weekend ai reads for 2023-12-08

programming note: we have a special edition next week and will be back to our usual ai things in January

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: GOOGLE GEMINI & AMAZON Q

• Introducing Gemini: our largest and most capable AI model Google Blog

  • via adam, “Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models” [PDF]

• but … Google’s best Gemini demo was faked Tech Crunch

• Google Gemini is Finally Here AI Supremacy, Substack

  • long look into Gemini, including larger implications for Google Cloud

  • and for Alphabet

• Why Gemini Probably Isn’t as Good as Google Says It Is The Information ($)

• Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies — Amazon has been racing to shake off the perception that it is lagging in the push to take advantage of artificial intelligence.   New York Times

• but … Amazon's AI chatbot, Q, might be in the throes of a mental health crisis Business Insider

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Mukund Srinath (source)

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

• Meta and IBM launch ‘AI Alliance’ to promote open-source AI development The Guardian

  • official press release, AI Alliance Launches as an International Community of Leading Technology Developers, Researchers, and Adopters Collaborating Together to Advance Open, Safe, Responsible AI IBM Newsroom

• AI-Powered Drive-Thru Is Actually Run Almost Entirely By Humans Bloomberg

• Stanford Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI EO 14110 Tracker [Google Sheets]   Stanford University

  • related, The Bureaucratic Challenge to AI Governance: An Empirical Assessment of Implementation at U.S. Federal Agencies Association for Computing Machinery

• Consulting Giants See AI Shaving Years Off the Path to Partner Bloomberg

  • as a formerly-green consultant, the opportunity to do “more interesting” client-facing work right away would have been great; but having managed many green consultants, we don’t know how we could have done that without having done the work ourselves and understanding how to coach and train and check others’ work

  • without other guardrails and training opportunities, this sounds dubious

• Why do AI Wrappers get a bad (w)rap? Ben’s Bites, Beehiiv

  • interesting but doesn’t touch on costs to earn that revenue

🎓 EDUCATION

• AI Adoption Framework for Philanthropy [PDF]   Technology Association of Grantmakers

  • relevant to most organizations, not just philanthropy

• The 4 next big things in education technology for 2023 Fast Company

  • Accredible

  • Forward Education

  • Prisms of Reality

  • Quizlet

• AI in EdTech: How it Breaks in Subtle Ways eLiterate

• Why Small and Mid-Size Companies Need an AI Educator Julia Zhipa, Medium

• Math Education with Large Language Models: Peril or Promise? Social Science Research Network

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

• Technical Report: Large Language Models can Strategically Deceive their Users when Put Under Pressure arXiv

• Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models arXiv

  • related, Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT Not Just Memorization, Github

• You Don't Need a Vector Database Xethub Blog

  • they show their work

• AI networks are more vulnerable to malicious attacks than previously thought Science Daily

• Google DeepMind’s new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials — Newly discovered materials can be used to make better solar cells, batteries, computer chips, and more.   MIT Technology Review

  • good excuse to post this background on GNNs (52:40)

• Apple joins AI fray with release of model framework — Apple’s machine learning research team quietly releases a framework called MLX to build foundation models.   The Verge

  • examples of what the framework can do at Github

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

• Bricks & Brands — What if today's popular brands had Lego sets?   Mehmet Gozetlik, Behance

  • the Leica, Nintendo, and Hermès ones are best; the former just looks like a real camera and not a Lego set

• AI Term — It simplifies the process of converting natural language into executable commands, allowing users to find and run the commands they need without leaving their terminal.

• Writing with AI iA Blog

  • designers looking at role of AI in writing, and what it means for the user experience

• Pika 1.0

  • Announcing Pika 

• Chatbot Arena: Benchmarking LLMs in the Wild — Ask any question to two anonymous models (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Llama) and vote for the better one!

• Dubbing AI — Free Real-Time AI Voice Changer

  • lot of “server is overloaded” errors; may require patience

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

• Ello

  • an app that listens to a reader (ages 4-8), plus a box of books shipped monthly

  • this was somehow not reassuring