AI Goldrush
ChatGPT wasn't even just the beginning
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Friends,
As you review today’s recommendation, please do feel free to comment, like. Many of you reply to me directly and I would love for your comments to be public. You can see these prompts at the top and bottom of this email. You can also download the substack app, read it there as well as listen to an audio version. And, of course,
One of the unintended poster industries of this new AI coming has been education and edtech. In education circles, there’s a running joke that it’s not ChatGPT, but CheatGPT. Other educators are embracing AI tools for the classroom. For my educator friends interested in what’s happening in the industry, check out my recommended resources.
This AI Revolution continues to escalate. I remember at the advent of the common Internet there was a gold rush. AI is not new but OpenAI releasing an easy-to-understand interface with ChatGPT, has opened the minds of millions around the world. I spent time on a training course to see how powerful the prompts could be. I’m not surprised that ChatGPT is the Kindle Store’s hottest new author. If you look in your spam folder, you’ll also find invites to crazy schemes, I’m sure!
We will see explainers and courses about “how to use ChatGPT”, “the best prompts” followed by applying AI for specific use cases, unproven money-making schemes - but also legitimate ones. For the everyman and everywoman, we should think first about how we move away from the mundane by asking AI to do things for us that will speed up our life. How do we use AI to explain and give us summaries of the mundane, for example? And then, how do we train models to give us highly intelligent views based on a specific corpus of text - or searching for your next home purchase based on your budget and requirements or even scouring through LinkedIn to find the best person to fill my next recruitment campaign?
I’m currently enjoying Artifact - personalised news, powered by AI. I’m also excited that Notion announced Notion AI enabling you to generate summaries, action items and key insights from your notes, rewrite a doc to be more concise, or translate it to another language as well as brainstorm new ideas and first drafts when you’re writing something new.
If you’re going to read one article today, check out OpenAI blog piece that defines its ethos over the coming years. (Planning for AGI and beyond)
Finally, and unrelated, I will leave you with this immersive experience from the NBA. If this is the next level of fandom in streaming, I’m excited!
Stay Curious,
PS. How old do you think you are?
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Here are my recommendations for this week:
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Now
Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence. - Social Media is not just correlational, it is a major factor, and this covers the data. It’s not the only factor. You need to treat social media like a drug. Either don't have it or be clear when and how.
Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars - Few technologies defined the 20th century more than the car. On the surface, the love affair with the personal automobile continues unabated into this century. The number of drivers on the world’s roads continues to rise almost everywhere. The distance driven by American motorists hit a new peak last year, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. But there are hints that this is changing. People like Ms Crandall show why. Getting a driving licence was once a nearly universal rite of passage into adulthood. Now it is something that a growing minority of young people either ignore or actively oppose, into their 20s and beyond.
Don’t worry about AI breaking out of its box—worry about us breaking in. The worst human impulses will find plenty of uses for generative AI. We can’t fully immunize ourselves against whatever they’ll hurl our way. But we can start by thinking carefully and strategically about tomorrow’s manipulations, enlist generative AI itself to prebuild certain protection layers (an article for another day), and train our minds to be sceptical of the likely come-ons and tricks of next-generation scams before they start flooding our inboxes.
A year after Russia’s invasion, the scope of cyberwar in Ukraine comes into focus - The Ukraine war has inspired a defensive cyber effort that government officials and technology executives describe as unprecedented - it is possible to begin accounting for digital weapons' role played in the conflict. Sophisticated Russian cyberattacks — such as those targeting the electricity grid — have either failed to materialize, been thwarted or gone unobserved. Cyberwarfare in Ukraine has instead been marked by widespread deployment of wipers — designed to delete and destroy data — and extensive information operations.
Eagles Are Falling, Bears Are Going Blind - Bird flu is already a tragedy. An avian flu outbreak has unleashed a wave of devastation on North America's wildlife, with the US alone suffering the loss of a staggering 58.4 million domestic birds. The affected farms have been forced to cull their chicken flocks, leading to a spike in egg prices. While the likelihood of human transmission remains low, the virus has been spreading among mammalian populations, causing concerns about its potential to infect new hosts. It has already infiltrated over 150 avian species and at least a dozen different types of mammals. Although not anticipated to be the next human pandemic, it has already surpassed any other recorded outbreak in its magnitude and destructive impact on North America's wildlife.
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Next
The Real Agenda Behind All the Chatbots. ChatGPT isn’t the product. Its API is. The APIs were always the point. These bots were demos meant to sell other companies on tools they could use to build their own. And it worked. Now, the war to build the leading generative A.I. platform is underway.
Generative AI is coming for the lawyers. Large law firms are using a tool made by OpenAI to research and write legal documents. The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been forecast multiple times before. But the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at its forefront, has those within the industry more convinced than ever.
Brain implant startup backed by Bezos and Gates is testing mind-controlled computing on humans - The Synchron Switch is implanted through the blood vessels to allow people with no or very limited physical mobility to operate technology such as cursors and smart home devices using their mind. So far, the nascent technology has been used on three patients in the U.S. and four in Australia.
Planning for AGI and beyond: OpenAI’s piece covering what’s next. If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility. AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity.
Small wonders: The antibodies from camels and sharks that could change medicine - A handful of animals make a pared-down version of these pathogen-fighting proteins of our immune system. Scientists hope to harness them as treatments for ills from cancer to Covid, for tracking cells in the body, and more.
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