The Great AI Acceleration
What I've learned teaching AI workshops in 8 countries.
AI-powered face swap gifs of Sean Connery and Jerry Seinfeld via misgif.app. Scroll down to learn about world’s first Chief AI Officer Summit, hosted by David Mathison and CDO Club. · Sree’s newsletter is produced with Zach Peterson (@zachprague). Digimentors Tech Tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob). Our sponsorship kit.
🤖 For just $10, you can buy the video and slides from my “Non-Scary Guide to AI” workshop and all-star panel with experts Aimee Rinehart, Senior Product Manager AI Strategy for The Associated Press; and Dr. Borhane Blili-Hamelin, AI Risk and Vulnerability Alliance, here: https://digimentors.gumroad.com/l/aipanel. One cool part is that it has Purchasing Power Parity pricing, so it adjusts automatically to the country you live in. eg: Sweden: $8; Italy: $6.70; Singapore: $6.60; UAE: $6.10; India: $4; South Africa: $4. TESTIMONIAL: "What an excellent class... thank you! Generative AI is an unbelievably exciting and terrifying subject. Looking forward to participating in future classes." — Jill Davison, global comms executive. · I am doing these workshops around the country and abroad as well as by Zoom, customized for each audience. If you'd like to discuss organizing one, please LMK at sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com
🗞 @Sree’s #NYTReadalong: Our guest last week was NYT Overlooked’s Amy Padnani. You can see a recording here. You’ll find three years’ worth of archives at this link (we’ve been reading the paper aloud on social for 8+ years now!). The Readalong is sponsored by Muck Rack. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
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My takeaways after teaching my “Non-Scary Guide to AI” workshop in eight countries:
The AI industry is plowing forward like nothing we’ve ever seen. When OpenAI released ChatGPT-4 earlier this year, it was a total game-changer, becoming the fastest-growing app ever over the course of a couple of weeks.
As I wrote back in April, the onus this put on us as a society was so great, and our collective understanding of that onus so minimal, that it was hard to see this not going off the rails.
From “The Liberal Arts Have Never Been More Important”:
[O]ur shared humanity — and all of the creativity, emotion, and faults that come with it — has never been so tested. With every AI-laden platform, all of the “is this thing made by AI” tools that are being built to counter them, and what I believe will be a slow-but-steady automation of large swathes of our daily lives, we are forced to truly reflect on what it means to be human.
As we approach the end of 2023, it’s become clear that this has been the Year of AI. ChatGPT-3 is pretty good. ChatGPT-4 sometimes brushes up against being scarily capable. Now, just a few months after upending the human-machine relationship, OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT’s next iteration is exponentially faster, smarter, and cheaper than it’s predecessors — and it will be rolled out as a platform that will allow anyone to build apps on top of the AI model, no coding skills needed.
Imagine inventing the gas automobile in January and rolling out a Ferrari in December — that’s how I am thinking about this. With all of the recent turmoil at OpenAI, the company (or is it a non-profit?) behind ChatGPT, it would appear that Microsoft may have fallen into the perfect scenario to lead the way in enterprise AI.
Meta is working on generative AI tools for both Facebook and Instagram that will inevitably lead to such a crisis of information trustworthiness — already a major issue for the company before this wave of user-level AI. Of course, there has already been an avalanche of mis- and disinformation all over the internet ahead of next year’s presidential election in the U.S. (and pivotal elections in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and so many other places); and I cannot see it getting any better as generative AI becomes faster, better, cheaper and more ubiquitous. One hopes that efforts to watermark or otherwise flag AI-generated content can keep up. A lot of people will be paying attention to this, and I suspect artists, creative workers, and journalists will need to be among the most vigilant.
Every major tech company you can name is working on some sort of major AI project (or 10), and the next two years or so may bring about some very fundamental shifts in the ways we interact with physical technology like phones, our homes, our cars, and countless other things.
I know I swore not to write about Elon Musk again this calendar year, but, of course, his AI project will be super edgy and won’t care what snowflakes and the woke mob think.
To their credit, many governments seem to be genuinely trying to avoid repeating the mistakes they made during the rise of social media 15 years ago — the main mistake being their blind faith in tech “visionaries” to bind their platforms to even the loosest of moral codes. The AI industry is doing the same, to a degree, albeit with the (unexpressed, but plainly obvious) goal of building out monopolistic frameworks that benefit large, well-funded incumbents.
If we’ve learned but one lesson over the last two decades of extreme technological advances, I would hope it’s that businesses are in business to make money and we should shelve any expectations of benevolence right from the jump.
Credit where it’s due, the Biden Administration is as out in front of this as any other government in the world. The Executive Order it issued on October 30 may be lacking in the enforcement department, but it’s quite clear that the administration is taking this seriously and doing what it can to attempt to create some sort of regulatory framework. As is so often the case, government lags behind industry, but this is a start.
The order was issued the day before the UK-hosted AI Safety Summit, and that certainly wasn’t a coincidence. Say what you will about Rishi Sunak and British conservatives, he’s also clearly putting resources forward in a bid to understand and adapt to these critical next few years.
This episode of the Hard Fork podcast with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton has a very smart and informed discussion of the whole thing, including an interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan.
What do you think? Would love to hear your comments. And book me to do a customizable, remote or in-person “Non-Scary Guide to AI” workshop for your company, nonprofit or school.
My previous essays on AI:
My workshop: “Non-scary Guide to AI”
— Sree / Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | Threads
Sponsor message about the world’s first Chief AI Officer Summit, from CDO Club & David Mathison
In about two weeks, the CDO Club will host the 10th annual CDAO Summit and the launch of the world’s first-ever Chief AI Officer Summit hosted by Northeastern University in Boston, MA, on Wednesday and Thursday, December 13-14, 2023.
The CDAO Summit (Wed, Dec. 13) will focus on Digital Transformation, Data & Analytics. You will meet Chief Digital and Data Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, CDAOs, Chief Experience, Innovation, Strategy, Technology, & Transformation Officers, and Chief Compliance, Governance, Privacy, & Risk Officers. The CDAO Summit is hosted by the D’Amore-McKim School of Business and The Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University.
The first-ever CAIO Summit on Artificial Intelligence (Thurs, Dec. 14) is the world’s first-ever event designed specifically for Chief Artificial Intelligence Officers (CAIOs), hosted by The Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University.
The event will sell out. Click here to register: https://boston.cdosummit.com/
DIGIMENTORS TECH TIP | Cricut Joy Xtra: Now Cut That Out!
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.
As the days get shorter, the temperature drops and we spend more time indoors, now might be a good time to reconnect with old hobbies. The good news is that many home crafts which once required a steady hand, patience and sharp scissors can now be handled elegantly with a little high-tech assistance.
The new Cricut Joy Xtra is basically a smart cutting machine, but its key advantages are its versatile material-handling capabilities and the large community of loyal Cricut users who endlessly find new ways to use their units. The unit joins a mature family of automated cutting machines dating back to the original Cricut in 2005.
According to the Utah-based company, the Cricut Joy Xtra can cut more than 50 materials on its 8.5-inch wide cutting bed and can also write, sketch and transfer foil with special pens and markers. Among its many talents, the unit can create holiday cards from card stock, precisely cut out designs printed by an inkjet printer and create iron-on transfers for tee shirts and other clothing.
Cricut’s selection of printable sheet material packs includes stickers, vinyl, a new waterproof sticker pack and many others. All are designed to be used in standard inkjet printers and cut with the Cricut unit. Also available are 4-foot rolls of “smart” materials like vinyl, transfer tape and glitter iron-on.
With Cricut’s Design Space app, users can edit stock designs or create their own from scratch. According to a Cricut representative at a recent Pepcom media product showcase in New York, the software is designed to be simple and takes users through the cutting or drawing process step by step.
Users who subscribe to the extra-cost Cricut Access online service will soon be able to use a new Create Sticker feature which lets users create professional-looking stickers. The unit will be able to do a “kiss cut” where it cuts out the sticker, but not the backing paper behind it, or a “die cut” where the sticker and backing are completely cut out of the paper.
When not in use, the cutting bed of the 6-pound Cricut Joy Xtra unit folds up, making it appear no more high-tech than a beige breadbox. The $199 unit can be ordered alone,with an Everything Bundle of materials orwith the Everything Bundle plus a one-month Cricut Access subscription.
Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree@sree.net and please connect w/ me: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube / Threads
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