Everything Is About To Change
This last week alone has seen an insane explosion of new advances in AI with just about every major company releasing updates or integrations as a major AI land-grab takes place.
In a blog post titled "The Age of AI Has Begun" Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important technological advance in decades. Calling it as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.
AI has been around for a little while in fact my companies have used everything from the OG version of Google Dialogue flow to self-trained models that our engineering teams have made. But this last week alone has seen an insane explosion of new advances in AI with just about every major company releasing updates or integrations as a major AI land-grab takes place.
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AI tools are going to revolutionize how we learn, work and perform everyday tasks but it can be really confusing knowing where to start.
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Technology Adoption and AI
Technology adoption generally follows a kind of bell-shaped, sigmoid curve. You have a slow takeoff as the technology is invented and the major pain points get ironed out. Then you have this incredible explosion of growth and hype as people find it useful and the technology gets better and better and loads of similar companies pop-up and enter the market to jump on board the hype, a bit like the gold rush. Then as people start to understand what the technology can do, and you begin to reach the limit of what’s possible with that technology, the hype fades, the rate of progress flattens out and that exciting tech becomes part of our daily lives just like it did with the iPhone and streaming music online.
Now as you may have seen from my video on AI writing tools there are a lot of AI copywriting tools and AI companies that use OpenAI's API that have popped up following that hype cycle we just talked about and it's going to be very interesting to see what happens to a lot of these companies based on some of the other recent announcements.
OpenAI GPT-4 and GPT Plugins
With the release of GPT-4 OpenAI introduced longer context of up to 25,000 words, visual inputs - where images can be used as inputs to generate captions, classifications, and analyses. And GPT-4 can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities. I've been trying out GPT-4 on my ChatGPT Plus subscription and also via the API in some of my companies and it's really great with the responses seeming less generic and prompt personas being more creative.
On the back of GPT-4 OpenAI then announced ChatGPT Plugins. Plugins for ChatGPT are a move towards being a true platform where people can access multiple tools from and where they don't need to switch out to google or other apps to complete a task.
In the Plugins demo ChatGPT can now browse the internet and use APIs to tools like Expedia, Opentable and Instacart to not only search for information but to act on those search intents and book trips, restaurants and order groceries.
It wasn't all good news for OpenAI though as a ChatGPT glitch allowed some users to see the titles of other users' conversations which raised privacy concerns.
Google Bard and GSuite AI
AI has the potential to disrupt search and content creation. Two huge markets. The leader in search obviously isn't going to get left behind.
So Google announced that they're adding AI functionality to their workspace tools like Google Docs and Gmail. The company plans to bring additional generative AI features to its Chat, Meet, Sheets and Slides applications meaning you'll be able to generate content quickly within these already well-adopted tools that even the slowest technology adopters use.
Google also announced that their medical-specific language model Med-PaLM 2, consistently performed at an “expert” doctor level on medical exam questions, scoring 85%. This is an 18% improvement from Med-PaLM’s previous performance and far surpasses similar AI models.
And Google has also started rolling out its own AI chatbot Bard, but it is only available to certain users and they have to be over the age of 18.
Unlike its viral rival ChatGPT, Bard can access up-to-date information from the internet and has a "Google it" button which accesses search. It also name-checks its sources for facts, such as Wikipedia. But Google warned Bard would have "limitations" and said it might share misinformation and display bias.
This is because it "learns" from real-world information, in which those biases currently exist - meaning it is possible for stereotypes and false information to show up in its responses.
Back in June 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended from his job after he spoke out about his belief that the company’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient.
While Bard is built on top of LaMDA, it’s not exactly the same. Google says it has worked hard to ensure that Bard does not repeat the flaws of earlier systems. That means avoiding “hallucinations”, where it makes up facts to avoid admitting it doesn’t know an answer, and ensuring “alignment”, keeping the conversation from veering off into disturbing tangents. But despite this early reviews suggest that Bard is a little underwhelming compared to ChatGPT and Google is uncharacteristically playing catch-up to Microsoft.
Microsoft Bing GPT and Co-Pilot 365
As Bill Gates mentioned in his blog post Microsoft have been speaking with the OpenAI team for almost 10 years and they are a major investor in OpenAI.
Microsoft have integrated GPT-4 into their Bing search engine which has rejuvenated a search tool that was previously nowhere near google.
Not to be outdone on generative content, Microsoft, also unveiled their 365 co-pilot, which brings AI enhancements to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Co-pilot basically what everyone wishes Clippy was with the ability to summarise the key discussion points of a Teams conversation, provide recaps for someone who joins late or misses the whole meeting a well as the ability to create PowerPoint presentations, including images, from prompts, draft emails, analyse long documents and create summaries and graphs of data in Excel spreadsheets.
Like we've said already by bringing these tools to mainstream platforms they are going to become more like standard formatting tools than crazy new features and the ability to engineer good prompts is in my opinion going to be an essential skill that everyone from students to professionals will need to become good at.
MindJourney V5
Continuing on with the crazy announcements MidJourney version 5 was released, which generates even more realistic images and has improved standard language recognition. With an API in the works, we can expect other products to start using Mid-Journey for their art generation capabilities soon.
In version 5 images are more realistic and are more responsive to intricate changes in text prompts. Some of the arguments ( --ar , --iw , --tile ) which were taken away in V4 have been brought back. Images with limbs, fingers and toes have a significantly better quality and the stylize option gives a wider stylized output, more vibrant than v4. One of the coolest additions is the ability to set the weighting that an input images has on an output for example if you provide an example image of a statue you can set a numerical weighting which instructs MidJourney on how closely the output should resemble the original image.
Baidu Releases Ernie
Over in China, Chinese search engine Baidu released their chatbot, Ernie, which unfortunately received a lukewarm response from both shareholders and the public. And a little bit like Bard the poor performance caused a 10% drop in Baidu shares.
NVIDIA AI Foundations
Back in the US NVIDIA announced their newest cloud services offering, AI Foundations, that will allow businesses to build, refine and operate custom large language models (LLMs) and generative AI models that are trained with their own proprietary data and created for their unique domain-specific tasks.
These models include NeMo, NVIDIA’s language model; BioNemo, a drug and molecule discovery-focused fork of the NeMo model built for the medical research community; and Picasso, an AI capable of generating images, video and 3D applications. This release is pretty exciting as Nvidia is empowering businesses and individuals to harness the power of AI to create their own tailor-made solutions.
AI Video: Gen2
We've seen lots of image and text generative AI enter the mainstream but what about video? Wouldn't it be cool if you could generate your own footage? Well Runway Research announced the release of Gen2, a cutting-edge multimodal AI system that brings text-to-video synthesis to a whole new level. With Gen2, you can generate never-before-seen videos using text, images, or video clips, opening up a world of possibilities for content creators! Some of the capabilities here are really exciting with the ability to generate videos from text and image prompts as well as more advanced features like adding masks to video and stylizing existing videos.
Adobe Firefly
Sticking with creativity content creation giant Adobe announced that they are revolutionizing the future of creativity with their next generation AI capabilities. They're integrating generative AI into the everyday workflows of marketers and creative professionals, making it easier than ever to bring your wildest ideas to life. The company announced a family of creative generative AI models called Adobe Firefly and releasing the first two tools that take advantage of them. One of the tools works like DALL-E or Midjourney, allowing users to type in a prompt and have an image created in return. The other generates stylized text, kind of like an AI-powered WordArt. According to Adobe, everything fed to its models is either out of copyright, licensed for training, or in the Adobe Stock library as it tries to navigate the slightly tricky area of AI copyright.
Final Thoughts
There is a heck of a lot going on in terms of artificial intelligence and it's super exciting but it can also feel slightly scary with the pace of change and the idea that AI could replace jobs at a time when finances are already tight for most people.
The best way to navigate change is to embrace it and to make sure you are staying up to date with how to effectively use new AI tools and engineer prompts to get the best out of those tools. In my opinion AI is never going to completely automate everything. It still needs a human conductor to make decisions and supply the prompts.
Join AI PRO
AI tools are going to revolutionize how we learn, work and perform everyday tasks but it can be really confusing knowing where to start.
To help you out and get ahead of the 99% I've created a course that covers everything to do with ChatGPT and AI that will take you from beginner to deeply understanding how to integrate AI into your existing productivity workflow and get more from your time.
You can sign-up for early-access via the waitlist below: