Stay Up-to-Date on Humanistic Artificial Intelligence! May Edition
TD Publishing’s Monthly Update on Artificial Intelligence.
TD Publishing, a company that provides artificial intelligence educational programs, offers a monthly newsletter sharing the latest advancements in artificial intelligence to keep non-tech professionals and students up-to-date.
Each monthly newsletter will provide 3-4 informative articles and podcasts, which are expected to take 30-60 minutes to read through. Below is the May edition, written by Craig Gordon, founder of Don’t Count Us Out Yet and co-founder of TD Publishing.
If you would like to subscribe to this monthly newsletter by TD Publishing, please email jay@tdfactfind.com or sign up below!
The days of 2024 are flying by, and the world of AI is constantly changing faster and faster!
Well, here we are, 1/3 of the way through 2024…
We have to say, in our minds, AI has developed more in the past four months than it has in the past two years.
We are starting this month’s humanistic AI updates newsletter with what we think is a startling statement. That is, if one of our AI non-tech professionals, students and CPAs that have taken one of our courses, asked us which chatbot or AI search engine we use for writing and research today, we would say the best models are Anthropic Claude 3 and Perplexity. How about that? No mention of Open AI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. That was a huge surprise to us, as it may be to you. That goes to show you how much has changed in the last four months.
As we look ahead to the next few months with new advances from Open AI and ChatGPT, Apple’s AI developments made public, and Elon Musk’s Grok 1.5 open for users with X, much more is to come. Faster and faster. We are sure there will be other announcements just as important as those we’ve highlighted. What a crazy, quick moving industry this is!
With this reality in mind, here is a summary of what we think are the best developments from the last month, which we think you should be aware of.
Open-Source Models Getting Better and Better
The open-source models, such as Mistrial and Facebook’s Meta, are starting to receive recognition with the advantage of letting users see under the hood on how they operate. This could be a huge competitive advantage for a number of reasons, including how independent observers can now review parts of how AI operates and give it some trust due to verification processes. Don’t count Facebook out just yet!
NOTE: When we teach our CPA continuing education course, we repeat and emphasize this as a way for CPAs to capitalize on and get involved.
Axios shared an announcement on their new strategy to deliver content, pivoting away from almost any writer or data being published to trusted and vetted experts, which only gave us some new thinking about what comes next. In statistics, we always talk about Type 1 and Type 2 errors. Type 1 is when you didn’t have the correct information to make the right decision, and Type 2 is when you had the right information, but didn’t act on it for various reasons, such as it was buried under mountains of data like a needle in the haystack. With new developments in AI, almost everyone is talking about the deluge of data, news, images and the like swamping our decision making. Axios is trying to be a leader in eliminating a lot of the noise. Again, that thought of trustworthiness keeps popping up. Computer AI experts, are you listening? More by itself is not better. Quality is needed.
There are a couple useful items to take a look at in this next piece. First, Poe seems to be the first product that lets you combine the usefulness of various chatbots rather than just being anchored to one. We are going to take a deeper look at this, and we think more will come. This is a great read on why the real answer to “humans or AI?” is actually “humans plus AI.”
More and more, we believe prompt querying (which is just a fancy tech word for asking the right questions) will be the most important tool humans will need to interact with AI. We are constantly researching this area from the ways philosophers, lawyers and journalists do it, but for all you non-tech professionals out there, here is an easier way to ask better questions to AI.
Last month, we highlighted the article on how Walmart might become a threat to Google with some of its new AI services. In keeping up with examples of where AI is becoming mainstream this past month, we looked at how 500 7-Elevens in Japan are using AI cameras and visual recognition to instantly see which on-site ads are working, and which aren’t. We can imagine a day where the old quote by John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half,” will no longer be true with the help of AI.
We leave you with a comment we resurfaced from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1964, which is now more important than ever.
"Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
"Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: 'Improved means to an unimproved end.’
Our hope is that artificial intelligence really starts to work on the improvement of the ends. That is why we think non-tech professionals and students need to get involved with the development of AI now to prevent one way thinking of consumer tech and computer science minds being the be all and end all in decision making.
Have a great May! Best,
Craig, Ariana, Jay, Jeffrey, David and Irene for the TD Publishing Crew
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