Super exponential
How AI is being used right now
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Friends,
At some point - if you haven’t already - you’ll start to see disillusionment around the applicability of AI and generative AI. What can this chat GPT do for me?
Me - I’m bullish on the improvement it can bring to our lives, how it helps companies do things better and how AI will help shape the next decade and beyond. It’s not about the chat interface, or the obvious use cases - it’s the boring ones that you don’t hear of. And there are so many use cases as listed by Harvard Business Review.
According to HBR: "There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast number of areas of domestic and work life. Looking through thousands of comments on sites such as Reddit and Quora, the author’s team found that the use of this technology is as wide-ranging as the problems we encounter in our lives. The 100 categories they identified can be divided into six top-level themes, which give an immediate sense of what generative AI is being used for: Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%), Content Creation & Editing (22%), Personal & Professional Support (17%), Learning & Education (15%), Creativity & Recreation (13%), Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%).
But there are hundreds of real life use cases. Here are the ones that I love:
Amazon's AI-driven recommendations are estimated to drive 35% of total sales.
Netflix's recommendation engine is credited with saving $1 billion per year by reducing churn and keeping subscribers engaged through personalised content recommendations.
BMW utilizes generative design AI to simulate and generate thousands of potential car parts and assembly configurations to optimize for weight, durability, and material usage, significantly reducing development time and material costs while fostering innovation in vehicle design and performance.
In "No Man's Sky", Hello Games uses generative AI algorithms to create vast, explorable universes, including planets, ecosystems, and alien species, all dynamically generated as players explore.
Legal Robot employs AI to understand legal language and generate custom contracts based on specific user inputs and requirements. This streamlines the contract creation process, reduces legal expenses for businesses, and minimises the risk of errors or omissions in important documents.
Stitch Fix uses generative AI to analyze current fashion trends, customer preferences, and inventory levels to generate new clothing item designs tailored to consumer tastes.
Visa uses generative AI models to simulate fraudulent activities and patterns, improving the detection algorithms' ability to identify and prevent actual fraud in real-time transactions.
And at Avallain, we’re using Generative AI to support in editorial efficiency within education.
The list could go on and on, but I’ll point to some specifics that are happening:
Great wealth is being created: The Nvidia CEO has seen his value skyrocket in recent years. But we’re also seeing a talent war for those with AI skills - and some of the most senior employees are either jumping ship of being acquihired.
Partial Automation: Even if AI doesn't lead to full automation, its application in sectors like healthcare and education could significantly improve productivity and economic growth, potentially without leading to high unemployment.
Population Growth Theory: Economic theories suggest that population growth has historically enabled faster economic growth. AI could simulate this effect by increasing the "population" of working robots, thus accelerating idea generation and economic activity.
We may be in a phase where some of the more strategic uses of generative are being built to be released later this year. Personally, I love both the boring…and the magic.
Meta’s VR Ray bans (with AI) feel like magic in the making
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Here are my recommendations for this week:
Part of my workflow on consuming and learning information has been ramped up by AI tools. One that I’m using regularly is TubeonAI which creates summaries of videos and podcasts in seconds. If you need to up your lifelong learning to stay ahead of the game, sign up for free and then use code BOXOFAMAZING for a premium discount) Sign up
Now
Is It Even Possible to Become More Productive? Most recently, Silicon Valley has made a near religion of separating the act of working from the product by proclaiming from every mountaintop that it doesn’t matter where or how you work, so long as you get it done. If you can’t hack it, there's one to blame but yourself. Thus the recent gusher of books with prescriptions for maximizing our own mojo. But the quants were worried. Productivity had been flat for a decade. Perhaps we’d done it: We’d produced all we could. Had we lost the ability to wring any more efficiency out of ourselves? Would it take an act of God to make us make more stuff? In March of 2020, we got one. Loosely related: Finland named the world's happiest country (again) in 2024 but young people in Europe are struggling
Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control - The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist: Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you. - But have listened to hours of Huberman over the last 4 years. So many nuggets to improve your life - but everyone has their faults.
The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave: Mickey Barreto’s five-year stay cost him only $200.57. Now it might cost him his freedom. Crazy story
The changing face of protest: Mass protests used to offer a degree of safety in numbers. Facial recognition technology changes the equation: Over the past decade, there has been a steep rise globally in law enforcement using facial recognition technology. Data gathered by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that government agencies in 78 countries now use public facial recognition systems.
When Your Vision and Hearing Decline with Age: If you want to feel like you’re getting old, visit an optometrist and have them tell you that in 6 to 12 months you won’t be able to read things up close and you’ll need bifocals.
Next
How People Are Really Using GenAI: [table of use cases] Real people are really getting plenty from generative AI. These examples can help us better understand where it’s actually creating value in people’s personal and professional lives. With any popular new technology, there are many fans and many detractors, like the two skeptics at the beginning of this piece. Who will have the last laugh though? The gleeful celebration of AI tripping up is irresistible and will do the social media rounds, for now. But whereas the appeal of this schadenfreude will fade, the real stories of AI helping human lives will stay and spread. As one enthusiast said “People that don’t find it useful, simply haven’t really understood how to use it.” Another put it more sharply: “The 5% or whatever who use it effectively are going to smoke the others.” This is the image of all use cases
Generative AI and K-12 Education: An MIT Perspective: In November of 2022, a Silicon Valley company launched an invention that could complete students’ homework for them. Available only to subscribers at first, by the spring of 2023 OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 was available to millions of students. As of January 2023, anyone with internet service can access the next generation, GPT-4, using Microsoft’s Bing, for free. ChatGPT and other emerging models like it are a form of generative AI, and its widespread availability poses new challenges and opportunities for schools. The response from educators falls along a spectrum, of enthusiasm and optimism on one side, and fatigue, bitterness, and pessimism on the other, and commonly, a mix of positive and negative attitudes. The optimists, the pessimists, and the ambivalent all agree that the sudden, widespread availability of generative AI has been a jolt that has left them scrambling to adapt for the past year. Related: I Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Why K12 Education is Not Thinking About AI Also: Is it harmful or helpful? Examining the causes and consequences of generative AI usage among university students
Why don't we have AI-powered robot butlers yet? Why AI-powered robot butlers – and the subsequent robot uprising – are at least a century away. If they were actually useful, robot butlers would be chore-killing appliances rather than snooty status symbols. I'm pretty confident the remaining butlers in the world — highly skilled managers of palatial estates who know which freshly polished rifle is for pheasants and which one is for foxes — would get to keep their weird antique jobs, even if Apple really did start manufacturing iJeeves. Ideally, then, the robot butler revolution wouldn't be an example of automation wrecking lives. It could instead be a true example of progress — technology for the people. And yet, there's no sign of it anywhere. Alternate view: Elon Musk says Tesla Optimus robot should cost ‘less than half of a car’
The World’s Most Innovative Companies 20024: OpenAI is not number 1.
“The king is dead”—Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time
Anthropic's Claude 3 is first to unseat GPT-4 for #1 since launch of Chatbot Arena in May '23. On Tuesday, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT) for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. "RIP GPT-4."
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