Weekly Linkup #45.5

Singles...not albums. But I did join Columbia House about a dozen times...

Graph-based AI model maps the future of innovation: This comes with all the prior concerns about GenAI but seems to be using it for a different outcome than image generation. “A graph-based AI model (center) recommended creating a new mycelium-based biological material (right), using inspiration from the abstract patterns found in Wassily Kandinsky’s painting, “Composition VII” (left). Credits:Image: Wassily Kandinsky (left), Markus Buehler, with the assistance of his new artificial intelligence system (center and right)”

The Race to Save the World's Vanishing Languages: So critical. Language is the cultural transmitter (you should also read Snow Crash). “Linguists warn that the vast majority of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on the planet are at risk of extinction. Estimates by cultural heritage organizations, including UNESCO, suggest that the last living speaker of a language dies roughly every two weeks, and with them any chance of revitalizing a community of speakers. At that point, the best linguists can hope for is that the language is preserved for future study, much as the artifacts of long-gone civilizations are preserved in a museum.”

The State of Instructional Design, 2024: Chock full of findings but this one still stands out for me - “One of our most striking discoveries was the diversification of who actually designs learning. While the majority of those who responded were full or part time instructional designers, almost one third of respondents were Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who have taken on instructional design responsibilities as part of a different role.”

AI can now create a replica of your personality: OK let’s get all Black Mirror here. What if during your onboarding to your new job, you get assigned to sit down and do one of these interviews. Now, after that, the system also continues tracking everything they can legally track at work and maybe even buying de-identified demographic data that fits your shopping and lifestyle profile? That’s a pretty good digital twin. Think voice actors are the only ones who can be copied by AI with fidelity? How would you feel? Would you negotiate this on the way in? Not take the job? > > “Led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, the team recruited 1,000 people who varied by age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. They were paid up to $100 for their participation. From interviews with them, the team created agent replicas of those individuals. As a test of how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games, twice each, two weeks apart; then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar.”

Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried: This is giving Voight-Kampf vibes….there’s a tortoise - “PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images,” Google wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, “going beyond simple object identification to describe actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene.”

A linkless internet - In creating anonymous summaries, AI flattens out all the fascinating architecture of thought that makes the internet hum: This > > “One reason hyperlinks work like they do – why they index other kinds of affiliation – is that they were first devised to exhibit the connections researchers made among different sources as they developed new ideas.” > > I remember blog rolls. I remember the slashdot effect. I hadn’t really considered how AI-generated summaries, remove the sources from the process. Pretty soon, it all just tastes like chicken.

Generative AI and the Nature of Work (Harvard Business School): “Using the setting of open source software, we study individual level effects that AI has on task allocation. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the deployment of GitHub Copilot, a generative AI code completion tool for software developers. Leveraging millions of work activities over a two year period, we use a program eligibility threshold to investigate the impact of AI technology on the task allocation of software developers within a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design. We find that having access to Copilot induces such individuals to shift task allocation towards their core work of coding activities and away from non-core project management activities.”

The Industrial Age of AI Agents Begins: How Microsoft's Strategy Could Mark the End of the Agentic Artisan Era: This is why I say to stop paying attention the latest news and start grappling with the org changes already possible with the tools available > > “Microsoft's recent moves in the AI agent space - from forking AutoGen to building enterprise-grade infrastructures - signal a transition from experimental tools to industrial-scale platforms. They're methodically constructing a comprehensive ecosystem that combines open-source innovation with enterprise stability, leveraging multiple frameworks (Semantic Kernel, TaskWeaver, AutoGen) in a coordinated strategy.”

Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru’s Desert: Love this both in reality and as a metaphor. “Gouged into a barren stretch of pampa in southern Peru, the Nazca Lines are one of archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries. On the floor of the coastal desert, the shallow markings look like simple furrows. But from the air, hundreds of feet up, they morph into trapezoids, spirals and zigzags in some locations, and stylized hummingbirds and spiders in others. There is even a cat with the tail of a fish.”

OpenScholar: The open-source A.I. that’s outperforming GPT-4o in scientific research: “At OpenScholar’s core is a retrieval-augmented language model that taps into a datastore of more than 45 million open-access academic papers. When a researcher asks a question, OpenScholar doesn’t merely generate a response from pre-trained knowledge, as models like GPT-4o often do. Instead, it actively retrieves relevant papers, synthesizes their findings, and generates an answer grounded in those sources.”

Undersea Surgeons: In a wireless world, it is easy to forget the all-too-real cables that snake across the turbulent ocean floor. Until they snap - The electronic connections that bind our world are fragile. “One morning last March, tens of millions of people in West Africa woke up to find they had no more internet. Hospitals were shut out of patient records. Business owners couldn’t pay wages. In homes and on sidewalks, people stared at the wheel icon rolling endlessly on their screens. “Connecting,” it promised. It wasn’t.”

Why are we still talking about return to office?: I think we know why.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Deep Dive into 25 Different Types of RAG: This is the kind of thing that some smart L&D team will take and without being asked by anyone, maybe tweak it a bit, run it by the CIO’s office and release it for everyone in the enterprise to access - starting with sr leadership.

The man who gave us the web is building a better digital wallet: Please make this work Sir Berners-Lee > > “With Solid, all that changes. The technology is a standard for storing information of all kinds—in theory, everything from your financial records to your email to your camera roll—in a private cloud-based repository called a pod, for “personal online data store.” Organizations that want to access data in your pod can request it. Whether to grant such access is your call, since it’s your data. But nobody gets free rein to do with it as they will—like, say, feeding it into an algorithm as AI training data.”

Space Startup Spins the Living Crap Out a Satellite—and It Actually Survived: Look, the 9 year-old in me is like “COOL!” but the person who is already thinking about the proliferation of space junk is kind of like “great - a cool way to accelerate our inability to actually see stars at night.”

The AI Economy -Lessons from My First AWS re:Invent: - You need to be reading this newsletter from Ken Yeung. “IN THIS ISSUE: My conference adventures continue as I journey to Amazon's re:Invent conference to hear about AWS' approach to AI. Plus, explore the company's AI partnership with the NFL and how they use the technology to help support players' philanthropy.”