Weekly Link Roundup #57.5
This is me running to catch up.....
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI: See if you or your favorite authors are in there > > “Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.” The original article - “The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem : Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI” By Alex Reisner.
Turbocharging Organizational Learning With GenAI: I’ve probably included this one before but I might just keep doing it. I do think that these kind of initiatives are the kinds of things that L&D can be engineering, supporting, building, in order to keep demonstrating that value to the org > >
“Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM): This $35 billion health insurer implemented a cross-functional GenAI/AI leadership team to educate employees about how to use the technologies
Wolters Kluwer: This 4.2 billion euro business and academic information company built in organizational slack for learning. Leaders scheduled an hour a week during which everyone attended peer-led learning sessions, with the majority focused on practical GenAI/AI applications.”
Product Market Fit Collapse: Why Your Company Could Be Next: Can’t imagine what this article would have to do with L&D as an industry > > “Historically, product market fit was once viewed as a milestone to achieve that evolved gradually over time. We're now witnessing something unprecedented: established products with seemingly strong product market fit experiencing sudden collapses in their core growth models. From Chegg's 87.5% valuation drop to Stack Overflow's traffic decline, these disruptions are what I call “Product Market Fit Collapse.”
Jolla founders take the wraps off an AI assistant to power up their push for privacy-friendly GenAI: I don’t know if this company or product will work or survive but I love this as a signal > > “Jolla, the erstwhile mobile maker turned privacy-centric AI business — via sister startup, Venho.ai — has taken the wraps off an AI assistant it says is a “fully private” alternative to data-mining cloud giants crawling all over your personal information.”
BYD cars now have an on-vehicle DJI drone launch platform: Sorry BYD, but Speed Racer, Pops and Mifune Motors already got there. > > “BYD’s video below, reposted by YouTube channel ShanghaiEye, has some real science fiction vibes: the driver taps a button on their vehicle’s touch screen, and doors slide open on the top of the car, revealing a rising landing platform with a drone on it. The drone is shown lifting off while the EV is in motion in some shots, then following the car down the road.”
Virtual First Toolkit (from Dropbox): I’ve talked before about how we can have hybrid and fully remote orgs that can capture the best parts of our f2f cultures but it takes intentional work. That’s what Dropbox has done. Love it or find it lacking, I admire the effort and drive > > “We’re designing a more enlightened way of working—virtually. At Dropbox, our goal has always been to bring simplicity and humanity to work. Now that we’re a Virtual First company, we’re extending this philosophy further. In this toolkit, you’ll find practical, virtual-friendly exercises—from setting better goals to improving your team’s well-being—to help you thrive in distributed work. Whether you’re fully remote or working from home, we hope they help you and your team stay effective, connected, and well.”
Roblox’s new AI model can generate 3D objects: “Roblox is launching and open-sourcing Cube 3D, the first version of its foundational AI model for generating 3D objects.”
Breaking The Content Chaos: How Low-Code Solutions Can Empower Enterprises To Thrive: Sure - read the whole article but if you work in #LearningAndDevelopment, here is the sentence that will either scare you or show you an opportunity > > “Low-code platforms are great for empowering business stakeholders to take control of their content-driven processes.”
Salesforce Bets Big on Agentblazers: Training One Million Builders for the AI Era: Great writing by Ken Yeung. If this quote doesn’t speak to a future in which #LearningAndDevelopment can play a key, high value role, then I don’t know what will > > “We’re in the biggest workforce transformation of our lifetime as we unlock the power of agents and humans working together,” remarked Nathalie Scardino, Salesforce’s Chief People Officer, in a statement. “Every organization will be called to redesign their people strategies, redeploy talent to support a future workforce with agents, and reskill employees—and every employee will need to lean in on human, business, and agent skills to drive success for themselves and for their customers.”
One Does Not Simply Meme Alone: Evaluating Co-Creativity Between LLMs and Humans in the Generation of Humor: Finally! The paper you didn’t even know you were waiting on > > The tl;dr - can AI or humans create funnier memes? Spoilers - humans are funnier but humans+AI are viral > > “While previous research has explored the abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as co-creative partners in tasks like writing poetry or creating narratives, the collaborative potential of LLMs in humor-rich and culturally nuanced domains remains an open question. To address this gap, we conducted a user study to explore the potential of LLMs in co-creating memes - a humor-driven and culturally specific form of creative expression. We conducted a user study with three groups of 50 participants each: a human-only group creating memes without AI assistance, a human-AI collaboration group interacting with a state-of-the-art LLM model, and an AI-only group where the LLM autonomously generated memes. We assessed the quality of the generated memes through crowdsourcing, with each meme rated on creativity, humor, and shareability. Our results showed that LLM assistance increased the number of ideas generated and reduced the effort participants felt. However, it did not improve the quality of the memes when humans collaborated with LLM. Interestingly, memes created entirely by AI performed better than both human-only and human-AI collaborative memes in all areas on average. However, when looking at the top-performing memes, human-created ones were better in humor, while human-AI collaborations stood out in creativity and shareability. These findings highlight the complexities of human-AI collaboration in creative tasks. While AI can boost productivity and create content that appeals to a broad audience, human creativity remains crucial for content that connects on a deeper level.”
Post-apocalyptic education - What comes after the Homework Apocalypse: “Last summer, I wrote about the Homework Apocalypse, the coming reality where AI could complete most traditional homework assignments, rendering them ineffective as learning tools and assessment measures. My prophecy has come true, and AI can now ace most tests. Yet remarkably little has changed as a result, even as AI use became nearly universal among students.” Ah, the increasing tension between old activities and the value sought.
Unstructured helps companies unlock the AI potential of their raw data: In a gold rush, follow the people selling picks and shovels > > “The company also released its Enterprise ETL Platform, which continuously extracts and tidies unstructured data for use with generative AI. Raymond says 65,000-plus organizations now use Unstructured, including nearly 80% of the Fortune 1000.”
Adobe’s new AI agents can make personal websites for your customers: AI, agents, and orchestration - don’t look now but AI is already in the building > > “Adobe announced the launch of 10 agents and an orchestration tool on its Adobe Experience platform. These tools target specific needs such as customer channel engagement, content production, data management and site optimization.”
Stability AI’s new AI model turns photos into 3D scenes: “Stability AI has released a new AI model, Stable Virtual Camera, that the company claims can transform 2D images into “immersive” videos with realistic depth and perspective.”
Bite Sci-ze: 5 Great SFF Collections for Short Story Lovers:
Banned Historical Fiction Books:
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