Weekly Link Roundup #36
Meta being Meta (multiple times), Six Word Stories, and a product that's been around for 30+ years....
Fall of the wild: why pristine wilderness is a human-made myth: Think I’m going to have to read this. “The wilderness is widely seen as a place untrammelled by human activities. Not so, argues journalist Sophie Yeo in Nature’s Ghosts. Advocating lyrically for rebuilding a diverse natural world, she recognizes that, however wild a region might seem, human activities have left a mark in even the most isolated regions. People have been a part of nature as long as they’ve been around, coevolving with its ecosystems for millennia.”
Meta hides warning labels for AI-edited images: Feels like a step backward - “Starting next week, Meta will no longer put an easy-to-see label on Facebook images that were edited using AI tools, and it will make it much harder to determine if they appear in their original state or had been doctored” especially when coupled with Zuck’s whiny assertion that “some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.” What an idiotic take - especially after he stood there in Congress and offered a waffling apology to parents of dead children. Oh look, more Meta being Meta - Meta reignites plans to train AI using UK users’ public Facebook and Instagram posts. More Meta: Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent.
The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder: Now I’m no VC, but if I was, investing in anything that Fei-Fei Li is starting would be an easy call. “While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality. It’s an ambitious goal, and despite the dreary nabobs who say progress in AI has hit a grim plateau, World Labs is on the funding fast track.”
Generative AI: A Source of ‘Costly Mistakes’ for Enterprise Tech Buyers: Things Mark Rants About - the need for #LearningAndDevelopment to shift from activities that can be automated to value-creation for the org that is much harder to automate AND that #AI both demands a level of sophistication throughout the entire org that needs to be much more thorough than other tech innovations AND that creating content to teach that tech, offers a great chance for L&D to lead the way for the whole org, including senior leadership. This quote nails the why “Enterprises, though, do not always start with a full understanding of generative AI. Speaking with TechRepublic at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Australia in September, Brethenoux said there is confusion in the market about the technology — partially due to the language used by vendors. Common misunderstandings include what broader AI actually is, in comparison with generative AI, and how AI agents differ from generative AI models. This is causing some organisations to make mistakes in the way they seek to apply the technology for use cases in their business.”
OpenAI unveils o1, a model that can fact-check itself: The news quote in a second but here’s my take; this story is important for two reasons - 1) OpenAI is the big dog in this space so its somewhat important to keep an eye on what they’re doing 2) its yeat another story that drives the point home that when it comes to deploying AI in your enterprise, the technical knowledge around AI (including in this case, the cost), needs to permeate up and down the org chart. Here’s a reason why its NOT important - our org design and change management efforts lag the tech developments to such a degree that its a big mistake to not keep your eye on what AI can ALREADY do for or to you, and instead focus on the latest shiny new feature. Track but don’t commit. “ChatGPT maker OpenAI has announced its next major product release: A generative AI model code-named Strawberry, officially called OpenAI o1. To be more precise, o1 is actually a family of models. Two are available Thursday in ChatGPT and via OpenAI’s API: o1-preview and o1-mini, a smaller, more efficient model aimed at code generation.”
Strategic Chain-of-Thought (SCoT): An Unique AI Method Designed to Refine Large Language Model (LLM) Performance and Reasoning Through Strategy Elicitation: If you want a deeper dive into the advances that are driving the new release from OpenAI, here you go. “One important tactic for improving large language models’ (LLMs’) capacity for reasoning is the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm. By encouraging models to divide tasks into intermediate steps, much like humans methodically approach complex problems, CoT improves the problem-solving process. This method has proven to be extremely effective in a number of applications, earning it a key position in the natural language processing (NLP) community.”
How to take advantage of a generative tool fueling Glean’s $260M raise: GraphRAG: Read the article but the general idea, is a system that can look not just for information but for relationships between those pieces of information. This is a key development in the utility of these systems. “When a sales representative at Glean, an innovative enterprise search company, needed to prepare for a crucial client meeting, they turned to their own powerful generative AI tool. Within minutes, the system had combed through years of emails, Slack messages, and recorded calls, providing a comprehensive overview of the client relationship and spotting opportunities that would have taken hours to uncover manually.”
Campfire raises $3.95M for generative AI game tool Sprites: “Campfire has raised $3.95 million in a seed funding round for its generative AI game engine dubbed Sprites. Sprites lets developers build AI agents with memory and emotions who can hold conversations with users and accompany them on online adventures, making games, interactive media and consumer apps personalized and more engaging.”
Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You: LOVE these > Tell us about “medical bills” again. —@boomerdell, via Instagram
Sid Meier's Civilization 7 developer discusses building “the best looking tabletop game on the planet”: 1991. That's the year the first CIVILIZATION (CIV) game came out. I've played every single version since and am excited about CIV 7. There's a lesson there about design - its turn-based. There's no graphic violence. Just you (and maybe some multiplayer, but mainly just you) trying to manager your CIV from the Stone Age to the Space Age. Here's the part I want you to notice though from this interview with game's executive producer. "Telemetry also told us nobody played the tutorial, because frankly, when people get a new game, they don't want to play the tutorial. They just want to play the game. So we actually rewrote the whole system,” he explains. “We have the tutorial dynamically embedded in the game now so it's going to teach as you play. We have the tutorial system able to ‘talk’ to the UI system, so that if they want you to press something specific, it actually does that, and you can be walked through that process." Sounds like #MomentsOfNeed and not taking players out of the experience - kinda like not taking learners out of their workflows. That's another lesson, and not a small one.
The Spellbinding Life of Koji Kashin: Japan’s Legendary Wandering Magician: “Around the mid-16th century, stories started circulating around Japan about a mysterious man who could perform feats of great magic. His name was Koji Kashin, and he most likely never existed. He only survives today through legends and folklore, yet it’s very tempting to think that the man was real and simply erased all historical documents proving his existence with a magic snap of his fingers for no other reason than because he thought it would be funny.”
AI Will Force a Transformation of Tech Infrastructure: File under “Yes, Obviously” - “Cloud services and private networks for years had to handle relatively limited amounts of data. Now that artificial intelligence and deep learning are driving vast quantities of photos, video, sound and natural language into the mix, however, data that was once counted in gigabytes and terabytes is measured in much larger units of petabytes and exabytes.”
As Wi-Fi turns 25, here’s a look at how it was really created: Nice read on the history of key technology.
In Defense Of 'Coffee Badging,' The Controversial New Office Trend: Gosh. It’s ALMOST like we should be thoughtful about why we want folks back in the office and maybe do some design work to ensure that we’re actually making the best use of people’s time and not just having some knee jerk reaction because managers want to see people in the office.