AI is in its e-commerce 1998 moment

It's 1998. I'm telling you that e-commerce is the future and I have some hot stocks to sell you. Are you in? My stated investing thesis is vaguely correct, but depending on the particular stocks you could retire way early (Amazon.com) or lose your shirt in 1999 (Pets.com).

To uncritically accept my thesis is to roll the dice carelessly yet to react against my thesis is to miss opportunity. This is the sort of crossroads businesses face regarding #ArtificialIntelligence. There is over- and mis- hype out there, but this is not to say that accepting the frame of the hype and reacting against is the right path.

In this video, I examine these threads in more detail and argue the right path is to ignore the hype and figure out the hype really should be for your business and your industry.

AI as a (powerful, transformative) management technology

#ArtificialIntelligence might eventually transform how large organizations are administered, and I think this sort of application is both more interesting and more important than commonly recognized. In this video, I contrast your typical ordered, pyramidal org chart with the more disorderly and decentralized ("rhizomatic") reality of how things get done - we have all had experiences where we got to go on a journey seeking the person who knows where the bodies are buried. The right sort of #AI observer + interlocutor could potentially do everything to enhance management's ability to steer the ship in a constructive and straightforward way.

AI is doctoring your photos! (and has been a while...)

You've been using #ArtificialIntelligence to doctor all your photographs for years just as most any image you see on social media has been doctored!

Does this revelation surprise you? I'm being hyperbolic, but it has been true for some time that most smartphones had sophisticated #MachineLearning algorithms cleaning up photos on the fly. Does this count as #AI doctoring? Different people may say different things...

I think this is worth pointing out both because...

1) there is already more AI in the room with us than we admit, and related...

2) human-and-AI collaboration is already the norm for many tasks

In this video I develop these themes and provide some more examples you may have already encountered without knowing.

Doing generative AI well requires pulling up your socks (metaphorically)

Are your organization's #ArtificialIntelligence socks pulled up all the way? Or are droopy socks giving everyone blisters? There is a story I love about celebrated UCLA basketball coach John Wooden coaching players on putting their shoes and socks on with care. Many people will tell you elite performance is about doing all the less-than-sexy things right. In this video, I distill the content of some failure & frustration stories I have heard to argue that doing #GenerativeAI well is as much about an application development headspace as it is about AI. Failure scenarios have an AI story in them, but it is always about AI interacting with all the little, prosaic details of building an app that real people actually want to use.

AI winter and why the NVIDIA earnings call is important

As you await the NVIDIA earnings call tomorrow you might take a couple minutes to think about a.) why finance is a very important part of the long-term story of #ArtificialIntelligence, b.) the past periods "AI winter" in the 60s / 80s, the importance of expectations, and c.) why it is generally enlightening to understand why this earnings call is so anticipated.

Why the parade of new LLMs could represent a headache for you

There is always an exciting new hashtag #LLM model coming out these days. If you are trying to build something practical for right now, this could actually be a headache for you. In this video, I present arguments related to cost, model lifecycle, and safety to the effect that one needs to beware the parade of new models. I also provide one more voice in favor of the open-source, locally hosted model as I perceive it to be the least vulnerable to the issues I discuss.

#GenerativeAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AISafety

Digging into the "why?" of the Apple Intelligence delay

Apple has delayed its anticipated release of a new raft of #ArtificialIntelligence features for its phones. In this video, I dive deep on this decision primarily for the benefit of business leaders contemplating similar decisions. Tidbits discussed in the video that are worth mentioning in writing include...

"stability" as a motivation and on-device vs. #cloud processing

the use of specialized chips produced by Google

#WallStreet's scrutiny of #BigTech #AI spending

The emerging "medium language model"

What is a medium language model? (you can abbrev as mlm for fun)

It's mostly my term for the moment, but it appears to me as the obvious term for a natural line of research I have heard discussed more and more. In this video, I discuss some trends in #ArtificialIntelligence research oriented towards producing #LLM -like models that are less prone to hallucinations and are hopefully more suitable to serve as experts. The idea is that if the training data is restricted to material produced by appropriate experts, the output will be more consistently expert, but then the immediate question is if there is enough data to suit this pickiness.

The biggest question in AI: What is AI?

If you are a business leader or executive, it might turn out to be very important how you communicate with various stakeholders about #ArtificialIntelligence. There is one simple, surprising question you can contemplate that will help you handle this communication well...

What is #AI, exactly?

In this video, I argue that it is everything not to understand this question for yourself, but rather to appreciate + accommodate all the ways other people understand it.

No seats on the OpenAI board for Apple or Microsoft

In this video I discuss recent news that Apple and Microsoft will no longer pursue observer seats on OpenAI's board ostensibly because of concerns around antitrust optics. Success with #ArtificialIntelligence in a large organization often involves navigating unusually many and unusually weird stakeholder revolts and this story is a great example of how non-technical issues like corporate governance and antitrust regulation can join forces to make your life more interesting than you might think.

AI is out and biznis is in at Open AI?

Open AI is in the news today for hiring a CFO and a Chief Product Officer. I think it is more broadly noteworthy that human resource stories about Open AI these days invariably involve not only the hiring of many people on the business side but frequently also the departures of notable engineers and scientists like Ilya Sutskever. I examine some recent history including Open AI's journey from not-for-profit research lab to legally awkward pseudo-for-profit company, its near implosion following the attempted and eventually failed ouster of CEO Sam Altman, and use these data points to muse on whether technology is out and business is in to such a degree as to produce impactful consequences down the road.

Scarlet Johannson is suing OpenAI! She should win but might lose...

Take a study break to let me update you on events at the intersection of #ArtificialIntelligence and personal identity. The biggest headline is that Scarlet Johansson is suing #ChatGPT maker OpenAI for allegedly using her voice without her consent. The punchline is that I think she likely deserves to win, but she may not. I provide some discussion my personal journey as a creator, as well as some observations of trends on Pinterest and jokes about the fantastic abs typical of male underwear models, to argue that the current situation is very murky in a way that I expect will enable bad actors to misbehave with a little too much impunity.

The (non) future of new and science fictional consumer products

#BigTech companies like #Apple or #Google are under unusual pressure to show the world a futuristic, transformative product and there are plenty of incumbent ideas that we tend to agree are cool and futuristic when we see them on a lab bench. However, I think there is a lot of room to be skeptical that people will welcome these ideas into their day-to-day lives in the way that is required to produce a hit product, much less a socially transformative product like the smartphone. In this video, I talk about correct and incorrect prophecies in classic Schwarzenegger action / sci-fi films to point out that we do a better job guessing at the progress of technology than at the evolution of our day-to-day interest. I spotlight some particular technologies that are knocking on the door, including #AugmentedReality as well as a possible #ArtificialIntelligence -fueled shift in how we interact with computing broadly that you can see implicit in #OpenAI's recent focus on improving capabilities for audio and image based interaction.

LLM, Agent Based Workflows, and Dungeons and Dragons

Below I talk about agent based workflows, a paradigm for how to use #LargeLanguageModels (#LLM) and similar tools, in the context of a tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons. I have a very basic text-based game (linked below) built on the #ChatGPT API that has some limitations I am going to improve over the next few weeks. I am going to do my best at doing this in an at least philosophically agent-based manner - look out for more videos on my progress and why you might call it agent-based. The goal is to give you a sense of the value in these concepts that is more tangible and problem-solving oriented than some of what you might find out there right now.

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI

AI is for small business

The current wave of #GenerativeAI technology may get a lot more uptake with #SmallBusiness and smaller businesses will likely be the leaders that eventually drag the large corporations with them. This is not something that will be well-publicized, but it is already out there if you know how to look for it. Invest 10 minutes in my story on how the AI wave is really about small business and why.

#ArtificialIntelligence

The human in the loop

You can't leave #ArtificialIntelligence all the way unsupervised.

Can you use #GenerativeAI to plan an event for you? #Meetup has a button you can click to do this. The answer is "Yes" but in a silly way. Do you care what the event is? What kind of work you have to do to back up the plan? What the event is about? You probably do, and if you do you need to put about as much work into the supervising the AI as you might have spent planning.

If you are involved in managing risk for a large organization, or if you are worried about where the labor market is headed, you should note that you need humans in the loop for the foreseeable future. No matter how good the AI is, you still need to check that it is behaving in a way aligned with your goals and resources. You can have a brilliant employee that creates a problem because you did not bother to communicate with them and AI is not really any different.

Is prompt engineering for real?

Is #PromptEngineering for real? Is it really a coherent, specialized skill that will stay relevant or is it just a buzzword about tinkering with another buzzword? There is a multi-tiered debate going on about this right now and I won't be able to cover all of it here. I will say, though, that there is a lot more to it than you will be exposed to playing with #ChatGPT for personal use and I often see the topic carelessly over-trivialized on social media. If you are building an application using a #LargeLanguageModel or similar, you are really writing prompts for other people that might not be cooperative, you might have prompts helping write those prompts, and the stakes for your business could be pretty high. It is a challenge to take seriously.

#ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #SoftwareEngineering #ApplicationDevelopment

Elon Musk sues OpenAI!

#ElonMusk is suing #OpenAI. This is hot off the presses right now and potentially a really big deal.

In this video I provide context and backstory for this lawsuit including...

Musk's turn as a co-founder, funder and one-time board member of OpenAI,

how OpenAI was in fact founded to be open yet has become closed,

how OpenAI is now oddly a not-for profit with a for-profit subsidiary,

the role of Microsoft and how all these threads fit into OpenAI's recent semi-implosion followed by #SamAltman's return to the helm.

#ArtificialIntelligence