You can't INNOVATE without MISTAKES
Set your mind on growth.
In this edition:
My thoughts
Notable headlines
Learning, Tools, and Experiments
Using the MISTAKES Framework
AI Mistakes
My Thoughts
Science fiction is an incredibly useful tool. When it comes to imagining what's possible, we can play with new ideas at a different level by creating an artificial representation of reality from which we can control, manipulate, and derive additional insights.
But the two major events that happened in AI this month are not so far apart. Google got called out for how it represented reality. Sora has people reacting with fear and excitement about the incredible representations it can create for moving pictures.
These reactions are to be expected, and we are far from done.
Regarding the Google Gemini controversy, I sincerely believe that we need a “bias knob” that lets the user dial in the bias the system uses to construct replies. We all try to limit our bias, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect “no bias”.
We’ve built mechanisms like the “Op-Ed” in journalism decades ago, and I think it’s time we acknowledge the complexity involved in how these systems respond to what we ask. We should try to eliminate bias where possible, but it’s not always possible, nor is it always appropriate. It’s complicated, but this is where I’m at. If you disagree, I read every reply, so tell me how you really feel!
The more we constrain the responses, the less capable and useful they will become. Controls are warranted, but if they are controls, you also know what you will get. We already have the tools with the models to adjust temperate (that’s easier because of the math involved in predictability), but if we are tweaking things, it needs to be clear. At a minimum, system prompts need to be published or disclosed in some way so that we understand the “unwritten rules” that govern the systems. I’d really rather it be an open process than a closed door. We learn faster when it’s open and new ideas can be contributed.
As for the Sora announcement, it’s clear that OpenAI understood that the reactions would likely need time to settle down and to be well received and understood by the public before the released it for use. It appears that they were quite intentional about releasing some details and representations of what it can do but not giving access to the tool itself. It’s also important to remember it’s just a moving picture. They look amazing, but movies require more effort than moving rendered images around a screen.
I've seen a lot of reactions to the Sora videos. If you were a regular viewer of the YouTube channel, you saw that I was stunned by how high fidelity, high quality, and consistent the outputs were.
But as I said in the live broadcast, we don't know what it took to produce those. But I can tell you that I have friends in the movie, TV, and film industry, and it’s already garnered an article about Tyler Perry putting a pause on studio hires.
Looking back on the December edition, I projected we would have a full-length movie created with AI. That seems even more likely now. And if anything, the release of Sora has just helped more people to understand what’s happening and how fast. ElevenLabs is already working on adding sounds and audio, and this week, Alibaba released a showcase of their new Emo, which actually uses the lady from the Sora video to show off audio and voice augmentation work.
AI is going to impact Hollywood, television, music and art productions. How long will it take for an industry-wide impact? That’s less clear to me because I’m on the outside, and headlines don’t do well at contextualizing entire industries. But have you ever sat in the theater and read the literal hundreds of names it takes to make a film now? It’s an absolute army of people for any work of sufficient length or complexity. Undoubtedly, at least a few of those job roles can be impacted by what AI can do today.
Should we all be worried now? No, but I do think it bears consideration. There is an opportunity here if you step back and consider the possibilities.
So, if you are worried about what AI can do in doing your work, don’t delay. Start working with these tools now so that you are the expert on the new tech and tools. This puts you in higher demand, and better yet, if you have the vision, you can be the one doing the hiring for the next big film.
If you are not in this place, or it’s not clicking into place, please read the section at the end. I have a great tool to share with you, and I’d love to connect with you and help get you on a better track. This is part of the AI MISTAKES mission.
Notable Headlines
Google Launches new Gemini Chatbot capabilities, complete with incredible abilities to generate highly detailed faces, and then the CEO apologizes about what it generates after some changes are needed
If you want more details, watch last week’s Live broadcast, but more work is needed across all AI generation systems.
Nvidia's market capitalization topped $2 trillion before falling below the mark again.
I expect the inertia to continue, but other solutions are coming to market this year.
Jenseng Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, argued that AI's ability to understand and execute commands in human language could democratize programming, making everyone a programmer without the need to learn specific coding languages.
I’ve taken to calling prompt engineering “Natural Language Programming” because it’s the new form of programming. Computers will do more on their own, so he’s not wrong.
AI startup Groq went viral this week for its new chip that delivers near-instant chatbot response times.
In summary, really, really fast. Not cheap.
Google struck a $60 million content licensing deal with Reddit, allowing Google to train its AI models on Reddit content.
Not the last content licensing deal we will see this year.
Google open-sourced a family of AI models called Gemma.
Open models are vital. I’m not particularly excited about Gemma; it will improve, I am sure, but I am excited that Google has open-sourced it.
ChatGPT can now remember everything it has been trained on.
I’m still processing this one, but it’s an upgrade.
OpenAI unveils Sora, a text-to-video model that produce complex and much longer video
This will have an impact in more ways than one. I can’t wait to see what happens in open source as a response.
Learning, Tools, and Experiments
Microsoft has a great Generative AI for Beginners program on GitHub. You do have to sign up for access to OpenAI on Azure, and everything is in Microsoft’s way of doing things, but if you are already on Azure, it’s a great way to dig in.
If you want to go really deep, you might be interested in Andrej Karpathy’s Tokenizer Mini Byte Pair Encoding project on GitHub.
Stability AI has shared more on their upcoming Stable Cascade (text-to-image) for consumer-grade systems. You can play with the preview here.
If you have a nice desktop system and home and happen to have a fairly recent NVIDIA GTX card, you can play with their new Chat with RTX. If you want to do more with your own documents and you have 36GB of storage available, go check it out. You can also take a closer look by watching my recent live broadcast covering it.
And don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube Channel. I do a live video every Friday, sharing the latest news, ideas, and great research discoveries. There’s more than enough to talk about every week.
AI MISTAKES
Before we get all serious, I do have to share some MISTAKES from this month.
So, no AI system is perfect; there is always room for improvement. And also, because they are not perfect, we have opportunities that are not to be missed.
This is where I want to take a moment to discuss mindset.
Having been through many circumstances, I now far better appreciate the value of looking at things in the proper light. I want to call out the absolute necessity for everyone regarding mindset and how it becomes an advantage for you.
Because if you look at the news about AI, and all you see is “I am going to lose my job”, you need to reset. Take the time and effort to find the help you need to get yourself in the right frame of mind.
This is so important that I’ve made it the first module of the premier master course with AI MISTAKES.
I created a framework as a guide to make it easy to remember and use.
If you're interested in the course, sign up for the waitlist to be the first to know when the next course becomes available.
The goal here is to put yourself in a position to take action. It helps drive the question: “How can I take advantage of the circumstances?” instead of being a victim or passive observer.
If you show up with the vision and know how to use the tools, AI can likely help you execute the vision. Then, you can be part of the story, looking for great people to help you execute.
We might all think we have the best ideas. And then see someone else do it and go, Hey, that was my idea. And my response now is, yeah, but you didn't do anything with it. In today’s world, it’s increasingly true that ideas are a dime a dozen. If you have an idea, share it. Build the vision, and people will start to show up. But more importantly, if you care about that idea, find an action to take to execute it.
Now that we’ve covered mindset, I want to address the section header: AI MISTAKES.
What I see, more and more frequently, is people making the mistake of underestimating what AI can do.
I hope you can see from the headlines that AI is becoming more capable of research and development efforts across hardware, software, algorithms, and data.
What are the mistakes that it's making today? AI MISTAKES aims to understand how to think about AI, use AI, and apply it to our daily lives.
Don't let the mistakes slow you down. Embrace them. Learn from them. Get started today.
Go make some AI MISTAKES.