AI 3 - MickMel

What will AI collide with?

August 2, 2024 by greenmellen 2 Comments

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I was at a recent event where Rich Beaudrie posed an interesting question: what will AI collide with?

There are many examples of collisions from the past. At one point 15 years ago, we had cell phones with large screens + 3G networks + compact GPS chips and Google Maps was born.

Or you can look at things like early social networks, which combined the fact that everyone had a computer at school + the internet really taking off.

So what’s next?

Rich talked a good bit about what AI might collide with, and he sees a big intersection between AI and AR/VR technology. His role involves digital learning, and to be able to learn by conversing with an AI that is tuned to you in a VR world would be miles ahead of watching a generic video and answering questions. I think he’s quite right about a future there.

On a lighter side, I see AI coming to more video games. I have the new “College Football 25”, and it’s fantastic, but the announcers are still just dreadful. At this point, it seems that it would be fairly easy to train an AI on the voice of someone like Kirk Herbstreit and have it generate the in-game announcing on the fly. They’re still doing the process of “record 1,000 phrases and we’ll stitch them together”, and it shows. Given what GPT-4o can do with voice inflections, I could see AI working quite well for something like this.

If nothing else, Rich’s presentation has me pondering what else AI will “collide” with in the near future. So far we’re seeing it stuffed into products in rather predictable ways, but some big collisions are certainly coming.

What are some AI collisions that you think we might see in the next few years?

Goals or not?

May 29, 2024 by greenmellen 4 Comments

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I recently read Jim Rohn’s classic book “7 Strategies for Wealth and Happiness“. As I’ve done with a few books lately, I had a brief discussion about it with GPT-4o to see if there were insights that I missed.

I asked for the main takeaway from the book and got this response:

One of the biggest takeaways from Jim Rohn’s “The Seven Strategies for Wealth and Happiness” is the importance of setting clear, achievable goals. Rohn emphasizes that having a vision and plan for your life is crucial for both personal and financial success. Did any specific strategy resonate with you the most?

It’s a solid answer and after a bit of back and forth I pressed into the goal setting a bit more and contrasted it a bit with the lessons from Emmanual Acho about not setting goals. Here was that quick conversation:

Me:
Well, in Emmanuel Acho’s book, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, he is against goal setting, which contradicts this book. How do you see the two of those?

GPT-4o:
That’s an interesting contrast. Emmanuel Acho argues against traditional goal-setting because it can lead to disappointment and a narrow focus, potentially missing out on unexpected opportunities. Instead, he promotes focusing on values and continuous improvement.

Jim Rohn, on the other hand, sees goal-setting as a way to create a clear path and motivation. Both perspectives highlight the importance of direction but approach it differently. It’s about finding a balance between having a structured plan and remaining open to life’s unexpected opportunities. How do you feel about these differing views?

Me:
I tend to side with Emmanuel’s views, but Rohn’s views are interesting as well.

GPT-4o:
That makes sense. Embracing Acho’s perspective allows for more flexibility and adaptability, which can be less stressful and more aligned with personal growth. At the same time, Rohn’s structured approach can provide clear direction and motivation. You can take elements from both: have overarching values and principles to guide you, while setting flexible, adaptable goals that can evolve over time. Does that sound like a good blend to you?

The quality of the response from GPT-4o was amazing, and makes perfect sense for a way to help blend those two approaches to goal setting.

This also leads to a meta question for me. I’ve long said that I won’t use AI to write content on here, as that’s not the goal for it, and I have no intention of going away from that — but would this be considered AI-generated content for the blog? It essentially is, but I think it still meets my criteria. It’s reading that I’m doing, digging into the text, asking questions, and then laying out the answers. While I’m certainly using AI in this case to help generate the content, it seems quite different from an “AI-generated post”.

All of that said, where do you stand on goal-setting? Do you side more with Jim or Emmanuel?

GPT-4o is astounding

May 20, 2024 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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It seems that every iteration of ChatGPT and similar technologies is amazing, and the new “GPT-4o” certainly continues that trend. If you’re not familiar with it, here is a quick peek:

Along with just text, you can see that GPT-4o also can interpret video, images, and other info. Not only can it understand more about the world around it, but the overall interaction feels more lifelike than we’ve ever seen before.

As of today most of us still don’t have access to the video aspects of GPT-4o, but the audio alone is stunning. Here is another video that shows a bit more about that:

The ability for the AI to change the style of its voice like that is very compelling, and starts to get almost freaky good.

The voice model that we have access to today isn’t quite as powerful as shown in the video (that should be here very soon), but it’s still amazing. In playing with it a lot over the past few days, I’ve noticed two things:

The conversations that I have with it can be fantastic. I’ve talked to it about books and movies and the results are incredibly realistic and helpful.
While it has access to the real-time internet, it still struggles with some basic things. I tried to talk about yesterday’s Braves game, and it cited all kinds of incorrect information. As with previous models, it has no problem just creating fake “facts” if it’s unsure of the correct answer.

Where this will get more interesting in the coming months is when it can actually know me. Right now, GPT-4o can’t see my calendar or email or anything like that, so I can’t converse with it about my day. That’s undoubtedly going to change soon, possibly with some AI announcements from Apple at WWDC next month.

You can try GPT-4o today for free at ChatGPT.com, though your usage of it will be quite limited on a free account. Either way, this is a shocking improvement on an already amazing product, and will become even moreso as they release the other pieces of it (video, etc) in the coming weeks. Give it a shot.

Schools need to understand AI

March 20, 2024 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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Over the past few weeks I’ve talked to handful of high school students about how AI is being treated at their schools, and the results are largely disappointing (though somewhat understandable).

Ultimately, I have three main takeaways from the conversations.

Schools are scared of AI

The general thought from the schools is “No AI for anything, ever”. You can’t use it in any way, for any assignment, at any time. Of course, this is faulty logic, because bits of AI are baked into so much, and because the definition of “AI” is very loose.

As a small example, when you’re texting someone and your phone suggests the next word or suggests fixing a typo, that very much could be considered AI. If Google Docs underlines a word to help with spelling, did you just cheat and use AI?

I get what schools are going for here, but it’s much more gray than they think. That leads to…

Handwritten essays

Since detecting AI-written work is nearly impossible, schools are requiring students to write essays in class, by hand. That makes sense to me. While I don’t love writing long pieces of text by hand, this seems like a reasonable solution. Allowing any use of the computer in class or at home to write an essay would undoubtedly be used some some students to cheat by using generative AI like ChatGPT and this is the best way to avoid that.

No learning

Having students write essays by hand is fine, but there should also be some curriculum to help students learn to make proper use of AI. The ones I’ve talked to have not seen anything related to learning about AI, how to write solid prompts, or anything related to that. The schools literally don’t talk about AI at all. It’s going to have a major impact in almost every field, so pretending that it doesn’t exist is doing a major disservice to these kids.

For those currently employed and are worried about AI, I recently heard this statement: “AI won’t take your job, but somebody that knows how to use AI will take your job.“

AI will impact jobs, for sure, but those that can work effectively with AI will be best positioned as time goes on.

All of this said, I don’t envy the position that school administrators are in right now. It’s easy for me to sit here and say “they should teach students more about writing prompts for AI”, but how should that be done? Have separate classes for that? Integrate it into some existing classes? There are no easy solutions here, but it seems that schools are largely putting their heads in the sand which absolutely feels like the wrong way to approach this.

Interruptions with unbalanced scale

February 23, 2024 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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When it comes to spam, unbalanced scale is a rapidly increasing problem. It’s bad enough when one person reaches out directly to you with an unsolicited offer, but when that one person can quickly send out hundreds or thousands of those offers, things fall apart quickly.

It goes back to a post from nearly a decade ago by Seth Godin that I’ve shared many times on here:

Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.

I think we can all recognize how problematic it’s been for the last decade, but it continues to get worse.

First, we have marketing groups that continue to share “great tips” on how to evade spam filters and flood our email boxes with more and more garbage.

Second, there are AI tools that are anxious to contribute to this as well. One example (and I won’t share where it’s from), promises to “create intelligent campaigns that send LinkedIn connection invitations, automatically view, follow and endorse profiles, and send InMails and messages. All automated, personalized and with custom time delays.” Ugh.

Scaling has been a problem for years, and it looks like it’ll be getting worse. The good side is that real human connections, particularly in person, are going to get increasingly valuable as all of this gets worse, and I encourage you to lean into those types of interactions and relationships.

The new jargon that comes with AI

February 17, 2024 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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Perhaps more than any other area, changing technology generally brings with it a slew of new acronyms and terms. We have things like HTML, DNS, SEO, HTTP, PHP and dozens of others that are used nearly every day in tech-related fields.

The explosion of AI is bringing a new set of words and acronyms for us to learn. Now we have “GPT”, “prompt engineering”, along with common words that now take on new meanings like “hallucination” and “jailbreak”.

The BBC recently put out a great article that breaks down all of these new terms and what they mean. They frame their article as follows:

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most important technological development of our time – here are some of the terms that you need to know as the world wrestles with what to do with this new technology.

Imagine going back in time to the 1970s, and trying to explain to somebody what it means “to google”, what a “URL” is, or why it’s good to have “fibre-optic broadband”. You’d probably struggle.

For every major technological revolution, there is a concomitant wave of new language that we all have to learn… until it becomes so familiar that we forget that we never knew it.

That’s no different for the next major technological wave – artificial intelligence. Yet understanding this language of AI will be essential as we all – from governments to individual citizens – try to grapple with the risks, and benefits that this emerging technology might pose.

I’m fairly immersed in AI, but there were still a good number of items on this list that I wasn’t familiar with. Wherever you might be related to AI, this article is likely a good one to help take you a few steps further, and I encourage you to check it out.

Who will reap the value of AI?

January 11, 2024 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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The future of AI is still quite muddy, but it’s clear that big changes are coming. As AI continues to develop, who stands to gain the most from it?

While it could be companies like ours, or perhaps huge companies like Google or Apple, I think it might benefit the average user the most.

In “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, Charlie talks about machines back in the day that could make textile work easier when he said:

“And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.”

I see AI similarly. We’ll need to integrate it into our workflow, no doubt, but as every company does that the prices for marketing services will be forced lower and lower. The quality coming out will continue to rise (in theory) but the costs will continue to drop. It’ll be a huge win for consumers.

I’m not sure there’s a good solution for us as marketers other than to ride it out and offer the best service we can, with or without AI. Using Charlie’s example, what if the textile mill owners simply chose not to spend the money on the new, more efficient machine? They could do that, and save a lot of money in the short-term, but then fall way behind their more efficient competitors in the future.

It’s the same with AI. If it can be used to make our services better, then we can’t skip it and hope for the best, because when everyone else is pushing tons of great content with the assistance of AI, we’re toast. The biggest benefits of AI are likely going to go to the consumer, and our job is to make sure they get the best results no matter how it’s done.

We seem like slowed-down whale songs

January 2, 2024 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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I consume a lot of content in order to learn, and many others consume far more than I do. It feels like a torrid pace, but compared to AI tools it’s laughably slow.

Back in 2016, Sam Altman (the man behind OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT) shared this idea:

“There are certain advantages to being a machine. We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost. To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”

In a system like ChatGPT, their scale is often measured in “parameters” — connections between various words. GPT-3 uses roughly 175 billion parameters, and GPT-4 uses nearly a trillion parameters. If we consider a parameter to be roughly equal to a single word in a book, then GPT-4 is using the content equivalent to 10,000,000 books — and it doesn’t forget a word.

Reading a book per week, it’d take you around 192,000 years to catch up with GPT-4 and, again, you’d like not remember a sizeable portion of what you read (I sure know I wouldn’t).

This is amazing enough, but it’s accelerating a rapid pace as well. As time goes on, our ability to consume knowledge will seem ever slower compared to machines, and being seen as a “slowed-down whale song” seems about right.

Google has been steering us toward this for years now, and our advantages as humans will be how we can use tools to make sense of all of that content, rather than trying to remember everything ourselves.

Yes, AI will take some jobs

September 23, 2023 by greenmellen 2 Comments

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It’s a foregone conclusion that AI is going to replace some jobs in the coming years. I can’t say whether it’s be a small or large number, and no one knows for sure, but it’s clear that at least some jobs will be replaced by AI.

This sounds like a bad thing, but is it? Maybe so, but maybe not.

Back in 1930, we had 235,000 people that were switchboard operators in the United States, but technology caused almost all of them to lose their jobs in a short period of time. Should laws have been put in place to prevent automatic switching technology in order to save those jobs?

We’ve seen the same thing with inventions across history, from the printing press, to the car, to the computer, to the internet. Each advancement wiped out a batch of jobs, but then also created new ones. AI is likely to be the same.

With AI, we’re likely going to see a big reduction in jobs like copywriting, but we’re already seeing new jobs for “prompt engineers” (people that can write great inputs for AI), including Netflix famously offering a salary of $900,000 to the right person.

I don’t know how all of this will shake out, and I hate that some people will be losing their jobs because of this in the coming years, but in the future with the benefit of hindsight I suspect it’ll be a net positive for all of us.