weekend ai reads for 2023-10-13

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: BUSINESS MODEL

• Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits  Wall Street Journal

  • related, Even Google Insiders Are Questioning Bard AI Chatbot’s Usefulness — Product managers and designers are skeptical about the tool, messages from an ‘official’ Discord group show   Bloomberg

• OpenAI’s Revenue Crossed $1.3 Billion Annualized Rate, CEO Tells Staff  The Information ($)

  • related, New Data Show OpenAI’s Viral Growth Among Startups. Can It Last?   The Information ($)

• Anthropic in Talks to Raise $2 Billion From Google and Others Just Days After Amazon Investment   The Information ($)

• The Inference Cost Of Search Disruption – Large Language Model Cost Analysis  Semianalysis ($)

  • via adam, related, OpenAI is too cheap to beat Generating Conversation, Substack

• We’ll call it AI to Sell it, Machine Learning to Build it The AI Underwriter, Substack

  • followed by a good list of questions

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies (source)

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

• LLMs for Dummies Digital Natives

• How AI reduces the world to stereotypes Rest of World

• How Will A.I. Learn Next? — As chatbots threaten their own best sources of data, they will have to find new kinds of knowledge.   The New Yorker

• Researchers Tested AI Watermarks—and Broke All of Them  Wired

  • related, What people ask me most. Also, some answers. — A FAQ of sorts   One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick)

• Generative AI Is Coming for Sales Execs’ Jobs—and They’re Celebrating — ChatGPT-style AI can tackle the drudge work of responding to RFPs faster than humans. Sales teams at Google, Twilio, and others say productivity is spiking.   Wired

🎓 EDUCATION

• via phillip, AI Book Bans: Testing LLMs Against the Freedom to Read Library Innovation Lab, Harvard University

• As AI Chatbots Rise, More Educators Look to Oral Exams — With High-Tech Twist EdSurge

• How AI is Shaping the Future of Education: Discover Key Takeaways from IT Futures Forum Dan Sodergren, Medium

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

• Who’s Harry Potter? Making LLMs forget  Microsoft Research

• LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant 

  • open-source multi-modal model (i.e., vision) built on Llama 2

• via adam, Decomposing Language Models Into Understandable Components  Anthropic

  • the paper

• TimeGPT-1  arXiv

  • bringing deep learning forecasting with on a diverse data set

• via marktechpost, LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment (May, 2023)   arXiv

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

• AI was asked to create images of Black African docs treating white kids. How'd it go?  National Public Radio

  • spoiler: poorly. it went poorly.

  • although the fashion show for the seniors (Instagram) is a winner

• Lalal.ai — Extract vocal, accompaniment and various instruments from any audio and video

  • test first minute of a song for free; on the free tier

  • struggled with the Big Freedia sample at the beginning of Beyonce’s “Break My Soul”

  • also struggled with Julian Casablancas’s falsetto register on “One Way Trigger”, giving it vibrato; cut out whole words when he sings in baritone

• App, Lover, Muse — Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot.   Insider

• AI Dubbing and Voice Translation — Localize your content across 29 languages in seconds with voice translation, speaker detection, and audio dubbing   Eleven Labs

  • your own voice, in many different languages

• Content Credentials 

  • admirable effort

• GPT-4V is blowing my mind The demos are awesome, but too scattered I wanted to break down the 100+ use cases I've seen so far into a simple framework Check out what I found with full descriptions and examples.   GregKamradt, Twitter (sorry)

  • graphical summary

• Hotshot-XL Text to GIF fffiloni, Hugging Face

  • there is a certain team at a certain organization that we hope does not decide to incorporate this into their workflow

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

• Script Monkey — Your Personal Hollywood Screenwriter

  • this isn’t paddy chayefsky