1 Billion is Not a Lot
Issue 065 · August 12, 2024
Happy Monday and welcome to your regular download of ambitious investigations.
There are weeks where decades happen. AI is happening on so many fronts, by so many people, that staying abreast of where to even pay attention, is an incredible challenge. Thankfully for you, I spend my days glued to the internet filtering and selecting the bits and bobs that help you stay ahead.
Good news, everyone! We are rolling out a new visual identity for the newsletter, and recently upgraded our WhatsApp group to a community with dedicated channels for regional meetups.
This newsletter now features “AI turquoise” (1, 2) which might or might now become a thing, but it also helps us separate the newsletter from the optic yellow used by Envisioning.
The upgraded WhatsApp community hopes to be an upgrade to the already-wonderful experience we are having in the group. We now have separate meetup groups for members in Amsterdam and Brazil, and hope to roll out a few select dedicated channels for issues which don’t overlap with the primary chat channel.
💬**Join us**!
💬**Join us**!
I’ll be in Bangkok in a couple of weeks presenting the previously discussed AI Masterclass the Global Trend Summit. Ping me if you’re around!
Until next week,
MZ
MZ
Advanced Prompting Techniques (17 min)
Mckay Wrigley on X offers a breakdown of advanced prompting techniques for LLMs. I especially like the custom tooling for resolving issues with a step by step approach (prompt chaining). I also like how they plan around the role of humans in the loop, with specific inputs and observation models.
Advanced Approaches for Code
In the same vein, here is an advanced Coding System Prompt (Roah Paul on X and /r/PromptEngineering on Reddit) which is apparently helping people produce better output with code. In my experience, Claude 3.5 is already a lot better than GPT 4 at such tasks.
What if OpenAI vanishes tomorrow? (50 min)
High-signal podcast with YC group partners and the creator of Gmail - Paul Buchhet on… AI. Highly recommended and difficult to summarize. They cover a lot of ground with great technical and commercial insight.
What’s Next from Anthropic (15 min)
Very timely presentation by the head of developer relations at Anthropic, Alex Albert. Technical and detailed and supports the idea that we are nowhere near a slowdown.
Kurzgesagt on Superintelligence (18 min)
Key AI milestones and risks when it comes to humanity's future.
AGI might be the last invention of humanity... it could become the most intelligent and therefore most powerful being on Earth.
AI is getting faster faster and cheaper faster
Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From
Amazing deep dive by Jason Koebler in 404 Media on the financial motives for creating online content. This isn’t going away.
Facebook itself is paying creators in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines for bizarre AI spam that they are learning to make from YouTube influencers and guides sold on Telegram.
Bratpropagation
@1thousandfaces_ on X. (sorry not sorry)
Diffusion Models are having a moment.
FLUX.1 from the StableDiffusion team is something else. You should play around with it. Don’t miss Ethan Mollick’s take 🦦💺.
Not a camera in sight.
Big week for robots
Figure announced their 02 Model on X. Better hands and movement coupled with speech-to-speech and lots of other improvements means we are one step closer to humanoid robots at work and home.
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