BACK OFF Steam Engine!

Productivity gains bigger than the Industrial Revolution are here.

The Big Stuff

A relatively light AI News week (SVB's failure not withstanding) has given us a moment to ponder the impact of generative AI already... and WOW!

We have entered the Second Wave of artificial intelligence. Even though it might seem like AI showed up overnight, the first wave of AI has already reshaped many aspects of our society; from how we search for information, to how we interact, to how we find jobs, to how we date, and how we market our businesses. Why did we never hear about this? It was anything but sexy. Ranking algorithms were the key innovation of the first wave and they changed almost every corner of society. For example, what you see on the first page of Google, which ads you are shown, and what shows up in your social feeds, has all been selected by ranking algorithms.

The launch of ChatGPT on Nov. 30th, 2022, marks the beginning of the second wave, and all of a sudden the profound power of generative AI is obvious. For a parallel explosion in recent history, the Internet was functioning for years and connecting computers globally, but it wasn't until the invention of the World Wide Web that non-scientists gained easy access to the power, and that changed everything. ChatGPT's rapid adoption is a similar watershed moment, but the adoption is dramatically faster. It took approximately 8 years for the WWW to get to 100 Million users. It took ChatGPT 2 MONTHS! (link) 

The second wave of AI is not something we have to wait for it. It's here now, and it is accelerating. The productivity gains are already more impactful percentage-wise than the steam engine, which brought a 25% productivity increase in the 19th century. Current AI tools are having larger increases, with software engineers showing a 55.8% productivity increase, while professionals completed tasks 37% faster when given ChatGPT. Ethan Mollick wrote about these productivity increases in Secret Cyborgs: The Present Disruption in Three Papers.

Changing the Game...

New AI tools are allowing people to create all sorts of things beyond their ability without it. One great example this week is Sumplete, a game that was entirely coded by ChatGPT. In a few hours of prompting, ChatGPT came up with the game concept, the name, and all of the code. The story of how it was built is a fun read. While this example is simple, it is a glimpse into the power these tools can provide. Warning: many users have said they find this game addictive.However, where does the productivity end, and if AI can write code, and create games, is there a time when it will no longer need human prompting, and if so, what happens to human labor? Will it cause widespread unemployment? Marc Andreesen, founder of a16z and Netscape, makes a compelling argument in Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment. Marc argues that there have been several "job apocalypse" scares in the last 20 years, from outsourcing/offshoring, to robots. Instead of unemployment, we've had the best economy in human history.

A glimpse into the future of productivity...

At least in the near term, AI is much more likely to augment, than replace. When it does replace activities, they are most likely the mundane, repetitive activities that computers are good at, but people don't like doing. What will these tools look like, and what will be the next profession impacted? This week, HubSpot gave a glimpse into what this world would look like, with their release of ChatSpot.ai. ChatSpot is an extension to the popular CRM, HubSpot.The video is about 20 minutes, but worth a watch.

ChatSpot shows how powerful ChatGPT-like interfaces can be when they are integrated with your data, and tools. Dharmesh demonstrates the following: 1) Adding a contact to Hubspot using natural language, 2) Doing simple reporting and company research through natural language (e.g. how many contacts do we have? Show me the companies in Massachusetts with over 1,000 employees), 3) Generating personalized emails to prospects, 4) Generating and posting blog posts (along with image generation). None of these tasks replace humans, they just allow the tasks to be completed faster and with less effort. Steve Jobs compared the personal computer to a "bicycle for the mind" and he was right. AI-enabled tools are the motorcycle for the mind.

Microsoft will also be releasing "Copilot" to their Dynamics 365 suite. Dynamics Copilot will help a lot of the more repetitive sales and customer support tasks. For example, writing email responses to customers, creating email summaries of Teams meetings in Outlook, while pulling in pricing and product information directly from the CRM.

If software engineering was the first killer use case for AI, sales is looking like the second. However, it is by no means limited to these two. Microsoft is intent on integrating OpenAI throughout its product suites. This week, Microsoft shipped a Windows 11 update that includes an AI-powered Bing in the taskbar.

Other big news this week:

• GPT-4 is coming next week – and it will be multimodal, says Microsoft Germany (link)

• Facebook's Powerful Large Language Model Leaks Online (link)

• OpenAI Rival Anthropic Raises Funding at $4.1 Billion Valuation (link)

• How Google Became Cautious of AI and Gave Microsoft an Opening (paywall) (link)

• OpenAI President "We made a mistake" (paywall) (link)

Smaller, but still Cool Stuff

• How OpenAI CTO Mira Murati became one of tech’s most influential innovators (link)

• This Website Wants to Use AI to Make Models Obsolete (link)

• ChatGPT Makes it to Southpark (link)

• U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-Ops (link)

• How A.I. Is Being Used to Detect Cancer That Doctors Miss (link)

• Athena AI Heroes - Live Twitch Stream of celebrity deep fakes answering audience questions (link)

• Costa Rica will be the first country in Central America to have an Artificial Intelligence strategy (link)

• Bing Chat has a secret ‘Celebrity’ mode to impersonate celebrities (link)

• Reid Hoffman steps down from OpenAI board to avoid potential conflicts of interest (link)

• Don’t Look Up: The AI Edition - The game is afoot, but a lot of folks are still in denial (link)

Incredible Resources

• ChatGPT Sidebar (link)

• Chatbot Kit - The simplest way to build advanced AI chat bots (link)

• Adrenaline - Debug your code with AI (link)

• Nat - Compare the results from multiple LLMs (link)

• LucidPic - Generate quality stock photos of people that don't exist (link)

Going Deeper

• How to build a GPT-3 Slack bot with Zapier (link)

• Speak Foreign Languages with Your Own Voice: Cross-Lingual Neural Codec Language Modeling (link)

• Google releases open source 20B Flan-UL2 (link)

Tweets of the Week

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