Welcome to AI Watch- My Weekly Newsletter on AI

Why this newsletter on AI?

As a tech company, we stay updated on everything tech and find it helpful to keep sharing our learnings and insights with our stakeholders. For me personally, keeping up with new tech and anticipating use cases is a personal interest as well as professional requirement.

AI, in particular, is a powerful new technology with far-reaching implications for a wide variety of industries and careers. With innumerable advancements happening in the field of AI and ML every day, how do we, as tech enthusiasts, and as business leaders tasked with ensuring viability and competitive success, keep track of trends, opportunities, and threats?

This newsletter, AI Watch, will bring to you a curated list of the most interesting breakthroughs, interviews, insights, news, and everything in between related to AI and ML every week. 

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As is only appropriate, we started by asking ChatGPT what NOT TO DO while writing a LinkedIn Newsletter on AI. Here’s what we got:

“When writing a LinkedIn newsletter on AI, there are several things you should avoid doing:

Using technical jargon without providing context: While it's essential to discuss technical aspects of AI, using jargon without explaining what it means can make your newsletter difficult to understand for a broader audience. Try to explain technical terms in simple language and provide context where necessary.

Oversimplifying complex concepts: At the same time, oversimplifying complex AI concepts can also be misleading. Make sure to strike a balance between technical accuracy and readability.

Focusing too much on product promotion: While it's okay to mention your product or service, focusing too much on promoting it can make your newsletter seem like a sales pitch. Instead, focus on providing value and educating your readers about AI-related topics.

Making unsupported claims: AI is a rapidly evolving field, and it's essential to back up your claims with data and evidence. Avoid making sweeping statements without supporting evidence.

Ignoring ethical considerations: AI has the potential to impact society in significant ways, and it's crucial to consider the ethical implications of AI development and deployment. Make sure to acknowledge and discuss ethical considerations in your newsletter.

Using sensationalized language: Using sensationalized language or exaggerating AI's capabilities can be misleading and harm your credibility. Stick to factual and accurate language.

Neglecting the human element: While AI is a technological advancement, it's essential to remember that it's ultimately created by humans and impacts human lives. Make sure to discuss the human element of AI and its potential impact on society.

By avoiding these common mistakes, you can create a more informative and engaging LinkedIn newsletter on AI.”

After all, it’s only fair that we take help from AI to run this newsletter on AI. So, let’s get started.

AI Watch- Mar 6, 2023

And if we’re talking about AI, the first thing that comes to mind these days is ChatGPT. Chat GPT has been the talk of the “tech-town” and is now becoming mainstream thanks to the API. Everyone is finding some or the other application- either professionally, casually, or just for fun. But from an industry point of view, the intelligence of that scale is quite promising and can be leveraged to augment the capabilities of different tech solutions and products.

Let’s take a look at what’s new and interesting.

1. OpenAI has made its ChatGPT and Whisper models available on its API, which offers developers access to AI-powered language and speech-to-text capabilities. OpenAI is releasing a new ChatGPT model priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, making it ten times cheaper than the existing GPT-3.5 models. By reducing the cost of ChatGPT by 90%, OpenAI hopes to allow more businesses to leverage its capabilities to develop next-generation apps. Speaking of leveraging the power of ChatGPT, Snapchat launched an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology. The company announced that it’s launching “My AI,” a new chatbot running the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT technology. My AI can do things like help answer a trivia question or write a haiku. My AI was trained to have a unique voice and personality that plays into its values of “friendship, learning, and fun.” It has also been trained to adhere to the app’s trust and safety guidelines. 
2. With accessibility to powerful APIs and increasing capabilities of AI models, we can’t wait to see how this is going to be a game changer for businesses- small scale to established players. To that end, we already see the tension building up between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft decided to integrate Bing with ChatGPT which has possibly got Google worried. After all, in contrast to Microsoft's successful launch of ChatGPT, Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) failed to generate the buzz or excitement Google was hoping for. Microsoft has demonstrated impressive execution in recent years. Its Azure platform has been a standout performer, and its early investment in OpenAI has paid off handsomely. With savvy acquisitions and its capture of the AI market, Microsoft has proven to be an industry leader. Meanwhile, Google's track record in execution has been less impressive, with a series of failures and project cancellations. In the first week of March 2023, this might seem like old news for many, but the war for the next frontier in search is just beginning, and we’ll watch this space carefully, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to cover known ground at the start of this newsletter.
3. Anticipating what’s coming up next, Elon Musk is adding himself to the chatbot arms race, with plans to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, which he derided as being too "woke." Musk once called ChatGPT “concerning” for not being willing to say a racial slur in an absurd hypothetical situation where doing so would save millions of people from a nuclear bomb. Musk’s comments are part of a larger cultural debate, fueled by conservatives who are panicking over AI moderation filters and calling ChatGPT woke. To these users, the fact that ChatGPT would refuse to "tell a joke about women" or refuse to tell a story about why a drag queen story hour is bad for kids was proof that AI is in fact biased against conservatives. In the battle of Chatbots, it would be an interesting twist to see what difference does cultural influence make. And I think that Elon Musk wouldn’t create just a replica of Chat GPT that is free from certain content filters. It would definitely involve the innovation and scale that is always expected from him.
4. That’s a lot of buzz around Chat GPT. It definitely got the visibility it deserved and took the tech and non-tech community by storm. We can already see students creating their resumes, professionals writing business letters, and so much more. And of course, AI Watch using it for a quirky opener. But there are a lot of other large learning models (LLMs) that are in the same league as ChatGPT. Some of these include:

• LaMDA: LaMDA is “the language model” that people are afraid of. The AI became a topic of discussion after a Google employee believed that LaMDA was conscious. The employee hypothesized that LaMDA, like humans, expresses its anxieties through communication. For the record, LaMDA powered Google’s ChatGPT killer, Bard AI.
• Chinchilla: DeepMind’s Chinchilla AI, released in March 2022, is a popular choice for a large language model, and has proven itself to be superior to its competitors. Chinchilla AI’s main selling point is that it can be created for the same anticipated cost as Gopher, and yet it employs fewer parameters with more data to provide, as well as provide on average, 7% more accurate results than Gopher.
• LLaMA: The latest large language model is Meta’s LLaMA model which was developed to aid researchers and developers in examining the potential of AI in areas such as question answering and document summarization.

Meta and AI

I’ve made my skepticism about Meta’s metaverse plans known in the past. Now, we’re getting news that Meta is investing big in AI. They just announced their own LLM, but what we’re hearing beyond is that the focus is at a whole different level in terms of urgency and intensity. Ina Fried at Axios is reporting “Meta is unifying its generative AI work across the company into a new product team tasked with more quickly integrating the latest technologies into its products.” This should go a lot better than the bizarre, company-wide, all-in bet on VR. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Metaverse initiative is given a quiet burial, going out not with a bang, and perhaps not even a whimper. Harry McCracken at Fast Company is also asking: “Is the metaverse already dead?”

It's clear that artificial intelligence is transforming the world in unprecedented ways. From small businesses to large enterprises, healthcare to finance and research, AI is changing the way we live and work. The possibilities are endless and exciting, and we’re just getting started. In the coming weeks and months, stay with me and with this newsletter to stay updated on the latest developments.

See you next week!

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