Artificial General Intelligence in our lifetime?

Hello and welcome to the 1,299 new folks joining us since last week. An uneventful one for me this weekend, a christening (where I became a Godfather for the 4th time 😳), dog walks and food!

Getting all my ducks in a row before I head off to Austin next week for the Zapier offsite 🎉 . The email will go out as normal, there may be a couple of late sends but I'll try not to!

Let's get to it.

p.s. ChatGPT Pro is rolling out slowly for $42/mo. They promise more uptime, faster speeds and priority access to new features. I keep refreshing but I don't have the option yet!

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🤌 Ben's Picks

1/

It was about 50% of the way in that the two parties realised they were defining AGI differently, and they each received more compliments than my wife has given me in the last 5 years. Nevertheless, this debate between IBM Fellow Grady Booch and NYU Prof. Gary Marcus is brilliantly insightful, helps us to realise that the focus on LLMs is actually stunting AGI development, and explains why lack of plasticity across domains is a major setback for AGI development.

A good point is being made here. Once you appreciate that true AGI needs to encapsulate everything from metacognition to sentience in order to truly infer and transfer knowledge across domains, the focus on incremental improvements in LLMs is perhaps directing money in a wonky, inefficient direction that could put a stiff upper bound on our ability to achieve AGI.

2/

Are Google sacking everyone to make money for new lawyers? My Twitter feed of newly-unemployed techies combined with this NYT article suggests so. Larry and Sergey are back, baby, well...kinda. Following their “Code Red” business warning after OpenAI’s ChatGPT success, they’ve said that they’ll be rethinking their risk capabilities in order to get products to market quicker in order to leap-frog the competition. Given their social footprint, releases like this will invite much more regulatory scrutiny than OpenAI, and rightly so.

The announcement is quite disconcerting - reducing risk capabilities at one of the biggest players in the market in an unpredictable and largely unknown field with serious societal consequences seems dodgy at best, and negligent at worst. On the plus side, who wouldn’t want a Google/ChatGPT hybrid for a search engine?! I know I certainly would. Or even better, just a bit of big-tech-money competition!

3/

And whilst we’re on ChatGPT: if you need to pass an exam, why not give it a try? It managed to get a decent score on one of Wharton’s core MBA modules, and also passed the US Medical Licensing Exam, which people study for years to complete. I’m concerned that a knee-jerk reaction to these reports will be to use more in-house exam-based testing, further encouraging the study-to-pass attitude that’s currently damaging much of the education system. Better approaches might be to assess based on in-class interactions, workshops, or longer-form reports where good use of AI technologies could actually be show-cased.

4/

Scale AI hosted its AI hackathon on Sunday. Some say it was the first time they physically felt 'Silicon Valley' in a while. Here are some tools that came out of it:

• Pierre Bhat, a prolific AI coder who roams GitHub resolving issues with PRs (link)

• An approach to add long-term memory of relevant entities for making AI chatbots smarter. (link)

• ActGPT - Chatbot that can perform tasks on browser. (link)

• Rap Battle - Pick any two people and generate a rap battle on the fly. (link)

• GPT-3 Auditor - Scanning code for vulnerabilities with LLMs. (link)

This thread has more examples with a bunch of interesting use cases. (link)

🛠️ Cool Tools

• Roast Dating - Get real feedback, boost your profile, and get up to 10X more matches on dating apps. (link)

• Extrapolate - See how well you age by transforming your face using AI. (link)

• Hal - Get any article or Youtube video summarised on iMessage. (link)

• Quickie - An extension for multiple AI tools. I'm sorry but that name has to be changed. (link)

• Agent HQ - Create LLM agents and tools directly in the browser for making AI powered chatbots. (link)

• CodeGPT: VS Code extension with ChatGPT like functionalities. (link)

• ChatLangChain - Answer questions about the LangChain codebase and generate code. (link)

• GPT Agent - Go straight from an idea to a deployable AI app. (link)

• Genmo Video - A generative media platform with a new text-to-video mode to create immersive live artwork. (link)

• Realhousewives AI - Ask any question about the Real Housewives of Beverley Hills. My wife's interest in AI suddenly peaked yesterday when I told her about this. (link)

• ChefGPT - AI-powered recipe recommendations based on your available ingredients. (link)

• StockGPT - an AI financial search tool. (link)

• A conversational UI for image editing is coming. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

• Can GPT-3 explain my past and tell my future? GPT-3 trained on 10 years of journal entries. (link)

• AI product index to track and organise cool new AI products. (link)

• Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for AI fight. (link, without paywall here)

• CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy. (link)

• Anthropic is hiring for prompt engineers and librarians with $250k - $335k as compensation range. 🤯 (link)

• Google vs. ChatGPT told by aglio e olio. (link)

• 9 ways Google uses AI in its products. (link)

• Becoming strange in the long singularity. (link)

• Dig into the research breakthroughs behind ChatGPT - transformers, self-attention and more. (link)

• Using ChatGPT to make content production process faster, more efficient, and more interesting. (link)

• I fell in love with an algorithm. (link)

• 80th birthday of the McCulloch-Pitts neuron - the fundamental idea behind all neural networks. (link)

• Eye contact feature from NVIDIA uses AI to make you look into the camera. (link)

• 100+ cheat sheets on various topics including machine learning, data structures, statistics and more. (link)

• AGI will not happen in your lifetime. Or will it? (link)

• AI chatbot’s MBA exam pass poses test for business schools. (link, without paywall here)

• ChatGPT has passed the United States medical licensing examination. (link)

• The Generative AI Landscape - A collection of awesome generative AI applications. (link)

🎓 Learn

• Fine-tuning GPT-3/ChatGPT and Zapier integration for no code OpenAI developers. (link)

• Get AI to write software for you. (link)

• Learn to outpaint with DALL·E. (link)

• Build GPT3-powered Shopify app that generates (a) product descriptions, (link) and (b) blog articles. (link)

• How I built a viral AI web app. (link)

🔬 Research

• Objaverse - Annotated dataset of 800k+ 3D objects. (link)

• Understanding and detecting hallucinations in neural machine translation via model introspection. (link)

• Incorporating intangible concepts into LLM prompts is impossible with natural language. (link)

• Potential for AI assisted medical education using large language models. (link)

• A new visually guided acoustic synthesis (ViGAS) network learns to synthesise the sound of an arbitrary point in space from input audio-visual cues. (link)

• SPARTN - A fully-offline data augmentation scheme for improving robot policies that use eye-in-hand cameras. (link)

• FlatFormer - Closing the latency gap for 3D point cloud transformers. (link)

• Symbolic API - Combine the strengths of both neural networks and symbolic reasoning. (link)

📰 Unclassifieds

• Want a $50K grant for integrating AI characters into your game or experience? Inworld's Character Grants Program is open to all. Apply now.

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