Weekly Link Roundup
Repeat after me (Thx Ethan Mollick) - These are the WORST AI and AI-enabled products you will ever use (they'll be better by tomorrow)
The 5 Latest Trends In Training For 2024 And How You Can Take Advantage: Wowza. I’m usually leery of trend reports but Spark and Co. and specifically Holly Macdonald have done a great job here. The thinking is good, the writing is clear but what really sets it apart is the sourcing. Each identified trend is coupled with multiple links to support it. Love that.
Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?: This is a great article. It reframes the whole “Arc Search is cool” into how changing a UX stresses the underlying economic model of the Internet. I also think this dynamic is being reflected in the lawsuits around AI image generators. Think about it - if someone creates an AI-enabled tool that scrapes the Web (including your own work product) and pulls together content to build generic compliance training content - and then sells it. How’s that feel? We’re going to have to figure out ways to make new models so that creators continue to be rewarded or the top of the funnel is going to go away.
CodeSignal launches a learning platform with an AI-powered guide: Not kidding - real question - how along did you say you AI-enabled learning platform that builds custom learning paths on the fly was? > "CodeSignal Learn is currently accepting users through a waitlist. Once you get in, the Cosmo bot asks you questions like what you want to learn and what is your skill level. Based on that, it forms a course path for you....The company said that there are hundreds of courses available at launch ranging from introduction to programming, tutorials on specific languages, data analytics and machine learning. Eventually, CodeSignal wants to expand into some non-technical areas — such as management skills — that accelerate career paths."
Colossyan uses GenAI to create corporate training videos: Here’s the point (courtesy of Ethan Mollick) that I want to keep hitting on again and again and again - today’s AI and AI-enabled products are the WORST versions of these products that you’ll ever use. And they’re getting better FAST. “Colossyan taps AI to generate workplace learning videos, remixing, re-animating and editing footage of one of several virtual avatars against changeable backdrops. Users can enter a script to have it “read” aloud by Colossyan’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine, which also translates the script into over 70 languages.”
Stability, Midjourney, Runway hit back in AI art lawsuit: See previous note ;-)
Roblox rolls out real-time AI translation for all users — is this the start of true global multiplayer?: Amazing? Yes. There is a danger though - who is vetting the translations? Who is checking the language models? Just like LLMs hallucinate confidently wrong answers, what’s the impact when they confidently translate language wrong? Remove meaning? Nuance? Enforce one culture’s interpretation of another culture’s language on a global scale? Real-time translation or colonization?
Google is beginning to flex its Gemini muscle: And another heavyweight enters the ring. Out of the box, Gemini is clearly built to challenge CoPilot but again it makes me wonder about the nature of the relationship that Google has vs the one that MSFT has.
Crux is building GenAI-powered business intelligence tools: This is cool but the actual product is only one reason that I include it. The brutal truth is that the vast majority of these companies that are going to be gone (either out of money or acquired) in the next 12 months BUT the UI and UX that they’re building, I want those things to stay because some of them are looking great.
2024 Report: AI & Business Readiness by the Carson School of Business at Washington State University: Great report focusing on the following key areas: The impact of AI in the workplace. Demand for AI job skills and resources. A critical role for higher education in AI readiness. Post-graduate preparation for AI risks. Gender as a factor in workplace applications of AI. Workplace seniority and AI engagement.
Brilliant Labs’s Frame glasses serve as multimodal AI assistant: Now we’re getting close to what I want. AR/AI-enabled glasses that I just wear like I wear my glasses now
Rize launches AI productivity coach, targeting work-life balance in remote work era: Now this will be really cool IF (and BIG IF) the privacy concerns that employees will have and handled in the right way. If they feel this is a new tool designed to help them be more productive, then cool. If they feel like its just another way for management to spy on them - it won’t take minutes until someone figures out a way to disable or lie to it.
Mobile phones and wrong numbers: how Maasai agro-pastoralists form and use accidental social ties in East Africa: This is fascinating - “Mobile phones are recognized as important new tools for rural development in the Global South, but few studies have examined how phones can shape social networks. This study documents a new type of social tie, enabled by mobile phones, that to our knowledge has not previously been discussed in academic literature. In 2018, we discovered that Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania create new social ties through wrong numbers, a phenomenon with implications for theory on social networks and path dependency.”
Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff: Notion is getting interesting. Everyone wants to be Slack + Office.
Books and looks: gen Z is ‘rediscovering’ the public library: I don’t really care why they’re using the libraries as long as long as they’re using em. Except for the influencers - don’t harsh the vibe.
130-Year-Old California Bookstore Seeks Buyer: More book news! Really rooting for this place. As digital as I am, and as much as I love just being able to carry a library on my kindle, physical books and the stores that sell them will always have a special place in my heart.
Review: Chris Dixon's Read Write Own: Read this if only for the ammo it provides to refute the stupid and ill-founded argument that RSS is dead. Hint: It’s not. It’s very much alive. Second hint: RSS is hard to monetize and doesn’t extract user data.
The fediverse, explained: This is what we used to have. Anyone remember the Trillian?ICQ IM platform? All your IM’s in one place. Cory Doctorow talks about the beneifts of this when he talks about “mandatory interoperability.” > “It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.”
Research team develops metamaterial to enable real-time shape and property control: Read this next sentence slowly > “A research team, led by Professor Jiyun Kim in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST has successfully developed an encodable multifunctional material that can dynamically tune its shape and mechanical properties in real time.”
Nvidia's value surges about $500 billion in 6 weeks — that's almost as much as Tesla is worth: Looks like maybe software won’t eat the whole world. Hardware would like a word.