My Centaur and I (030)
Exploring many kinds of human-machine augmentation.
Happy Monday and welcome to Artificial Insights, your weekly guide to the metaverse that matters: an inevitable future comingled with intelligences far greater than our own. To me, it is deeply fascinating to watch this explosion unfold in real time. Science fiction, scientists and businesses have presented visions of potential AI for decades, and in the past few years the shift from promise to delivery happened quickly. Bordering on cliché, the past 12 months have seen more staggering change happen than maybe the last 12 years, and it goes without saying this will keep accelerating.
How do we navigate an age of unprecendented change? The innovation tales of disruption only make sense in a bounded, finite game. AGI is different. While all technologies are force-multipliers, the factor of change delivered by AI tools today is already changing personal practices everywhere. Copywriters, illustrators and so many other talents have had their markets decimated overnight, and it seems the only way forward is by embracing these solutions and absorving them into our lives.
To me, that boils down to spending as much time as possible using these tools simply so I know what is possible and where my own limitations are hindering growth. Last week that meant building another web app from scratch using ChatGPT. The “Envisioning Purpose” exercise has been applied over 100 times, and we felt it was time to build a standalone version in our Envisioning Lab. The web app is fully functional and we’re offering a free hands-on demo this Wednesday at 18 CET for those who are interested.
MZ
P.S. I’m in Dubai next week for COP28 – DM if you’re around.
From r/ChatGPT: Fabric of Reality
Don’t miss this weekend’s Reddit meme, where you ask Dall-E to continuously add “more” of something to an image which eventually leads up to encompassing the universe (?). Works for a surprising number of scenes and probably says something about the underlying training data.
Philosophy Tube explores ethical AI, challenges, trade-offs, and solutions.
Jaron Lanier discusses AI's future, critiques social media and advocates for 'Freedom Fee' and user governance.
AI transforming education: Ethan Mollick discusses AI's potential in teaching.
Emerging Vocabulary
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
RAG combines the capabilities of two major components: a neural language model and a retrieval system. The retrieval system searches a large corpus of documents (like Wikipedia) to find relevant information. This information is then fed into the language model, which generates responses that incorporate this retrieved knowledge. This approach allows the AI to provide more accurate and contextually relevant information, drawing from a vast database of knowledge. RAG is particularly useful in tasks like question answering, where access to a wide range of factual information is beneficial.
View all emerging vocabulary entries →
Envisioning Lab: Purpose
Try our AI-augmented personal development tool. This Wednesday (29 Nov) we’re hosting a quick hands-on session on Zoom in which up to 50 participants create their own purpose statement based on their inputs and GPT extrapolations. Our feedback for the application has been overwhelmingly possible, so we want to stress test the system and get a sense for what people would like from such a service. Limited seats available.
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Artificial Insights is written by Michell Zappa, CEO and founder of Envisioning, a technology research institute.
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