Overview: Digital Transformation

Fantastic essay by Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, reframing AI into deep historical and evolutionary contexts. Starts by pointing out that "we are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth. For most of human history, we were unaware of the legions of bacteria living and d…

Google's new experimental product, Project Tailwind, is based on a "source-grounded AI ... allows you to define a set of documents as trusted sources ... a kind of ground truth ... craft a ... LLM that is not an all-knowing oracle or your new virtual buddy, but something closer to an efficient research assistant...This is exactly why I c…

"an initial analysis of a growing movement ... to make key machine learning tools and technologies open and shared. “Open Artificial Intelligence”...BLOOM is a large language model released under RAIL – a new copyright license that combines an Open Access approach to licensing with behavioral restrictions aimed to enforce a vision of responsi…

"AI-generated advice represents a huge shift"convenience: whereas a google search inundates you with results mixed with spam, splog and ads, "ChatGPT streamline this process... people choose convenience over almost anything else... [cf]Fogg’s behavior model: Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt". With AI, it's finally …

While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.

"effectively deploying these capabilities for our organization... build skills, processes, and structures to effectively leverage these tools’ advantages:"identify processes benefiting from LLMs (content)implement processes to ensure content accuracy, security"identify roles that will be displaced and identify upskilling" requi…

"But all good comes with new risks. With conversational AI, this includes data leakage, IP ownership conflicts and reproducibility requirements. Team members must be aware ... how and when to use it and the corporate policies around appropriate use... key questions your organization should be asking:"what can(not) you ask an AI tool?how …

Intro to "Embedding ... convert complex, high-dimensional data e.g. text, image etc. into lower-dimensional representations while preserving essential relationships and structure. Embedding is the knowledge for AI as it is produced, understood and used by ... AI systems."After introducing "some well-known text embeddings" (from…

A guide to the useful things one can do with LLMs.To write stuff: nothing comes "even close to GPT-4... access at Bing for free or ... subscription to ChatGPT... GPT-3.5 also good and much faster". Some tips: "Getting good writing out of ChatGPT takes some practice"Paste in your text and ask ChatGPT to improve it, suggest &q;…

"“Document Search Chatbot” ... field common questions (FAQ’s) based on the content of several documents.... Azure Search to extract and rank key highlights from a set of text documents based on a user query. This user query and Azure Search results are then passed to OpenAI to be interpreted and formatted into a chat based response..."Wh…

A sneak peek at Miro's new AI features for ideation and innovation, including their "AI powered mindmap... mind map with AI assistance"."While ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for generating ideas... the linear nature of chat threads" clashes with ideation's nonlinear nature, & "the sheer volume of ideas genera…

" a step-by-step guide for building a document Q&A chatbot in an efficient way with llama-index and GPT API... ask the bot in natural language about your own documents/data... [see it] retrieving info from the documents and generating a response [1]... customer support, synthesizing user research, your personal knowledge management"K…

"ChatGPT API will allow developers to integrate ChatGPT into their own applications, products, or services". Not to be confused with ChatGPT Plus:"API has its own pricing... https://openai.com/pricing.ChatGPT Plus subscription covers usage on chat.openai.com only and costs $20/month."ChatGPT API prices:"Free trial users: 2…

How can a reasonably conservative corner of the European Commission adopt M365?

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT, Bard and Sydney, which "take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought... hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence ... surpassing human ... inte…

"Microsoft imagines helping clients launch new chatbots or refine their existing ones", using a version of ChatGPT trained on post-2021 content. "The service should also provide citations to specific resources... give customers ways to upload their own data and refine the voice of their chatbots... replace Microsoft and OpenAI brand…

Good history of design thinking."IDEO’s way of working: a six-step methodology for innovation called design thinking... Key ... was its replicable aesthetic, represented by the Post-it note:... Not too precious, not too permanent... promises a fast-moving, cooperative, egalitarian process", but is also "disruptive, startup-flavored …

"a modern version of del.icio.us meets Roam... a searchable, interconnected repository of the most insightful content on the Internet" - and a pretty interesting example of convergent evolution vis a vis myhub.ai

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

Feedbot vous permet de faire de la veille, de suivre et d’automatiser la publication de vos flux RSS favoris sur Mastodon

ChatGPT-powered, the "‘My AI’ bot will ... initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers.., eventually all... we’re going to talk to AI every day" - useful, if you're a messaging service.It's a "fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat... trained to adhere to the company’s trust and sa…

While "Wolfram Alpha... seeks to distill scientific facts and perform calculations", ChatGPT and other similar AIs "build statistical models and string together sentences or pictures by calculating probabilities (of what the next word should be, for example). That has led to all kinds of mistakes ... Wolfram is not optimistic that t…

"What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? ... even simple tools can lead to interesting results when they clash with the contents of our minds"So he tries using ChatGPT as a muse. TL:DR; "ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested spe…

First of 3 posts on managing tasks with Obsidian, which I need to invest in as I'm creating tasks as I write my notes and then never looking for them again. This post starts with installing Calendar and Obsidian Tasks plugins. As always, to follow this advice I then needed to set up another plugin. Journaling Using Daily Questions in Obsidian…

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…

Jeff Jarvis is not a fan of Ted Chiang's piece on CgatGPT, although he does admit TC (one of my favourite authors) "makes a clever comparison between lossy compression... and large-language models, which learn from and spit back but do not record the entire web". Indeed, he takes the metaphor further: "what is journalism itself…

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…

The 3rd part of my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts looks at how AI could turbocharge collective intelligence "and finance the resulting ecosystem, providing an alternative to Big Tech AI monopolies".

The "executive summary" of my 5-part bundle of 1/1/2023, which "provide a snapshot of my current thinking into how a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem could be bootstrapped into existence."