Hi
Hope you had excellent weekends. The blossoms are blooming everywhere in Hanoi at the moment and it’s in that lovely period before the thermostat breaks 40°. Love this time of year 😍🤩
Anyway, here’s a few notes from the world of AI to start your Monday:
OpenAI Pulls Back the Curtain: The ‘Model Spec’ Revealed – Shaping Safe and Ethical AI Assistants… oh and one more thing
If you care about the debates over ethics and AI, it is absolutely worth reading OpenAI’s newly released Model Spec. This unprecedented document pulls back the curtain on how the company is striving to shape their AI models into safe, ethical and beneficial assistants that can be responsibly deployed.
The Model Spec outlines core objectives like being helpful to users while avoiding potential harms. It details rules the AI must follow, like respecting privacy and creator rights. And it establishes default behaviours encouraging objectivity, discouraging hate speech, expressing uncertainty, and using the right tools for different tasks. It’s a bold step towards transparency that could influence wider discussions around governing AI systems as they become increasingly advanced.
Oh – and one more thing. OpenAI have a product announcement event tonight. On this, Sam Altman said “not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me.”
Considering they dropped things like Sora (see below with an ElevenLabs twist) without a whisper of promotion and their last event in November 2023 unveiled things like GPT-4 Turbo and GPTs, this should be interesting – catch it here at 10am PT ‘tonight’.
Moderna Prescribes Generative AI as the Catalyst for Faster Drug Innovation
Moderna is injecting (see what I did there?) the revolutionary power of generative AI into every corner of its operations. The biotech pioneer has partnered with OpenAI to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across its entire workforce – supercharging everything from clinical trials to brand storytelling.
In just six months, Moderna achieved a remarkable 100% adoption rate through a comprehensive change management program. Employees have already created over 750 custom GPTs, leading to breakthroughs like “Dose ID” – an AI assistant that analyses mountains of data to recommend optimal vaccine dosing.
As Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel puts it: “We believe profoundly that ChatGPT is going to change the world.” The company sees generative AI as key to maximising its life-saving impact while staying lean, allowing a team of thousands to “perform like 100,000.”
Nice if you’ve got a gigantic, world-leading AI partners to help you with your business transformation – but what if you don’t? What if you struggle with prompting and wringing that extra bit of juice out of your friendly AI? Anthropic have your back with the new Anthropic console. Describe what you want to achieve, and Claude will use prompt engineering techniques to create more effective, precise, reliable prompts. Fantastic idea – try it here:
The AI Workday Transformation: How Employees and Leaders are Reshaping Jobs
The AI revolution is radically reshaping workdays, according to new data from Microsoft and real-world examples in the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report reveals a stunning 75% of global knowledge workers now use generative AI, with usage nearly doubling in just six months as employees bring their own AI tools (BYOAI) to work.
In a similar article How AI Has Already Begun to Change These Workers’ Jobs the WSJ highlights how AI is already augmenting human skills across industries rather than replacing entire jobs – from doctors updating medical records hands-free to lawyers surfacing more relevant cases through smarter searches. But the true workplace transformation comes from the rise of the “AI power user” – employees who receive tailored training to prompt AI effectively for their roles.
These power users are reshaping work by constantly experimenting, Microsoft found. 71% of leaders now say they’d hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills over a more experienced one without. Michael Platt (neuroscientist and professor at Wharton) notes that AI can “liberate workers from menial work and enable innovation.”
Judging the Judges: Why Students Must Master Evaluative Judgement in the ChatGPT Era
As generative AI like ChatGPT rapidly advances, students urgently need evaluative judgement – the skill of assessing the quality of their own work and AI outputs. A recent paper titled Developing evaluative judgement for a time of generative artificial intelligence by luminaries in the field such as Margaret Bearman, David Boud, and Phillip Dawson provides a framework for developing this core human capability through adapted assessment practices.
The paper proposes focusing on three areas: judging AI-generated outputs, processes of prompting and using AI, and deploying AI to evaluate students’ own judgements. Existing strategies like peer review, rubrics and exemplars can orient students to critically appraise and integrate generative AI, rather than blindly accepting it.
Embedding such practices across entire degree programs is vital to prevent AI from diminishing human judgement abilities. Yet key uncertainties remain – how will students’ perception of AI credibility evolve? And to what extent do biases in AI training data undermine developing robust evaluative judgement? Mastering this meta-skill is crucial for thriving alongside generative AI. Great questions in need of answers…
Music Lover’s Delight: ElevenLabs Music Feels like a Big Step, but…
You may have picked this up by now that I am hugely into my music – wide range of genres from all over the world and not that fussed about when it’s from either – love it all. That’s why things like Suno, Udio, MusicLM (Google), etc. – they’ve all come up and got their moment in these updates. ElevenLabs Music though – wow. That feels like a big step forward. Not available for anyone outside of the ElevenLabs fam as yet but you can see a preview on X here.
Got to say though, impressive as this is – nothing will ever beat the feeling of a live gig with other humans 🥳 🎵 🕺
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Have a great weekend 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. 🙏