A week in Generative AI: DevDay, Pin & Bill
News for the week ending 12th November 2023
Big week! We had OpenAI’s DevDay, Humane launched their highly anticipated AI pin, the first hardware device designed for AI. We also had the first second generation generative AI technologies launch in the form of OpenAI’s GPTs and GitHub’s CoPilot Workspace. Oh, and Bill Gates thinks AI will completely change how we’re going use computers. 🙄 Keep up Bill!
OpenAI’s DevDay
Monday was a big day for OpenAI and I think Sam Altman did a fantastic job delivering the keynote, which covered a LOT of ground in just 45 minutes. I highly recommend watching the keynote and you can find my write up of the event here.
I’ve been playing around with the new features - GPTs are a lot of fun and it’s going to be really interesting to see what people build. Beware the security holes currently in GPTs though - all instructions and attachments can be accessed by anyone!
Humane's Ai Pin promises an 'ambient computing' future
I have to say that the announcement was quite impressive, there are some really cool features in this little device, and obviously this in only v1 so much more to come. It’s kind of like a Star Trek communicator 🖖
Copilot Workspace
This is a super impressive new feature (that sounds a little reductive!) that will help developers quickly address bugs/add new features across an entire codebase in seconds. It’s what I’m calling a ‘second generative’ generative AI technology - one that takes generative AI to the next level and is more powerful and more accessible to more people than the previous generation of generative AI technologies.
Google researchers deal a major blow to the theory AI is about to outsmart humans
To summarise, the research finds that generative AI models are good at performing tasks based on the data they've been trained on, and are not so good at dealing with tasks that go beyond that data. This supports the narrative that these models are just ‘stochastic parrots’ that repeat what they’ve been trained on and not ‘reasoning engines’ that can apply learned rules to new scenarios.
Regardless of which narrative turns out to be true, generative AI technology is still a foundational technology that will have a profound impact on society.
OpenAI's ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users
I’ve only been able to get stats that look at web browser user, which have been tracking at 200m per month for a while now, so good to see a consolidated update across web and mobile. 100m weekly active users is huge - I wonder what it will be in a year’s time and if they’ll have overtaken X’s (ex. Twitter) active user base?
AI Ethics News
Hollywood Actors Strike Ends With a Deal That Will Impact AI and Streaming for Decades
AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content
Meta will start requiring disclosures for political ads manipulated with AI
Meta bars political advertisers from using generative AI ads tools
As OpenAI's multimodal API launches broadly, research shows it's still flawed
Microsoft Temporarily Blocked ChatGPT For Employees, Citing Security Concerns
Google Bard introduces “Human reviewers,” sparking privacy concerns over conversation monitoring
‘ChatGPT detector’ catches AI-generated papers with unprecedented accuracy
Long Reads
Stratechery - The OpenAI Keynote
Apple Insider - Apple best-placed to benefit as AI goes mainstream, says Morgan Stanley
Gates Notes - AI is about to completely change how you use computers
Interesting Features & Use Cases
GPT-4 + Video as a Sports Commentator
GPT-4 + Voice as a Book Club Companion
GPT-4 + Vision as a Yoga Instructor
GPT-4 + Vision + TTS as a YouTuber
Google's AI-powered search experience expands globally to 120+ countries and territories
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson