30-min AI challenge

PLUS: Power and history of two smartest people in tech today.

March 27, 2023

Hey folks, and welcome to 5,696 of you who joined last week. We’re over 60k strong now 💪.

Today we’ve got Ethan Mollick’s latest AI experiment, an easier ChatGPT model that’s open-source, Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s history, Langchain following fast with plugin protocol and you should really listen/watch Lex Fridman chatting with Sam Altman—everyone else is.

Let’s get to it.

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🤌 Our Picks

Highlights if you've only got 2 minutes

1/

OK, it’s official - superhuman powers are a real thing and all it took to get there was ChatGPT. Ethan Mollick gave himself a test: see how much he could get done in 30 minutes using the AI. And as far as I can tell, he’s basically achieved what would previously have taken at least a day. For a mock marketing campaign, he did extensive market research, created a positioning document, wrote an email campaign, created a website, and a logo, and even scripted and created a deep fake video for the biz. If someone told you they could do all that a couple of years ago you would literally think they’re a superhero. All this begs one last question: how do we utilise our newfound powers? Do we work more or less? Who benefits from this? Companies or employees? What happens to leisure time? I could go on all day…

2/

Time to add one more competitor to the queue of smaller language models trying to give OpenAI a run for their money, and it’s even been named after a sheep… With the goal of democratising AI away from Big Tech, Databricks has released a fully open-sourced model called Dolly, and they reckon it manages to exhibit the “magical” human interaction capabilities that ChatGPT has. Built off EleutherAI’s GPT-J-6B, it’s been fine-tuned on a dataset of 50,000 words in just 3 hours - rapido!

3/

With OpenAI’s products rapidly taking over our lives, let’s take the chance to step back and listen to where it all began, as well as some behind-the-scenes drama between two of tech’s biggest names - Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Whatever you might think of him since his Twitter tirade, the fact is that he was there at OpenAI from the start, driving the original non-profit approach of democratising AI. This Semafor article runs us through Elon’s exit from the firm and his refusal to pay the $1bln he promised (fair enough, I guess); the pivot to a transformer-focussed model that’s driving what we’re seeing today; the shift from a non-profit to a for-profit with a $30bln valuation; and whether we’re seeing a liiiiittle bit of sourness from Musk since he’s no longer a part of the hottest thing in tech.

4/

Let’s squeeze in a cheeky little fourth pick for those of you who like to get down and dirty with code. LangChain, as ever, has followed the latest AI development at lightning speed. Since OpenAI released their Plugin Protocol - the ability to execute actions on apps from within ChatGPT - LangChain has updated their toolkit with an ‘AIPluginTool’ - great work driving open AI development forward! Check out the tweet linked above to see a simple set-up for it.

🛠️ Cool Tools

Product launches, updates and demos

  • Benji, the productivity app, adds ChatGPT to manage calendars, track habits etc. using natural language. (link)

  • Replit’s make me an app - Just talk to Replit’s app to make software. (link)

  • Markprompt - Build a delightful GPT-4 prompt for your markdown docs. (link)

  • ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin - Search and find documents, personal or work-related, by asking questions in everyday language. (link)

  • LLaMA voice chat that you can run locally on an M1 Pro. (link)

  • Book AI chat - Chat with any book. (link)

  • Xplayground - MacOS app to try out AI. (link)

  • Wavel AI - Your AI assistant for video captions and subtitles. (link)

  • Scribble Dribble - Sketch to art with AI magic. (link)

  • Beakr AI - Your go-to AI experimentation platform. (link)

  • ChatGPT plugin finder - Check Alexa's top 1M websites for the presence of OpenAI plugins. (link)

  • Catbird - Generate images from dozens of models at once. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

News, podcasts, videos, blogs etc

  • Sam Altman on Lex Fridman podcast - Safety, politics and AGI. (link)

  • OpenAI fixed a bug in ChatGPT that could’ve revealed users' chat history to others. (link)

  • Awe, anxiety and AI - Navigating the conflicting emotions of this moment in tech. (link)

  • Unreleased secret plugins found when playing with ChatGPT API. (link)

  • Axios’s software business raises cash to fund AI expansion. (link)

  • The sparks of AGI? Or the end of science? (link)

  • GPT for numbers and analytics from iGenius. (link)

  • The use of ChatGPT and other large language models in surgical science. (link)

  • I let an AI take over my life and hopefully not the world. (link)

  • Ten AI companies that investors and founders are keeping a close eye on. (link)

  • How Adobe design is shaping the Firefly generative AI experience. (link)

  • Malleable software in the age of LLMs. (link)

  • Make-It-3D - High-fidelity 3D creation from a single image with diffusion prior. (link)

  • ChatGPT vs Grammarly? Evaluating ChatGPT on grammatical error correction benchmark. (link)

  • Radiance fields - Grid-based urban scene from Adobe (link) and local view synthesis from Meta. (link)

🎓 Learn

How-to’s and resources

  • How to build and deploy a ChatGPT plugin in Python. (link)

  • Using GPT-4 to do financial statement analysis. (link)

  • Using ChatGPT plugins with LLaMA. (link)

👋 Too many links?! I created a database for all links mentioned in these emails. Refer 1 friend using this link and I'll send over the link database.

📰 Unclassifieds

Short, sponsored links 

  • Bubble is hosting a virtual AI event tomorrow to discuss how its no-code platform can enable you to build products with the power of AI. Register here

  • Writer is hiring the director for AI and NLP. (link)

  • Data & Society research institute is hiring an AIMLab technical researcher. (link)

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