weekend ai reads for 2023-06-30

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: AI FOR CEOs

A CEO’s biggest decisions can be summarized as “allocation of resources”. AI is going to test many CEOs’ agility in those decisions.

• What every CEO should know about generative AI McKinsey

  • Long and thorough overview of AI through the CEO lens; some of it is primer that is easily skimmable

• How to Attract, Develop, and Retain AI Talent Boston Consulting Group

  • One of the biggest constraints (along with compute and data) for non-big tech companies working on these problems.

• A.I. is now the biggest spend for nearly 50% of top tech executives across the economy: CNBC survey CNBC

• Our early-adopters index examines how corporate America is deploying AI — Companies of all stripes are using the technology The Economist

  • related: The widespread adoption of AI by companies will take a while The Economist

• It’s not just hype, corporate America is making huge bets on AI transforming their businesses Tech Crunch

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Patricia Urquiola (source)

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

As LLMs begin to reach the limits of their scale using current data and compute, the discussion is shifting what to do next.

• The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget arXiv

• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content. We’re just beginning to see the effects of these changes. The Verge

• Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve The Gradient

• Predicted benefits, proven harms — How AI’s algorithmic violence emerged from our own social matrix The Sociological Review

• The Great A.I. Hallucination (podcast transcript, actual podcast 0:44:00) The New Republic

• On giving AI eyes and ears — AI can listen and see, with bigger implications than we might realize. Ethan Mollick, Substack

🎓 EDUCATION

• Generative AI Should Not Replace Thinking at My University — I’m dismayed that any academic institution would encourage us to use chatbots rather than our intellects. The Atlantic

  • A professor at Indiana University explains why he is upset about his IT department’s tone-deaf “imperative” on the use of GPT

• possibly related: Nearly Half of Surveyed Faculty Pessimistic on AI Impact in Higher Ed The Harvard Crimson

• Georgia Tech Is Trying to Keep a ChatGPT-Powered Teaching Assistant From ‘Hallucinating’ EdSurge

• Private equity deals in education services jump as sector prepares for AI shift. S&P Global Market Intelligence

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

• Picking Teams in AI Tomasz Tunguz

• Survey reveals AI’s impact on the developer experience -- We surveyed 500 U.S.-based developers at companies with 1,000-plus employees about how managers should consider developer productivity, collaboration, and AI coding tools. Github Blog

• GPT-4's Secret Has Been Revealed — Unraveling OpenAI's masterful ploy The Algorithmic Bridge, Substack

  • based on conjecture and rumor, i.e., not confirmed by OpenAI

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

• The best films about AI – ranked! The Guardian

• Artemis AI Bedtime Stories (iOS only)

• Biotech begins human trials of drug designed by artificial intelligence — Insilico Medicine says trial of lung disease therapy is milestone for generative AI in drug development Financial Times

• AI.xyz platform for your personal AI assistant

• Learning about AI from kids (30:52)  Headspace, YouTube

  • Talk from Dale Lane (IBM) on how he teaches kids about AI; turns into a pretty good explanation of AI itself