We're officially in the AI bubble

Watch me drown in the ocean of AI - I can't swim 😭

February 26, 2023

“The hottest new programming language is english” - Someone on the internet

Welcome to edition #2 of the “No Longer a Nincompoop with Nofil” newsletter 🤗. A week in the world of AI is basically an eon at this point 😮‍💨. I’ve included other reads and cool technologies to check out at the end 🙂

Here’s the tea ☕

  • Do you have AI in your product? Tell a VC and get free money 🤑

  • One university professor is forcing his students to use AI 🤔

  • Recreate your memories with AI 🧠

  • Everyone is hopping on the AI Bandwagon 🚌

Want free money? Just put AI in your headline

Tome is a company that recently raised over $43 million. What do they do? Simply put, they help you create presentations… using AI of course. How else would they command so much money for a glorified powerpoint. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good app and it has actual value, unlike all those ridiculous NFT projects that were raising millions last year 🤦‍♂️. But how much money do you need for a presentation generator? Is the company really worth $300 million? Pre-revenue!?! I guess I just don’t know enough about investing.. 🤷‍♂️

Who said consulting companies are slow? 💨

Last week Bain and Company announced a “services alliance” (consulting speak) with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. This marks a critical shift in the way OpenAI thinks, and sets a precedent for the use of AI in commercial settings. Consulting companies aren’t exactly known to be first movers when it comes to new, sometimes wacky technology, so this is actually quite a significant partnership and illustrates just how useful AI can be to companies.

I’ve said previously that one of the main industries that will be impacted by the current AI revolution will be support and online customer facing roles. Well, turns out Bain has already been using AI to build automated, real-time scripts for contact centre staff. How soon will they use the AI to do the talking as well? My guess is quite soon, considering people are already using AI to create entirely fake podcasts between people who aren’t even alive.. 📻

Coke is one of the beneficiaries of this partnership and is already using AI to optimise their advertisingand marketing campaigns. So if you see a coke ad soon, just know an AI thinks you really want to drink coke🍹.

Education is changing, Finally

Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton is not only expecting his students to use AI, some of his assignments even require it. Mollick had his class “cheat” to write an essay and had them use different prompt techniques to produce better outputs (where was this when I was in school 😭). He mentions how projects done this semester were more creative and overall better than projects done “pre-AI”. You can read more about his learnings from taking this approach here. 

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Mollick understands that AI is already very prevalent in classrooms and so essentially teaches his students one of the hottest new skills - prompt engineering. What’s that? Prompt engineering is your ability to get an AI to do what you want. It may sound simple, but if you know how to prompt an AI properly, you can get significantly better results. If you’re not convinced about how important prompt engineering is, this job posting from Anthropic, a competitor of ChatGPT, put up a job for a prompt engineer with a salary range between $250k - $335k 🤯

Ever wanted to re-live your memories? Now you can!

Sort of. Wist labs is working on an AI that will let you replay your memories using AR. They superimpose video into an Augmented Reality environment. The craziest part? With enough training data and a sprinkle of AI, you could potentially “continue” a memory or even play out an alternate ending to it. Actually mind blowing stuff 🤯.

All aboard the AI submarine

Why submarine? Because the amount of AI tools, research papers, money and advancements involved in the AI space every week, its more like the vastness of the ocean than a simple train 🌊.

Amazon is creating their own LLM’s (ChatGPT’s) and they outperform ChatGPT by at least 16%. They also recently announced a partnership with Hugging Face to host their ML models on AWS’ ML platform (AWS = Amazon Web Services). Hugging Face is probably the most important website you’ve never heard of. They host dozens of machine learning models and you can test and play around with them on their websites. Hundreds of new companies making use of all the new AI/ML models are using models hosted on Hugging Face.

This is a significant partnership as it diminishes the absolute control Microsoft currently has over the AI space and lends companies the option of trying something different. But it really shouldn’t come as a surprise considering AWS owns half of the entire cloud computing market, significantly more than the 22% Microsoft owns. In fact AWS is so big, it accounts for about 3/4 of Amazons entire operating profit.

Remember Meta? Me neither tbh. They also announced their own competitor to ChatGPT called LLaMA. In the paper released, they highlight the different results from various models and well… lets just say Google is holding on to one insane model at the moment. Meta’s LLaMA does significantly better than GPT-3 which powers ChatGPT. But it’s Googles PaLM model that absolutely stands above the rest, not only in results but size as well with 540 Billion (!) parameters. To put it into context, our brains have about 80 - 100 billion neurons..

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Here are a bunch of other cool stories/tools you can check out:

Thats it for edition #2 🥳. As always if you have any feedback, just hit reply or answer the poll below. It means a lot! Thanks for reading ❤️

Written by a human named Nofil

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