Weekly Link Roundup
Lessons in the context of AI, 1+1=5, how to demonstrate leadership in layoffs and a quick trip to the Midwest
>So this is maybe a bit longer than usual roundups but there’s some good stuff in here. The reason it’s longer is that I got the chance to take a little trip this week and speak to a great group of folks. I was invited to head to Milwaukee to speak to the Talent and Culture group at Wipfli (thx for the invite Aditi). Great group and I had a great time talking with them about the importance of being an innovative leader especially in these interesting times.
Bringing True Strategic Foresight Back to Business: Amy Webb nails it. “As strategy and foresight drifted onto separate paths, companies lost the synergy that originally made each discipline so potent. Just like other iconic duos you already know — Simon & Garfunkel, Kirk & Spock, Sherlock & Watson — strategy and foresight are better together, because they amplify what each element could achieve alone. Strategy without foresight makes companies vulnerable to outside disruption. Foresight without strategy renders scenarios unactionable. Each on its own has value, but our current business environment demands both.” (this is the 1+1=5 article :-))
Pecan AI debuts Predictive Generative AI to democratize AI predictions for business: GenAI is only one facet of the much larger AI world. “Before generative AI was the massive industry trend it is today, there was predictive AI which, as the name implies, helps to provide predictions about future events based on data. But what if you could combine both technologies into one?”
Nintendo CEO’s refusal to layoff staff goes viral following industry-wide cuts: When Nintendo took hits during a downturn, CEO Satoru Iwata “took a 50 per cent pay cut while other executives reduced their salaries by 20 per cent.” That’s called leadership, vision, taking responsibility and a move that would make employees’ morale go up even during a downturn. It’s a shame how seemingly no other CEOs have learned that lesson.
Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision?: A study from MIT and IBM finds that “AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual – and therefore there is room for policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts.”
Generative AI in the Enterprise (survey from O’Reilly): from Nov 2023…
Two-thirds (67%) of our survey respondents report that their companies are using generative AI.
AI users say that AI programming (66%) and data analysis (59%) are the most needed skills.
Many AI adopters are still in the early stages. 26% have been working with AI for under a year. But 18% already have applications in production.
Difficulty finding appropriate use cases is the biggest bar to adoption for both users and nonusers.
16% of respondents working with AI are using open source models.
Unexpected outcomes, security, safety, fairness and bias, and privacy are the biggest risks for which adopters are testing.
54% of AI users expect AI’s biggest benefit will be greater productivity. Only 4% pointed to lower head counts.
AI puts every CEO on the hot seat: “Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda tells Axios he is convinced CEOs are "not going to be able to palm the blame onto someone else" if they stay on the AI sidelines. "There's nowhere to hide," he says, "if you're the board, you're going to ask whether you can trust [the CEO]. You're going to ask, why are we still observers?" Read the other quotes by the other CEOs in this article.
Companies are struggling to keep private data safe from generative AI, Cisco says: It’s like if you asked AI to generate a nightmare for CISOs. “According to a new report from Cisco, which polled 2,600 privacy and security professionals last summer, more than one in four companies have banned the use of generative AI tools at work at some point. Another 63% of respondents said they’ve limited what data their employees can enter into those systems, and 61% have restricted which generative AI tools employees at their companies can use.”
From Tic-Tac-Toe to Monopoly, a mathematician reveals the design secret of great games: I’m down for any book that explores the nature of games and human’s relationship with them. This looks like a great read and I’d encourage anyone who is interested in the real attraction of games or using games for teaching, to read A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. Indispensable.
iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications, Researchers Find: …and we’re surprised?
What Reactions Is. And What Reactions is not: Yeah I know. AI talk is sucking all the air out of the room but this is an important step. Pay attention my #learninganddevelopment folks: “Reactions is a new feature of the open source Apache 2.0 SQL LRS. Reactions makes assertions as xAPI statements. It bases those assertions on conditional logic applied to xAPI statements entering into SQL LRS. The entire process is wholly contained within SQL LRS”
From Japan to the world: how to translate a game: Lessons here on the difference between translation and localization. “Behind the global success of Japanese video games lies a delicate task: appealing to overseas players whose expectations on issues such as sexism are increasingly influencing the content of major titles.”
Bluesky CEO confronts content moderation in the fediverse: Turns out, as the richest man on the planet is maybe finding out, content moderation on social platforms is hard.
Google’s latest AI video generator can render cute animals in implausible situations: I love this line “it is perhaps the most advanced text-to-animal AI video generator yet demonstrated.” So its doing cute animal videos - why should I care? Because as Ethan Mollick is fond of saying, “today’s AI is the worst AI you will ever use.” Now think about that and about how it can be deployed to create content and not just by instructional designers but by anyone in the org. Now think about the taxonomy you’ll need, the vetting process, the storage space!
A glimpse into the future of tech from the winners of the Amsterdam Science & Innovation Award: I love programs like this. I love looking at the winners and the runners up but I always want to know about the judging criteria and how you maintain community around an event like this.
Ranked: The Most Popular AI Tools: This is a good list with the caveat that any list is a snapshot in time.
Prompt Security wants to make GenAI safe for the enterprise: In a gold rush, look for the people selling picks and shovels, that’s where the money is. See also: Arcee is a secure, enterprise-focused platform for building GenAI.
Sundance documentary Eternal You shows how AI companies are ‘resurrecting’ the dead: I think it was just last week when I wrote about what happens when no one ever leaves your org. When their digital twin, digital echo stays behind? If they can do it for loved ones, they can do it for Bill from Finance. Even more.
Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use: Awesome. This is the AI version of watermarking and there are other products and processes coming to this space. All of this makes it even more important that if you’re implementing Ai in your enterprise, you really understand the total context of the tool you’re using - that’s legal, technical, and business model just to name a few.
Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us: Great read…thanks for the pointer Marc Steven Ramos. Should be required reading in L&D.
How Twitch lost its way: Really interesting read on a company that was dominant and is now suffering.
Startup Investors Have Fled The Metaverse: Getting serious flashbacks to the days when people were fleeing Second Life after it was promised to be the future. I even saw an island in Second Life built to train people on Six Sigma. Why?