🍕 Will the AI generation make fun of us?

Hey there,

we had a great keynote on Tuesday, I had tons of fun sharing my (slightly provocative) thoughts.

In the end, I opened the doors to the 3rd edition of the AI Academy Master in Prompt Engineering. There are only 18 seats left, and they usually sell out within a week. You should reserve your spot here.

If you want to watch the keynote recording, here’s the link. I introduce the Master at minute 40:45 (it’s not as cool as Steve Jobs’s product launches, but pretty cool nevertheless).

This week’s news:

• Will the AI generation make fun of us?

• Pizza Bytes 🍕: UAE’s Falcon 180B AI model, Apple is investing in AI, a study on risks and benefits of generative AI

Now let’s get started 🕺

Will the AI generation make fun of us?

I recently read an article on Hacker News about research centers before computers and how they employed hundreds of people to do calculations by hand (sorry, I can’t find the link anymore 😞).

It’s so easy to read about these people and think “Aww how cute they were doing all this hard work without technology!”. No one today would dream about doing calculations with pen and paper outside of school. We are men and women of the 21st century: we have superior technology! Calculators! Smartphones! Excel sheets!

There was one comment in the thread that captured my attention. This person wrote something like: “After LLMs, one day we will look at human programmers the same way that we look at human calculators today”.

It got me thinking. I imagined a world in which no one “codes” computers anymore. You just ask a computer what you want in natural language, the computer “understands it” and you have it.

Want to learn a new language? Don’t download a software called Duolingo on your phone, coded by a team of hundreds of developers. Just ask ChatGPT-12 to teach it to you.

Want to make a financial analysis of your company? Don’t type formulas in Excel. Just ask ChatGPT-12!

It’s really hard for me right now to imagine a world where we ask computers what we need in plain English (or any other language) rather than using other software built by people. But I guess if you pitched “human calculators” from the 50s a feature where everyone has a computer in their pockets they’d also think you’re high on something.

So here’s a fun thought for you to play with: What kind of AI future seems insane to us, but our grandkids will take for granted?

I honestly don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my grandkids one day will ask me “Hey grampa Gianluca, today our AI teacher told us that you had to smash your fingers on something called a “keyboard” and letters would appear on a physical screen! No wonder your hands are so wrinkled!”

I truly believe that the people who learn generative AI are the people who will build the future. If you want to join our crazy crew of builders and dreamers, consider securing your spot in the Master in Prompt Engineering.

Pizza Bytes 🍕

• The UAE's Technology Innovation Institute has launched Falcon 180B, an advanced AI model with 180 billion parameters, offered as open access for research and commercial use, outperforming competitors like Meta's LLaMA 2, ranking just below OpenAI's GPT-4, and on par with Google's PaLM 2 Large.

• Chinese tech company Tencent, popular for its WeChat app, is introducing its AI model, Hunyuan, for business applications and releasing an AI chatbot, amidst tightening US acquisition restrictions on semiconductors.

• Intuit has launched Intuit Assist, an AI assistant that can provide personalized answers and perform tasks for customers, such as creating invoices and optimizing marketing campaigns, using natural language queries and real data.

• Slack is introducing a new AI tool called Slack AI, which can automatically summarize threads, provide channel recaps, and search for specific information within messages, making life easier for its users.

• According to a report from The Information, Apple is investing in AI, developing advanced language models like Ajax GPT, which is more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-3.5, to improve Siri and develop customer chatbots.

• Matthew Allen's AI-created artwork, a winner at the Colorado State Fair, has been denied copyright protection by the U.S. Copyright Office, reinforcing a precedent that limits copyright protections to works created by humans.

• After creating a song featuring an AI-generated Drake voice, Ghostwriter is now using AI versions of Travis Scott and 21 Savage for a new track, raising substantial copyright questions about its potential Grammy contention.

• OpenAI has released a guide to help educators effectively use the AI chatbot ChatGPT in classrooms, suggesting uses such as generating lesson plans and quizzes, while emphasizing the importance of oversight and collaboration between teachers and students.

• Pentagon to expand drone and autonomous system fleet with AI, focusing on affordable and versatile technology, to address threats from China and other countries, and advance military technology.

• California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered state agencies to study the risks and benefits of generative AI, paving the way for regulations and training for state employees, while a similar executive order is expected from the White House.

You reached the end of this edition 😢

I’ll talk to you next week.

Ciao 👋