Weekly Link Roundup #31
Buckle up buttercup...lots of ground to cover
Whew. Been a minute hasn’t it? If you haven’t been keeping up, I did start a new job that I’m really loving. I love that I work for a company founded by someone like Dean Kamen. Those inventions in the pictures above are his - the first automated insulin pump (did I mention he was filing patents when he was in high school?), the iBot - a wheelchair that enabled the user to come to eye level with people standing and most recently, a home dialysis system. I don’t even have time to get into him founding FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). So yeah, really cool to work for a company founded by someone who is not only this inventive but is so intent about the inventions centering on the human and not the invention. Tl;dr - the new gig, helping design and build engaging and compelling learning experiences for people with diabetes, has been taking big chunks of time - and I’m soooo OK with that. :) That does mean though that I’m going to try and cover a lot of ground in this issue so feel free to start, take a break, and come back. (and as always, while I love my job, anything said in this newsletter is from me and me alone and does not represent my employer’s thinking or feelings in any way). Oh, I also got COVID for the second time, and that was NOT cool.
New study on AI-assisted creativity reveals an interesting social dilemma: This mirrors what I’ve seen in other studies, namely that AI has great potential to raise the performance of the lowest ranked performers in your org to be comparable to mid-level or higher performers: “The researchers found that stories written with access to AI-generated ideas were rated higher in creativity, quality, and enjoyability compared to those written without AI assistance. This enhancement was particularly notable among participants with lower inherent creativity. For these less creative writers, having access to multiple AI ideas resulted in substantial improvements in both the novelty of their stories. These improvements brought their work to a level comparable to that of more inherently creative participants.”
Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing: I LOVED learning BASIC (extra points in you know what it stands for). It taught me logic, how to think like a program and most importantly, that we told computers what to do. If you are a person of a certain age who has been into computers their whole life, this was a magical doorway.
Breaking up Google would offer a chance to remodel the web: It would actually not create room for more products, services, and companies but breaking it up would also free up money since as of now, paying to advertise on Google is essentially a requirement that amounts to a tax on anyone looking to do business on the web. See also: Cory Doctorow on Why Interoperability Would Boost Digital Competition.
S&P Global partners with Accenture, launches massive AI training program for 35,000 employees: Like AI or not, believe in it or not, having 35K people trained on it is huge - it’s also key that they’re training everyone in the org not just in the finance function > “In a sweeping initiative announced today, the company is partnering with Accenture to train all 35,000 of its employees in generative AI skills, a move that signals just how transformative S&P Global believes this technology will be for the financial services industry.”
Meet Nintendo Kawaii, the new smallest Wii build that fits on your keychain: This is some amazing work. That’s a whole Wii in that pic.
New tool detects fake, AI-produced scientific articles: “Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, a visiting research fellow at Binghamton University's Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, has created a machine-learning algorithm he calls xFakeSci that can detect up to 94% of bogus papers—nearly twice as successfully as more common data-mining techniques.”
Tezi is building an AI agent for hiring managers: OK look, start whatever company you want but here are a few problems I see - 1st where the hell are the AI agents who will work on behalf of the job seekers and match them with companies? Seriously, if LinkedIn took a break from MAKING GAMES (/smh) then that would be something that would allow them to double the amount they charge for LI Premium and it would be worth it. 2nd - the training data will be the hiring criteria? Wow - that’s great - I’ve NEVER been hired for a job and then ended up doing something completely different once I got in. It really looks like it could create pain and mismatches but at scale and speed. > > “Tezi, an early-stage startup, is working on one to help HR teams find the perfect candidates for a job opening. The startup claims this bot will sift through resumes to find the ones that match the hiring criteria, find time on the recruiter’s calendar to set up an interview and send out the email to the candidate.”
China Is Closing the A.I. Gap With the United States: New arms/space race. “While the United States has had a head start on A.I. development, China is catching up. In recent weeks, several Chinese companies have unveiled A.I. technologies that rival the leading American systems. And these technologies are already in the hands of consumers, businesses and independent software developers across the globe.”
Build a course with your own AI Instructional Designer (from CourseMagic): The link will take you to the company’s website. I don’t know anything about the company or the product except that it’s out there. Also, they’re not the only one - if you head to “There’s an AI for That” and search for “elearning” - you’ll find a whole list of AI-enabled products out there for building online courses (or at least part of them). Why put this up? It’s never been about IF this new tech will disrupt L&D and training but WHEN and the WHEN is NOW. Training content development is highly reactive to cost - meaning, when a lower cost solution comes along and some CFO sees it, they’re going to ask why the org isn’t using it. What’s your answer going to be?
> > Now add this story to the mis along with the first one about creativity and AI - How Close is AI to Replacing Instructional Designers? - to be fair, the study had a fairly small n (200 instructional designers from around the world) but when you start seeing results like “A whopping 60% of respondents considered the learning objectives created by a complete novice with some help from AI as very good or exceptional” - then maybe its just me but it feels like its time to start paying attention.
One last thing for this section, if the prior stories have scared or scarred you, maybe this one will help: Instructors as Innovators: a Future-focused Approach to New AI Learning Opportunities, With Prompts: written by the wife and husband team who have been at the fore of testing new AI capabilities. “This paper explores how instructors can leverage generative AI to create personalized learning experiences for students that transform teaching and learning. We present a range of AI-based exercises that enable novel forms of practice and application including simulations, mentoring, coaching, and co-creation.”
Valve unintentionally set the stage for today's digital economic hellscape, according to its former economist in residence: I’ll just add my incredibly helpful and insightful, YEP > > “As Varoufakis describes it, we no longer live under capitalism. Instead, he says we're in the age of "technofeudalism," a condition which emerged from and supplanted capitalism. The essential feature of this new era, according to the economist, are algorithmic fiefdoms that masquerade as marketplaces, extracting rent and dictating the terms of exchange while producing none of the goods themselves. Amazon is a prime example, as is Apple's App Store.”
Contextual AI nabs $80M for its ‘RAG 2.0’ platform: “Contextual AI Inc., a startup that helps enterprises build retrieval-augmented generation artificial intelligence applications, has closed a $80 million Series A round to support its commercialization efforts” and is headed by “Chief Executive Officer Douwe Kiela, who was part of the Meta Platforms Inc. research team that invented RAG in 2020.” > > The leadership here is the signal as is the growing prevalence of platforms like this. I get it when people say stocks can be in a bubble and that there is a lot of hype around AI but if you don’t see the growth of new capabilities here, I don’t know what you’re looking at. See also: How LlamaIndex is ushering in the future of RAG for enterprises.
The EU’s AI Act is now in force: Watch this on its own as a signal but also watch what happens as the rules come into full effect > > “A subset of potential uses of AI are classified as high risk, such as biometrics and facial recognition, AI-based medical software, or AI used in domains like education and employment. Their developers will need to ensure compliance with risk and quality management obligations, including undertaking a pre-market conformity assessment — with the possibility of being subject to regulatory audit. High-risk systems used by public sector authorities or their suppliers will also have to be registered in an EU database.”
Ema raises $36M to build universal AI employees for enterprises: You want a signal? Here you go > > “Our goal at Ema is to help automate most of the mundane tasks that human employees perform today and free them up to do more valuable work in the enterprise. We’ve built Ema as a universal AI employee. Ema can morph into taking on any role in the organization — from customer support, employee experience, sales & marketing to legal & compliance,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder of the startup, told VentureBeat.”
NIST releases a tool for testing AI model risk: Not sexy but we’ll need more of these tools > > “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, has re-released a test bed designed to measure how malicious attacks — particularly attacks that “poison” AI model training data — might degrade the performance of an AI system.”
The empty brain (Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer): Kinda loving this article - first because its really smart and second because it takes a big swing at a dominant paradigm in a way that resonates with the anthropologist in me that loves context. “No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.”
Let’s see, how do I headline these next two articles…oh yeah…academic publishing, and by that I mean for-profit journals that charge schools subscriptions to see articles that their own professors wrote, and how, in some cases, even had to pay a fee to submit those articles…those businesses are a scam.
-Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI.
-Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that.
Intron Health gets backing for its speech-recognition tool that recognizes African accents: Huge kudos! So important.