How I Use Foundation Models
Midjourney, prompt authored by GPT-4

How I Use Foundation Models

I've had many friends and coworkers speak of Foundation Models (#LLMs like #ChatGPT) as if they were autocomplete or simple chatbots, but I've found them revolutionary to the way I spend my day. At #Microsoft, we're working to integrate these into our products in a safe manner in a way that can help everyone to achieve more, but that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to share ways that I'm using these new tools to help me be more effective, and hopefully have some of my friends and colleagues explore the potential uses and benefits of these models to make themselves more effective right now.

I'll be authoring a series of posts on how I use these models, of which this is the first. I am not coming to you as an expert - there aren't any. At no other time in my career have I been forced to have such a beginner's mind, a growth mindset, and regularly re-evaluate my priors. These models display incredible emergent properties, and knowledge hard-won from one model may not translate well to another (or even the next version). I encourage everyone to play, learn, and become informed. These models will change society, and I want as many people involved so we can make those changes trend towards a result that benefits us all.

Okay, so my first example: Bing Chat (Creative mode) helping me discover new media I never knew I needed, based on thematic similarity:

Bing Chat conversation: I ask it why Giant Steps is considered pivotal, and what other songs might be interesting in Jazz for similar reasons. It gives me a response with some good options, however most are other Coltrane songs.
Chatting with Bing about Jazz

Good results, but mostly tunes I knew, and skewed towards Coltrane. This is, however, where the magic of these models comes into play. You are having a conversation with your search agent now, and it has context - you can ask it to go deeper. I want less Coltrane, and more modern artists that I may never have heard about, so I'll ask it to do so:

Bing conversation: I then ask it for more recent examples and to not focus on Coltrane. It gives me a response with much better results, songs that I hadn't heard before.

This is a whole collection of music that I never knew I needed, and I can now go to Spotify and start exploring the graph there as well, learning about even more new artists. This is just as easy to do with movies, books, or other media you're interested in. Please take it for a test drive and let me know what interesting things you find!

#AI #languagemodels #productivityboost #GrowthMindset

Taija Khader

Sr. Project Specialist | Sustainable Development | Open Innovation Expert | Program Management, Tech & Innovation

2y

This is great, Mike! ChatGPT has been incredibly useful for market research and discovering new interesting examples / strengthening arguments for concept notes and presentations. The most helpful tool! Looking forward to your next ideas.

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Barret Bachert

Director of Supply Chain Kratos Defense

2y

I started playing with Bing AI to research alternative sourcing for government contracts. It is extremely useful when put into the context of Market Research (Federal Acquisition Regulations Part 13).

Mike Lanzetta

Helping Scale Data and AI Solutions for Microsoft’s Largest Customers

2y

FYI I’m new to using the publishing platform on here - I’ll be editing this as soon as I can to provide proper alt text for the images. Apologies to my friends who depend on that, I promise I’ll figure it out and post a response to this comment when I do.

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Drew Robbins

Engineering Leader | Author of When No One’s Keeping Score

2y

Love this, because you have a deeper understanding of how this all works, but we get to see how you put it to work for yourself, which will be very interesting. I look forward to more.

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