The memes must flow
Issue 042 · March 4, 2024
Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly map to the boundaries of artificial awakenings.
Like the past 42 weeks of publishing this newsletter, this one has been a whirlwind of news in the rapidly evolving AI space. I sometimes feel compelled to look away a couple of cycles and simply let things unfold, but without fanning the hype, I am increasingly convinced that this field is a unilateral transformative force affecting more-or-less every aspect of our individual & collective lives.
I mean – why would you go back?
Short of a Great Revolt, there is no viable path back from our collective acceptance of advanced technologies to a prior state. We are ratcheting up our dependence on tech towards greater and greater mutual benefit. There is no reversing course.
Instead, consider different pathways forward. Lean in to certain technologies, learn about them in depth, and figure out how to use them in your daily life. GenAI is here and only getting better. Learn its boundaries and strenghts. Figure out what makes it tick, and which bits of your work are worth augmenting. Do this for yourself and for the benefit of those around you.
For me, it means rekindling the love of capturing ideas as visual images, which has translated into hundreds of hours crafting DallE & MidJourney prompts in the last year, for example. No better way to move towards new skills than doing what you truly enjoy.
On a practical note, don’t miss our new WhatsApp group chat 💬. Thanks to readers like you, this has now become my favorite place to find and share new ideas. Hope to see you there.
Until next week,
MZ
MZ
“Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”
Andrew Ng on the changing labor force
Short interview by the WSJ.
Most jobs you can think of as a bundle of tasks. When you break them down into tasks, then analyzing individual tasks for potential for AI automation or augmentation often leads to interesting opportunities to use AI.
AI and the Workforce
Wharton Webinar with several interesting speakers discussing research and implications of AI on various aspects of work.
The results show that with AI assistance, there is a 2.3 times increase in the creativity of human workers. This indicates that when AI handles boring, repetitive jobs, employees have more free time and stronger interest and motivation, feeling much better, with better morale and more energy to think about creative solutions to customer problems.
AGI this decade?
Insightful interview with Demis Hassabis with far-reaching profound ideas.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we had AGI-like systems within the next decade. It’s an empirical question whether that will hit an asymptote or a brick wall. I think no one knows.
As AI is becoming more multimodal and we start ingesting audiovisual data as well as text data, I do think our systems are going to start to understand the physics of the real world better... The world’s about to become very exciting, I think, in the next few years as we start getting used to the idea of what true multimodality means.
Sora demo video
“fly through tour of a museum with many paintings and sculptures and beautiful works of art in all styles”
We turned our thinking over to machines
Via Ricky.
Upcoming Webinar: How to use AI to 10x your productivity
Via Reinier.
AI Concept Graph
Do you find yourself learning different AI-related terms and concepts and wondering how they relate to each other? I recently started working on a “concept graph” which aims to present and explain the fundamental ideas and relationships necessary to understand the field. DM for details or join the WhatsApp group for a preview later this week.
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🏅 Forwarding this issue to colleagues and friends.
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🎯 Commenting with your favorite talks and thinkers.
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