competition: “For the second time, DARPA engaged the Tools Competition to seek ideas for innovative, self-directed tools that empower adult learners to thrive in the modern economy. The “Building an Adaptive & Competitive Workforce” track invites technologists, digital learning platform experts, researchers, students, and educators to propose AI tools that would help adults upskill and reskill in complex subjects, such as data science and STEM. Tools at all phases of ideation and development are eligible.”
Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books: Maris Kreizman Wonders Why Tech Bros Think They Can “Save” Something They Don’t Even Like?: “It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with. In a world where tech billionaires dominate so much of our culture, it’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are. Some of us enjoy fiction. And color.” >100% agree.
App lets Indigenous Brazilians connect in own languages: Love to see this.
Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing A Commons: Check this out if you’re not familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons, then you’ll see why these Principles are so key.
Forget Deepfakes or Phishing: Prompt Injection is GenAI's Biggest Problem: How many people had prompt injection as an attack vector in 2024? AI will demand a lot of things but above all it will demand a higher level of technical knowledge throughout the org than ever before.
I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away: WIRED experimented with a new form of voice assistant that can browse the web and perform tasks online. Siri, Alexa, and other virtual helpers could soon be much more powerful: “To get a preview of what’s next, I took an experimental AI voice helper called vimGPT for a test run. When I asked it to “subscribe to WIRED,” it got to work with impressive skill, finding the correct web page and accessing the online form. If it had access to my credit card details I’m pretty sure it would have nailed it.”