Robotics, Elon Sues OpenAI, Cancer Research, and a Prompt Engineering Course to Level-Up
And an image, audio-to-text, and interior design app for fun.
Morning y’all!
It’s Friday and I hope the week has been one of great productivity and personal and professional success! As I mentioned in yesterday’s update, I’m starting a new, larger project on Monday so I’m taking the weekend “off” to rest and relax in preparation.
But the AI news and tools won’t stop coming! Here’s a select bit that I found personally interesting and useful as we all continue to calibrate our own thinking about this exciting new space.
Have a great weekend and take it easy if you can!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer
Figure announced a mega-$675m venture round in collaboration with OpenAI, which I’m sure helped fuel the large figure. Humanoid robots isn’t something that I’m into, as much as generative AI, but I imagine that I will care more about this as time progresses. OpenAI will power a lot of these new robots:
One question I always ask myself is why they always have to look like humans; perhaps that’s to make folks feel less anxious about seeing them everywhere.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cancer Research UK discovered two unknown subtypes of prostrate cancer using AI using neural networks to compare samples across 159 patients which could help inform diagnosis and treatment. These medical uses of AI are some of the most obviously useful examples of this technology and should be celebrated, even if the outcomes are still very much in their infancy. Let’s go go go human ingenuity!
Realistics is an iOS app that could be your financial advisor, coach, parenting, personal trainer, and more. Or, that’s what they are advertising it as such. Ask a question about “any” topic and you go from there.
An interior design tool by Venus Williams (yes, that tennis superstar) that can help you discover your “style DNA” using generative AI. I’m not in the market for this but a few friends are so I sent them a link to this so they can check it out.
Let me know your thoughts on this! I’ve been relatively unimpressed with implementations that I’ve seen but maybe Venus has the magic.
Elons is suing OpenAI. Here are the deets:
OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.
Contrary to the Founding Agreement, Defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 not for the benefit of humanity, but as proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world.
OpenAI, Inc.’s once carefully crafted non-profit structure was replaced by a purely profit-driven CEO and a Board with inferior technical expertise in AGI and AI public policy. The board now has an observer seat reserved solely for Microsoft.
Let the party begin.
This wonderful breakdown of Reddit’s IPO is useful to read, only if it’s to see the small — but significant — growth of their AI-centric business which is accounting for $60m at this point in time:
With 98% of their current revenues tied to advertising, they aim to diversify their top-line through data licensing agreements for training large language models. Coincidentally, they announced a deal with Google right around the time of the S1 drop, which entails $60m a year in licensing.
I expect this to continue to grow and is a significant foretaste to what is to come. The use of (existing) data to power AI will continue to grow, not just at Reddit but any company that has mountains of data to sell. Like WordPress.
Summarize is exactly what you think it is. Free for up to 20 videos (!!!) a day. That’s not bad, as long as they’re under 60 minutes. But, you’ll get advertisements. Oh well.
I gave it a quick test and it worked fine.
I gave Freepik Pikaso a test-drive and was immediately surprised by the density and quality of image results! It’s been blowing up on socials about how good it is and I wanted to give it a real spin. Not too shabby, at all.
Superwhisper is an iOS app is talk-to-text, even using some of your existing apps:
Just talk to write notes, emails, messages, and thoughts with your voice. Works offline, so you can take it anywhere. Easily transform voice notes into any format.
With Superwhisper, you can write 5x faster using your voice. With perfect punctuation and AI formatting, you can write better and faster, hands-free.
I like the fact that it works offline too.
Want a bit more education? Prompt engineering with Llama 2 is a free course in collaboration with Meta. The course details:
Learn best practices for prompting and selecting among the Llama 2 models by using them as a personal assistant to help you complete day-to-day tasks.
Experiment with advanced prompt engineering techniques, like few-shot prompting to get Llama 2 to classify the sentiment of text messages, and chain-of-thought prompting to solve logic problems.
Treat Code Llama as a pair programming partner to both learn to write and improve code.
Promote safe and responsible use of LLMs by having Llama Guard check user prompts and model responses for harmful content.
Have fun with it!
Finally, I thought this quote from Aaron Levie was good enough to share, especially if you’re thinking about the larger scale enterprise and their application(s) of AI:
AI is going to have a profound impact on the enterprise. Software and IT teams in companies have been responsible for enabling tech for people to do their work. Now with AI, they’ll be providing the work itself. This is a fundamental shift in the power structure in companies.
The change from “enabling tech for people to do work” to now “AI providing the work itself” is a subtle but profound differentiation and I’ve been noodling on this for a few days and it’s gotten me thinking.
And that’s not a bad thing.
Have a great rest of your day and weekend folks!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer