What’s Happening In AI: October 2024

AI is here to stay. More than that we are at the beginning of a Cambrian explosion of AI and we’ll never go back. So, every day of the month I read three AI newsletters—Fry.ai, Superhuman.ai and The Neurondaily.com along with Ethan Mollick’s One Useful Thing blogposts and try to cull out what may be interesting and relevant to you as a leader who wants to have a minimum knowledge of what’s happening in the world of AI. Every news item is sourced if you want to dig deeper. I encourage you to make this your own and pass this to your network. 

QUOTES WORTH PONDERING 

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clark

“We are in for the ride of our lives.” Oprah, after interviewing Sam Altman, Bill Gates

and other experts about the state of AI in September. SOURCE

“Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.”– Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO SOURCE

“The existence of two scaling laws – one for training and another for “thinking” – suggests that AI capabilities are poised for dramatic improvements in the coming years. Even if we hit a ceiling on training larger models (which seems unlikely for at least the next couple of generations), AI can still tackle increasingly complex problems by allocating more computing power to “thinking.” This dual-pronged approach to scaling virtually guarantees that the race for more powerful AI will continue unabated, with far-reaching implications for society, the economy, and the environment.” Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence. (Order Today 😊)

“Smart Glasses are going to become the next major computing platform. They will gradually replace phones by 2030, much like mobile devices surpassed computers without replacing them.” Mark Zuckerberg SOURCE

BIGGEST NEWS OF THE MONTH

OpenAI’s “Strawberry” is finally here, and it’s sparking reactions across the AI industry. Here’s everything you need to know about the new OpenAI o1, which is expected to help the startup soar to a $150B valuation. SOURCE

Here’s how OpenaI o1 (formerly known as Strawberry) performs:

• Similar to PhD students on physics, chemistry, and biology benchmarks.
• Reached the “89th percentile” in coding competitions (example).
• While GPT-4o answered only 13% of International Mathematics Olympiad questions correctly, o1 scored 83%. SOURCE
• (OpenAI says the “o” just stands for OpenAI, though some people joked that it’s a reference to the O-1 visa, which the US government grants to “aliens of extraordinary ability.”) SOURCE
• A doctor used o1 to write a “major cancer treatment project” in under a minute, a task that would’ve taken him days. o1 even provided at least one creative idea he might not have thought of in “thirty years.” SOURCE

IN OTHER NEWS

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta unveiled Orion, a new pair of AR glasses that could be the first big computing platform since the smartphone. Watch Zuck’s demo HERE. Pretty amazing future we are facing! The big takeaway is Meta betting the farm on glasses as the “perfect form factor for AI.” Picture an AI that sees what you see, hears what you hear, and has your back 24/7. For example, over the next couple months, Meta Ray Bans will become:

• More conversational: “Hey Meta, what kind of smoothie can I make with these?” Then keep the convo going.
• Memory-enabled: “Remember where I parked.”
• Action-oriented: “Call this number”, “Scan a QR code.”
• Real-time translators: “Help me translate my convo w/ UFC champ Brandon Moreno.”
• Multimodal + responsive in real time: “Which of these dresses look the most ‘roaring 20s’ for my costume party?”
• The final frontier: “Orion”, fully AI-powered AR (augmented reality). Orion incorporates voice AI, hand and eye tracking, and a groundbreaking wrist-based neural interface. SOURCE

*Interesting side note: Smart students from Harvard (Thurston Howell III’s Alma Matre) have gamed the AR Glasses to, through face recognition software) can identify any person they can see with these glasses. Creep Factor at play. See full story HERE. SOURCE

San Francisco has rolled out new AI-powered surveillance cameras aimed at reducing crime in the city. SOURCE

Meta AI’s new Movie Gen platform is now the state of the art text to video model. See Mark Zuckerberg leg-pressing chicken nuggets. But behind the hype is what might be the most capable text-to-video model yet. SOURCE

Time to invest in your whole team! Martin Deacon of Teacheverynation.org told me in Seoul last month that he and his 25 person team took MIT’s course and now they use AI for everything and its making a huge difference and comes “Highly Recommended. “Driving Innovation with Generative AI” course starting October 15. To go way deeper than this infosheet register here: 

Check out Seth Godin’s take on how AI may help us in the future

Exploding Topics tracked down the 20 most popular AI tools in 2024 by total monthly website visits. This is what they found:

1. ChatGPT is still #1, with over 3B visits a month.
2. Graphic design platform Canva (841M visits)
3. Language translator DeepL (303M visits) 
4. Google Gemini (267M visits) 
5. Character AI (220M searches) 

Surprisingly, Claude is 10th place (~89M visits) and Perplexity is 11th (82M visits).

Of all of these, Claude’s traffic seems to be growing the fastest (at 8,700% over last five years). They go on to say, “We were also surprised to learn about the massive traffic going to more niche AI services. Maybe you’ve heard of these, maybe you haven’t, but millions of people use them every month:

1. Remove.bg (99M+ visits)—removes the background of an image.
2. Quillbot (~95M visits)—a writing assistant platform with multiple tools.
3. Suno (71M visits)—a music generator + Spotify-style platform.
4. CapCut (50M visits)—Bytedance’s “all-in-one” video editing suite.
5. Quizizz (37M visits)—an interactive quiz-making resource for teachers. SOURCE

CAPAIBILITIES AND HELPFUL TOOLS, TIPS & AIDEAS

46 AI Terms Everyone Should know SOURCE

Watch this video on how to create an interactive dashboard with AI using Claude. SOURCE

AI workout generator. SOURCE

How to add subtitles to any video using RunwayML. SOURCE

HuggingFace has become the toolbox for the AI industry. It’s the go-to place to host your own LLM or borrow ideas from fellow coders — and it now is home to 1 million models. SOURCE: Superhuman.ai September 30, 2024.

FAINANCIAL NEWS

Best performing AI stocks in 2024 SOURCE

OpenAI’s COO revealed that ChatGPT now has more than 11 million paying subscribers. At that rate, The Information estimates it brings in about $2.7B per year. SOURCE

FROM THE “THIS IS CRAIZY DEPARTMENT”

My buddy John Winsor sent me this “podcast” totally created by AI simply by loading one of his written articles from Forbes. Listen to the short-form podcast HERE  

Customized baby names…just for you (the preggies will definitely click on this one.) SOURCE

Fantasy Football fans, check out Gridiron AI. AI which does not add any human bias (e.g. “He’s got a good looking girlfriend, which shows he’s got confidence!”) or analysis to their outcomes. Whatever the algorithm spits out, that is what they post. This allows for an unbiased opinion, purely based on data and nothing more. SOURCE

A new AI-powered app helps you learn new languages while watching your favorite TV shows and movies. With 500,000 titles to choose from, Wordy uses a custom model to translate words you might not know in real time, helping you gradually expand your vocabulary. SOURCE

Visualization graphic race of different AI models. SOURCE

A fascinating visual and extensive visual report on how AI views generations. Fascinating. SOURCE

“Cake-ify” now coming to Pika Labs’ new model, Pika 1.5: There’s also Melt It, Explode It, Inflate It, and Crush It — which each do just as their names suggest. This video does a pretty good job of showing how each feature works.) SOURCE

If you are about to sell your house you may want to look at Stagerai.com. You’ll have the ability to put your best rug or lawn forward. SOURCE

FAITH CORNER (PrAIse-worthy news)

$275K awarded at Gloo’s 2^nd Annual AI Hackathon to promote human flourishing and church thriving. See the full story HERE.

Related story on the Gloo Hackathon.  https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/why-church-leaders-dont-need-to-be-afraid-of-ai.html

Poland opens first AI Chapel. SOURCE

TERMS TO KNOW AND USE WITH YOUR NERDY FRIENDS
What is a RAG? A RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is a method that combines two main processes: searching for information within specific parameters and then generating a response using that information only. Here’s a simple way to break this down: Let’s say you’re doing cancer research and only want to use reliable sources like medical journals and lab reports and not folk wisdom or homeopathic recommendations. With RAG, you set up a “walled garden” by specifying exactly what kinds of information the system can look at—like research from the best medical and research institutes along with the medical and scientific journals you trust. Whenever you ask a question, the RAG system  retrieves relevant info from only those journals and studies within its research parameters. Then, it generates a response based on that accurate and reliable data. This way, you’re not getting random or unwanted information, like from homeopathic medical sources or nutrition magazines in this example.  A RAG is optimal and particularly useful in situations where:

• You need accurate, specific, and trustworthy information (like medical research, law—remember the lawyer who was censured because he cited cases ChatGPT made up), a particular theology or a specific technical fields).
• You want to avoid the open internet’s noise and misinformation by drawing from a selected pool of information.

Think of RAG like a smart research assistant. It only looks through a special collection of books or articles you trust and then uses what it finds to give you the best answer. This is a virtually fool-proof method when you want to avoid random, possibly “hallucinated” information info stick with high-quality sources.

HELPFUL GRAPHS AND CHARTS

One picture is often more valuable than a thousand words. Take these charts and graphs and put them into your Power Point presentations. 

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SOURCE from Ethan Mollick’s Newsletter

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That’s it for this month. Keep on learning. Keep on experimenting! Keep on growing! If you find this in any way helpful, please pass it on.