Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Woot! Welcome Applied AI Weekly Readers to Issue 176. I'm excited to once again share with you the most interesting articles I've found this past week on Artificial Intelligence. Before we go there, here are a few things to note:...

We continue to sell tickets at a very rapid clip to the Applied AI Conference on May 10th. Interested in presenting at the first, largest, and ONLY conference on Artificial Intelligence here in Minnesota? Submit a presentation today! We are closing our call for speakers at midnight on Feb 24th.
Interested in being on the Conversations on Applied AI Podcast? If the response is a resounding YES, fill out this form to connect with me and we'll get you scheduled.
I'm continuing to offer free consultation with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. This can be everything from how I'm working on building chatbots, looking at open source LLMs, and how GPTs are changing how products are being developed from product management to software engineering. Connect today and book a meeting with me.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles that I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week. Reach out if there's anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

How Students Can ‘Future-Proof’ Themselves As AI Disrupts The Workforce

Exactly how jobs and professions will change is not yet clear, but universities tasked with producing employable graduates are already thinking about how higher education can stay relevant amid the uncertainty.

“We are in the difficult position of not fully knowing what the concrete outcomes of AI’s impact will be,” says University of Tokyo President Teruo Fujii. “But we are at the same time responsible for educating students to enter a society that will essentially be reinvented by this advanced technology,”

Sora

We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.

Scientists Are Putting ChatGPT Brains Inside Robot Bodies. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

In restaurants around the world, from Shanghai to New York, robots are cooking meals. They make burgers and dosas, pizzas and stir-fries, in much the same way robots have made other things for the past 50 years: by following instructions precisely, doing the same steps in the same way, over and over.

AI and the Classroom

In the full academic year since the launch of ChatGPT, Yale administrators and instructors have altered their guidelines and teaching styles to accommodate for the new technology. Though many remain concerned about plagiarism concerning AI, some professors have embraced using AI in the classroom.

Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups

Last May, Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest artificial intelligence start-ups, raised $450 million from investors including Google and Salesforce. It was the beginning of an astonishing funding spree.

By August, Anthropic had landed $100 million from two Asian telecoms. Then Amazon committed $4 billion to it, followed by $2 billion more from Google.

This month, the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures closed a deal to invest $750 million in Anthropic.

What Would Thomas Aquinas Make of AI?

In an interview with CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, Thomas Marschler, who holds the Chair of Dogmatics at the University of Augsburg, said: “Of course, Thomas could not have foreseen how the world’s technology would develop in the 800 years since his birth. No one in his time could have imagined that machines would one day be invented that would use computer technology to solve problems in a similar way to intelligent human beings or even surpass them.”

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Security

Tech Firms Sign ‘Reasonable Precautions’ to Stop AI-Generated Election Chaos

Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they will respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies – including Elon Musk’s X – are signing on to the accord.

Fake Biden Robocall Investigation Targets 2 Texas Companies

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said Tuesday that investigators have identified the source of the calls as Life Corporation and that the calls were transmitted by a company called Lingo Telecom. New Hampshire issued cease-and-desist orders and subpoenas to both companies, while the Federal Communications Commission issued a cease-and-desist letter to the telecommunications company, Formella said. In a statement, the FCC said it was trying to stop “behavior that violates voter suppression laws.”

Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence Is Making Critical Health Care Decisions

The government has slow-walked regulation of the fast-moving technology because the funding and staffing challenges facing agencies like the Food and Drug Administration in writing and enforcing rules are so vast. It’s unlikely they will catch up any time soon. That means the AI rollout in health care is becoming a high-stakes experiment in whether the private sector can help transform medicine safely without the government watching.

Development

Amazon announces LLM-powered tools for developers at the Devices and Services Fall Launch Event

At build-time, developers will provide the skill manifest, API specifications, content sources and natural language descriptions. At runtime, Alexa will find the right provider, orchestrate API calls and retrieve content based on user context, device context and memory (which includes conversation history, and event timeline.)

Memory and New Controls for ChatGPT

We’re testing the ability for ChatGPT to remember things you discuss to make future chats more helpful. You’re in control of ChatGPT’s memory.

Prompt Engineering: An Integrated Dream

Since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to the public, a flurry of discussions has emerged online about a new dream job: Prompt Engineering. It's touted as "AI's Hottest Job," promising six-figure salaries without the need for programming experience. Enthusiasts describe it as a job of the future, where anyone can earn up to $335K by smooth-talking a cool know-it-all robot into giving right answers. No surprise, Instagram money making sages, YouTube career preachers, and self-proclaimed oracles of TikTok have been very vocal about it. While this sounds like a dream job, is it truly achievable? Let's delve into the reality of job market behind the hype to find out.

Introducing Gemini 1.5, Google's Next-Generation AI Model

Last week, we rolled out our most capable model, Gemini 1.0 Ultra, and took a significant step forward in making Google products more helpful, starting with Gemini Advanced. Today, developers and Cloud customers can begin building with 1.0 Ultra too — with our Gemini API in AI Studio and in Vertex AI.