Hi
Hope you had excellent weekends. I spent mine catching up on sleep after an extremely busy (tho very productive) working week down in HCMC. Lucky enough to be part of some excellent sessions and always good to catch up with people but great to be back in your own bed, etc. Anyway, enough from me – a few headlines from the world of AI to start your weeks off right:
Google x Apple x Anthropic VS Microsoft x OpenAI x Inflection AI?!?
No, seriously – this is getting nuts. Fresh off the news that Apple is in talks to get Google Gemini in to power the iPhone (bye Siri!) we get the news that Anthropic is getting into bed too and that Claude will now be available via Google Cloud.
This just a few hours after the news that Mustafa Suleyman (ex-founder/boss of Google Deepmind) has left Inflection AI with one of his cofounders and joined Microsoft as the new CEO of Microsoft AI. Remember that moment at the end of the last Avengers movie – the Avengers Assemble bit? We might not be there yet but these are colossal power shifts in the AI space.
Sidebar: I had a – well, embarrassingly long conversation with Claude about this upcoming clash to try and figure out a compelling team-up analogy that fits the players on each side of this show-down. We ended up with Iron Man (Google), Dr Strange (Apple), and the Scarlet Witch (Anthropic) vs Batman (Microsoft), Superman (OpenAI – not convinced about that one), and Professor X (Mustafa Suleyman – ex-Deepmind/Inflection). 🤯 👀🍿
A few minor technical upgrades from Nvidia, OpenAI, and Neuralink
I recommend sitting down for this bit. Jesen Huang/NVIDIA held their keynote last week and it was wild. The Blackwell chips mark a 1000x increase in computer over the past 8 years (making Moore’s law seem … cute in the process) and they are going to be used to power another new generation of robots. Project GROOT’s AI model takes language, videos, and example demos as inputs so it can introduce the next action. So show it how to cook, clean, drive (?) … and it can do it on its own. The implications are quite literally world-changing – explainer here, full keynote here, and highlights below.
Oh, and in the same week, Sam Altman told Lex Fridman that OpenAI “will release an amazing new model this year” and Elon Musk’s Neuralink demonstrated the results of a brainchip installed in their first human patient (also below). So small stuff really… 😮🤯
Getting hands-on with GPT-4 class AIs
So I’ve been doing a bunch of workshops on AI to a range of different audiences recently and one of the most powerful things I’ve discovered is getting people hands on with a GPT-4 class model – i.e., some other than the free version of ChatGPT. It seems that there’s still more than a few people out there who’ve used the free version a couple times, been underwhelmed and gave up – and fair enough too, they can be underwhelming and go nowhere near the experience one of the GPT-4 level AIs offer.
So if you, your mum, your neighbour, your kid, or your dog want to see what’s really happening with AI as we wind down Q1 of 2024, try any of ChatGPT Plus (bonus points for using voice and data analysis), Gemini (free for two months – and you should have access to their utterly insane 1m token/700k word model by now), or Claude. Not sure which one to use? Helpful overview from Ethan Mollick here.
Building instead of buying – HE is doing it for themselves
Sick of Edtech and AI bros who’ve never taught a class talking about how they’re going to revolutionise education? Me too. In this light, it’s interesting to see moves by educators getting involved in building AI tools that rightly put pedagogy/andragogy before technology. We’ve mentioned the University of Sydney’s Cogniti AI before but they’ve taken it a lot further since and it turns out this is happening both regionally (with the APRU) and globally.
Interesting stuff – and then there are moves from thought leaders like Leon Furze to refine AI use-cases and shift away from “made with GPT” lesson planning apps to real time-savers – offloading the necessary (for now) tasks that eat up time for educators and so free up time to do things that really matter. Will be watching closely – and hopefully we might be hearing directly from some of these people in the near future 😉
In the absence of knowing what skills to learn, get good at learning skills (Yuval Harari)
Great call to action from historian and philosopher Yuval Harari in conversation with Stephen Colbert.
Colbert: “Is it real that we are going through some accelerated change, or does every generation feel that way? People are going, ‘Why aren’t we carving in stone anymore? These kids with their papyrus.’ Is it real that we are going through some accelerated change?”
Harari: “Every generation thinks like that, but this time it’s real. It’s the first time in human history that nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 20 years.” If you’re interested, the rest of the conversation is worth a watch:
We hope this edition of the newsletter has been of interest to you. If you’re new here and it’s been useful, please do click subscribe and you can expect a weekly update every Monday from now on. If you’re already a subscriber – thanks for your ongoing interest and support! Either way, if you know others who might benefit from reading this weekly, please forward it on to them too.
Have a great week ahead and let us know if there’s anything we’re missing that we should add to make this newsletter more useful for i) yourself and/or ii) others. This is a fast-moving, ever-evolving space and we greatly value any and all feedback. 🙏