Overview: Digital Transformation

Really brilliant monologue on creativity and AI, putting the current moment in a historical context of industrialisation stretching back to the invention of the printing press."If we really could substitute for our labor with machines — ones that don’t pollute or create even more work — it wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we all felt okay ab…

A quick to learn framework to build your own personal productivity system without falling into the "productivity porn" trap.

Casey first gets the Perplexity.ai scandal off his chest: "the Clearview AI of generative artificial intelligence companies: scraping billions of pieces of data without permission and daring courts to stop it. Like Clearview, Perplexity’s core innovation is ethical...".Is the Fediverse a solution? He likes it, but "a partial one... …

"easily transforming research into visually stunning, comprehensive content. Whether you're crafting in-depth articles, detailed reports, or informative guides... Search any topic, and instantly receive a well-structured, beautifully formatted article. Publish ... and share ... with a single click."The user can customise tone, stru…

"users encountering the company’s AI-generated summaries atop search results found over and over again that Google was hallucinating or worse... suggested putting nontoxic glue in your pizza... putting gasoline in your spaghetti... reported that just 17 American presidents were white ... that people eat one to three rocks per day", co…

A very sceptical take on "Google’s snorefest of an I/O presentation" and the current point in "the latest hype cycle... how exhausting the whole thing has become a year and a half after the release of ChatGPT".The days of being on the inevitable path to AGI because Silicon Valley had "thrown so much capital and compute&quo;…

"GPT-4o ... talk to users in a much more lifelike way — detecting emotions in their voices, analyzing their facial expressions and changing its own tone and cadence depending on what a user wants... It sounded more humanlike than some humans I know."And it's fast: it's “native multimodal support” means it can "take in aud…

"Web search ... more like a rummage sale. Your chance of finding an item that addresses your specific issue... is pretty low. You’re not walking into a custom tailor. You’re in the thrift shop... seeing if you can put something together. Some sewing may be required."This, of course, "is mentally taxing", so either they skim, ad…

Doctorow, pointing out that Google's move to AI search "is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage". Instead, "you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it…

What happens when we make machines "that we can’t help but treat them as people"?While "GPT-4o doesn’t represent a huge leap ... it more than makes up in features that make it feel more human... an ability to “see” and respond to images and live video in real time, to respond conversationally ... to “read” human emotions from visual…

"When Sundar Pichai took the stage at Google I/O ... said that the rise of generative artificial intelligence would provide new opportunities... for everyone". While many products unveiled will be doubtless useful, the picture's unclear for search itself: by end 2024 "Search Generative Experience... will appear at the top of re…

Interesting ideas but innocent of how they could create as much harm as good."The internet caters to our baser interests... like wanting to be healthy, but finding yourself in a food court where the only options are burgers and milkshakes. What option do we have but to be our baser selves?... But what if we created an arena of virtue ... wou…

Copy paste this into your nearest Word document or enterprise chat window, replace <> with your organisation's name and <> with whatever tool it uses to manage its knowledge, and you're good to go!

I've been kicking the tyres of Sublime, a new personal and social curation app, and pondering its approach to integrating AI.

"a deep-dive on the concrete ways Sublime makes my life better", by Sublime.app founder Sari Azout.

A 2022 year in review from Sari Azout, Sublime founder, starts by succinctly summarising their mission: "build a more human and nourishing internet... a platform where curious humans come together to curate and interconnect the best knowledge ... because our search engines and algorithmic news feeds are letting us down. The right idea, or the…

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence…

"Could AI itself be used to imagine and build new institutions, so we can better collaborate, govern, and live together?... hope to inspire and engage researchers and practitioners to build AI that improves our societal institutions."The site includes 8 (so far) “Project Cards that showcase ideas for projects that have come out of our wo…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

"All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some ... leave behind (useful) wreckage that can be salvaged":the first dotcom bubble left behind "cheap servers, office furniture and space... a generation of young people ,,, trained as web makers... technologists from non-technical backgrounds"crypto bubble: "a smatterin…

"startup Mistral AI posted a download link to their latest language model". In many ways it's equivalent to GPT4: context size of 32k tokens, and built using the “Mixture Of Experts” model, combining "several highly specialized language models... 8 experts with 7 billion parameters each: “8x7B”... a training method for AI syste…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

Like me, the author has "been taking notes for over a decade ...ended up with thousands of notes that I never revisited. So I decided to train ChatGPT on my 3,743 Obsidian notes", which were created for "one purpose: content creation. So I use an improved version of the Zettelkasten".Apparently there are just 3 ways to use AI i…

Earlier this week I used an excerpt from a chat with Philip Weiss & Jesús Azogue as a starting point for a conversation with ChatGPT about some of the content in my Hub.

Combines a good primer on Knowledge Graphs with a detailed technical explanation of how to "convert any text corpus into a Knowledge Graph using Mistral 7B", although he prefers to refer to them as "Graph of Concepts".Interestingly, "this project can be run easily on a personal machine... to convert any text corpus into a …

"If Charts lie, ChatGPT visualisations lie brilliantly". Exploring knowledge visualisations powered by ChatGPT, which can be particularly problematic because of the way the LLM's hallucinations - already hard to spot by their very nature - are also hidden behind the visualisation. But they have real potential as a creative muse.

Shows how to "Master web scraping without a single line of code" using the ChatGPT plugin (requires ChatGPT Plus) "scraper", and provides a prompt to extract content from a web page and arrange it in a table. And then use "plugins like “Doc Maker” or “CSV Exporter” ... or Code Interpreter for conversions."For large pr…

"I'm working with the garage door up as I learn how best to integrate AI with MyHub.ai... as anyone who has played with any LLM for any length of time knows... You need to try stuff out, compare results and try some more. You need, in other words, to experiment... Given that I am managing my research notes in Obsidian, sharing them here …