Hi
Hope that the weekend treated you well and that the week is off to a great start. I’m down in HCMC for a work trip – love Hanoi but Mouldy March is a killer – good to get some fresh air for a bit. And from these clearer climes, a few notes from the world of AI to start your Mondays right:
OpenAI, Meta, and Google’s Ambitious Push Towards AGI
So as the AI wave continues to build, you’re probably hearing a lot more about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Long story short (and very, very simplified) there are three major AI caliber categories; Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). What’s the difference? An ANI (i.e., narrow or Weak AI) is excellent at one thing – but only that one thing. An ANI might be super good at chess – outperforming humans but not able to tell a duck from a donkey, for example. The next level, an AGI, is as smart as a human across the board – and can perform any intellectual task a human can – which is mad enough by itself… until you remember there’s another level. ASI… well, read more about that here.
Anyway, why are we talking about this? Turns out all the big players are chasing AGI (it’s built into OpenAI’s mission statement and the CEO of Google Deep Mind is all about it) but Zuckerberg and Meta are making power moves – spending billions on the necessary hardware as they work towards their vision “to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is open and built responsibly so that it can be widely available for everyone to benefit from”. Genuinely don’t know how to feel about this 😵💫
The Future of Work: AI Assistants and Robotic Colleagues
So the IMF is predicting that ~40% of world jobs will be exposed to AI in some way 🤯 – and the last week gave two very real leaps forward that suggest that impact might be coming sooner than we might previously have realised.
Devin, the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer, can plan and execute complex software engineering tasks, collaborate with human teammates, and learn over time. Watch the product release video below and read more about the announcement from Cognition here.
Fascinating stuff that is, depending on how you look at it, probably putting The Fear into developers worldwide or pointing to a future where AI works alongside us to solve challenging problems and drive innovation. On balance, both are probably fair responses…
That was enough to need a lie-down by itself but then Figure x OpenAI rounded out the week with this update on Figure 1 – essentially GPT4 given a humanoid body with highly dexterous hands and the ability to improvise and respond to the world.
Figure 1 looks incredible for a first iteration of a product – including some very interesting human-like characteristics that have been baked in (e.g., note the pause as it starts to answer why it gave the person the apple – while multi-tasking?!?). Paint it red, give it a cape and you’re halfway to Vision from the Avengers – we clearly live in the future.
Monash University Leads the Charge in AI Integration for HE
One thing I’m really enjoying as HE as a sector grapples with the absurd-and-yet-somehow-still-accelerating speed of change AI is forcing is the open-handed collegiality and sharing that is taking place. We’ve highlighted wonderful shares from Danny Liu /the University of Sydney in the past like “What do educators want to hear about generative AI?” and “Where are we with generative AI as semester 1 starts?” but, this last week Monash University has put together a great mini-series of resources on AI and Education.
There have been a number of calls for people/HE “to be deliberate, not reactive, in deciding and justifying how we align our assessment design with the changing technological, pedagogical and knowledge contexts” but these pieces offer some concrete paths to take in doing this. This includes helpful pieces like “Positioning Artificial Intelligence (AI) in assessments may seem hard but here are some ways to start the journey” and open invitations to join conversations on stimulating examples of integrating AI into assessment and productive AI tools to use for teaching and learning. Worth a look!
Allie K Miller’s Lightning Class: Unlocking AI Productivity
It’s no secret, we’re big Allie K. Miller fans here – she’s come up in these updates a bunch of times… and we’re not alone in that given she’s LinkedIn’s #1 Most Followed Voice in AI Business (1.5m followers probably mean you’re doing something right). Case in point, this awesome Maven lightning lesson: How to use AI to 10x your productivity. Jam-packed with gems and with a focus on building an AI-first mindset, Miller provides practical tips and frameworks for integrating AI into daily workflows. From using AI for writing and research to streamlining repetitive tasks and enhancing creativity, Miller’s strategies are designed to help individuals and teams harness the power of AI to work smarter, not harder. Great opportunity to learn from one of the best in the business 💪🤖
Midjourney’s Consistent Characters: A New Era of Visual Storytelling
Gamechanger from Midjourney. With this, Midjourney firms up its claim to being the best of the off-the-shelf image generators (oh and if you’ve not tried it, you should – the granular control is fantastic). The excellent Rory Flynn has a great overview here – output samples below.
Consistent Characters in Midjourney (Rory Flynn/Midjourney)
By providing fine-grained control over character attributes and styles, Character Consistency within Midjourney will open up enormous new possibilities for visual storytelling and creative expression. Look out for an explosion of new graphic novels and comic books among many other things 🤩
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