weekend ai reads for 2023-07-28

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: INVESTING

NOTE: Nothing here should be taken as investment advice. Ever.

• Machine Learning Market to Hit $419.94 Billion by 2030: Grand View Research, Inc. Yahoo Finance

• McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2023 McKinsey & Company

  • Trends with the largest investments in 2022: Electrification and renewables ($288B), Future of mobility ($194B), Advanced Connectivity ($118B)

  • Generative AI was at $5B, which certainly will have grown in 2023

• Investing in AI: Navigating the Hype Sparkline Capital

• What to Watch in AI — Investors from Sequoia, USV, Kleiner Perkins, and more select the AI startups you should keep an eye on. The Generalist

  • Leads off with the actionable insights (appreciated!), and then lists a lot of AI companies recommended by various VCs.

• Josh Wolfe on Where Investors Will Make Money in AI (58:18, transcript available) Bloomberg

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Michael Beirut, paraphrasing Massimo Vignelli (source)

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

• Welcome to a World Without Endings — Thanks to AI, every painting can now have an expanded border, every minor character a ChatGPT-written spinoff series. The Atlantic

• The AI Organization, part I — Most of the discussion of AI today focuses on 1:1 interactions, but we aren’t talking as much about how AI is going to change organizations Mutable.ai Blog

  • This post had been showing up everywhere since it was posted two weeks ago. But since it’s still going, we thought we’d get in on the fun too.

• Pressured by Biden, A.I. Companies Agree to Guardrails on New Tools New York Times

  • related: OpenAI, Google, others pledge to watermark AI content for safety, White House says Reuters

    • related: OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all The Verge

• Top News Publishers Are Reportedly Planning To Sue AI Firms Forbes

  • related: Human Artists Lose Ground in Legal Battle Against AI Depcrypt

• Kenyan ChatGPT Moderators Call On Lawmakers To Stop Big Tech Exploitation People of Color in Tech

  • related: On the Loess Plateau, women who have not gone to college are raising AI Google Docs, Jeffrey Ding’s translation of South Reviews, a politics and economics magazine based in Guangzhou, China.

🎓 EDUCATION

• Generative Artificial Intelligence Committee Report University of Michigan

  • None of the seven recommendations (p4 of PDF) are novel; the analysis is thorough.

  • Direct link to the PDF on Google Drive

• Will AI Finally End Our Love Affair With College? Bloomberg

• via adam, A Map of Generative AI for Education Laurence Holt, Medium

• It’s been a bumpy 6 months for edtech — are smoother roads ahead? Tech Crunch

  • Euro-centric; the answer is “it depends”

  • The five key takeaways:

    • One-third of global edtech deals done in Europe

    • H1 2023 saw more funding and higher average deal size than H2 2022

    • My Tutor Source raises $100 million, signaling growth in MENA-based edtech startups

    • Kahoot’s $1.7 billion privatization by Goldman Sachs-led group highlights growing M&A activity

    • Expectation of minor increase in European activity in H2 2023

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon — Want to really understand how large language models work? Here’s a gentle primer. Understanding AI

  • related, via adam: podcasts on Benchmarks 101 (50:37) and Datasets 101 (1:00:55) Latent Space

• via adam, Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models arXiv

  • related: Building software with a LLM is not what they say — Five problems you'll have to deal with when using Large Language Models Underfitted

    • Short article about challenges of using LLMs in software development

• Researchers Poke Holes in Safety Controls of ChatGPT and Other Chatbots New York Times

  • the report: Universal and Transferable Attacks on Aligned Language Models

• Amazon grows generative AI efforts with Bedrock expansion for AWS Venture Beat

  • Similar to OpenAI’s plugins

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

• A GPT-4 Capability Forecasting Challenge Nicholas's Writing

  • A game that tests your ability to predict how accurately GPT-4 will respond to various prompts.

• This AI-Powered Firm Is Ensuring Lending Practices Aren't Racist Essence

• Introducing Stable Diffusion XL 1.0! Itamar Golan (Twitter, sorry)

  • Try it here.

  • The biggest noticeable upgrade is it can now generate readable text.

• 5 Ways ChatGPT Can Improve, Not Replace, Your Writing Wired

• Copilot2trip [sic] — AI-powered travel planning chatbot

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

• The 1st Annual Tiny Awards winner: Rotating Sandwiches, which is exactly what it sounds like

  • Lose the whole weekend going through the 250+ nominees (Google Doc)

🛎️ The most-clicked link from last week was this article from Vox about the rush to hire “heads of AI” even though no one quite knows what those jobs are.