Overview: Science&Technology

A 2022 year in review from Sari Azout, Sublime founder, starts by succinctly summarising their mission: "build a more human and nourishing internet... a platform where curious humans come together to curate and interconnect the best knowledge ... because our search engines and algorithmic news feeds are letting us down. The right idea, or the…

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence…

"Could AI itself be used to imagine and build new institutions, so we can better collaborate, govern, and live together?... hope to inspire and engage researchers and practitioners to build AI that improves our societal institutions."The site includes 8 (so far) “Project Cards that showcase ideas for projects that have come out of our wo…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

"All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some ... leave behind (useful) wreckage that can be salvaged":the first dotcom bubble left behind "cheap servers, office furniture and space... a generation of young people ,,, trained as web makers... technologists from non-technical backgrounds"crypto bubble: "a smatterin…

"startup Mistral AI posted a download link to their latest language model". In many ways it's equivalent to GPT4: context size of 32k tokens, and built using the “Mixture Of Experts” model, combining "several highly specialized language models... 8 experts with 7 billion parameters each: “8x7B”... a training method for AI syste…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

Like me, the author has "been taking notes for over a decade ...ended up with thousands of notes that I never revisited. So I decided to train ChatGPT on my 3,743 Obsidian notes", which were created for "one purpose: content creation. So I use an improved version of the Zettelkasten".Apparently there are just 3 ways to use AI i…

Earlier this week I used an excerpt from a chat with Philip Weiss & Jesús Azogue as a starting point for a conversation with ChatGPT about some of the content in my Hub.

Combines a good primer on Knowledge Graphs with a detailed technical explanation of how to "convert any text corpus into a Knowledge Graph using Mistral 7B", although he prefers to refer to them as "Graph of Concepts".Interestingly, "this project can be run easily on a personal machine... to convert any text corpus into a …

"If Charts lie, ChatGPT visualisations lie brilliantly". Exploring knowledge visualisations powered by ChatGPT, which can be particularly problematic because of the way the LLM's hallucinations - already hard to spot by their very nature - are also hidden behind the visualisation. But they have real potential as a creative muse.

Shows how to "Master web scraping without a single line of code" using the ChatGPT plugin (requires ChatGPT Plus) "scraper", and provides a prompt to extract content from a web page and arrange it in a table. And then use "plugins like “Doc Maker” or “CSV Exporter” ... or Code Interpreter for conversions."For large pr…

"I'm working with the garage door up as I learn how best to integrate AI with MyHub.ai... as anyone who has played with any LLM for any length of time knows... You need to try stuff out, compare results and try some more. You need, in other words, to experiment... Given that I am managing my research notes in Obsidian, sharing them here …

Good introduction to GPTs in general and a useful guide to getting a GPT to talk to your own knowledgebase via its API.Presents GPTs as a "very similar concept to ... open-source projects like Agents which LangChain, a popular framework for building LLM applications describes as ... to use a language model to choose a sequence of actions to t…

My first experiment with a GPT built on my previous 5 experiments into integrating MyHub.ai with ChatGPT.

Over the summer I put the "ai" into myhub.ai and turned my Hub into a personal GPT wrapper. I've been experimenting ever since.

OpenAI rolled out "custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose... GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful ... at specific tasks". Built with no-code via chat.openai.com/create, you can share your GPT, and even monetise it, via their GPT Store later this month.Th…

A guide to creating the "chatbot that responds to queries based on the content of uploaded PDF or Text files... built using Langchain, FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search... developed by Meta for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors), and OpenAI’s GPT-4... found at ai-docreader.streamlit.app...".The piece first li…

"does appealing to the (non-existent) “emotions“ of LLMs make them perform better? The answer is YES"

"text to speech and voice cloning software ... Create lifelike voiceovers for your content or use our AI voice generator as an easy-to-use text reader... spoken audio in any voice, style, and language ... renders human intonation and inflections "

Rob Phillips, Founder & CEO FastlaneAI, ex-VP for Siri etc., on the "Fundamentals of Assisted Intelligence" - or where OpenAI is going with AI agents.

Google's AI-powered assistant: "Duet AI is a powerful collaborator that can act as a coach, thought partner, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data... you must first have an eligible Google Workspace plan."Via this post on "creating the perfec…

Short video. Pretty mindblowing.

I asked Questy.ai, a startup, the following question: What is the best communication technique for reaching someone who believes many conspiracy theories, and sees all arguments as further evidence of conspirary?A summary of its response, which contained cited references:"When engaging with someone who holds fast to conspiracy theories and v…

ETHAN MOLLICK on "the culmination of the first phase of the AI era ... [which] ends with the ... Google’s Gemini, the first LLM model likely to beat OpenAI’s GPT-4... enough pieces ... are in place ... to see what AI can actually do, at least in the short term... [although] implications of what this phase of AI will mean for work and educati…

Amazon's Bedrock "offers a choice of generative AI models from Amazon itself and third-party partners through an API,,, customers to build apps on top of generative AI models and customize them with their proprietary data ... [and] create AI “agents” that automatically execute tasks... in many ways comparable to [Google's] Vertex A…

"My advice: Jump headfirst into AI with everything you’ve got."

Is your organization more like a jellyfish or a flatworm?The author's "Jellyfish and Flatworm story has been remarkably effective at helping ... [executives] visualize the impact of AI on their customers, their products, and their employees... this story is about why Knowledge Representation (KR) must be the core of any cost-effective lo…