Agentic Futures

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly sense-making session around analytic intuition.

One of the questions I’ve been asking myself is: how are we supposed to learn how to adapt and prepare ourselves for the technological transition we are experiencing? If we believe AI to be as transformational as it seems, then what are the best practices and preparations necessary to thrive in the near future?

I don’t expect the effects of AI to diminish in our lifetimes. Like our larger interdependency with technology, I believe the effects of AI will grow indefinitely, requiring a significant reorientation of our systems and collective priorities. Maybe AI is eating the world, or maybe it is the usual suspect of capital showing the way - but its consequences seem inevitable.

This very newsletter attempts to sense-make in small increments, but I have a lingering feeling that something greater is necessary.

Where do you go for quality insight, if you are not terminally online, living in SF or a Phd ML researcher?

Most conferences, media and innovation thought leaders seem relatively detached from the actual technical development of AI. Earlier this year we mapped out 50+ technology and innovation events & conferences around the world, and either we completely missed a number of specialized events, or there is remarkably little happening in this space.

Help me answer this question? I feel most people would have something to learn from developing AI-adjacent skills, but almost nobody has the time for it. How do we reach those who need to learn this the most?

Until next week,
MZ

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The Expanding Dark Fores of Generative AI

Please don't miss this one-hour lecture by Maggie Appleton about the consequences of AI generated content and the future of the internet. Recorded almost a year ago, it is incredibly prescient.

We are about to enter a stage of sharing the web with a lot of non-human agents...soon we're not going to be able to tell the difference between one of these agents and a human.

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Autonomous AI Agents

Data scientist Daoud Abdel Hadi explains the potential future impact of autonomous agents. Generative AI has been an impressive show of creativity, but the real impact of AI is probably when they start operating intelligently together with us (#centaurs).

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Amazon and AGI

Vishal Sharma, the Amazon VP for AGI (!) shares his impressions of generative AI and where we are going next.

It's been some time since we saw such a profound shift in capability than we had before. So we can't take that away from it. So I think generative will always have that place in the sense that it was the first thing that kind of shifted us in a stepwise way towards AGI.

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Few-Shot Prompting

Matt Webb on how to make LLMs generate more stable/consistent outputs from things like categorization tasks:

https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1770740110180393405

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Wired on Attention Is All You Need

The backstory to the seminal Attention Is All You Need paper (which gave rise to Transformers and GPT): https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-modern-ai-transformers-paper/

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Coming soon: Envisioning AI

We have been working on a dictionary of AI related concepts and terms, which will soon be ready to share. Keep your eyes on the WhatsApp Group for early access to the visualization. You can already navigate the content here, for example: https://envisioning.ai/Agentic+AI+Systems

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