China and the AI wars

PLUS: Integrating ChatGPT into education

Author

Ben Tossell
February 20, 2023

Hello and welcome to the 4,543 new folks joining from last week.

The stag do was as heavy as expected and I lost my voice. Just in time for my trip to Milan on Wednesday - a little birthday visit for my wife.

Let’s get to it.

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🤌 Ben's Picks

1/

I’m a comically big fan of the phrase “architect of your own demise”, so I’m over the moon that I’m able to kick off this week’s picks with exactly that: Has the Chinese government been the architect of their own demise in the race for AI dominance? The New York Times argues that excessive censorship, geopolitical tensions with the US, and attempts to control private sector companies have led to Chinese companies falling behind their US counterparts in AI. In addition to this, a lack of control over the chip market could limit their ability to harness the computing power necessary to catch up going forward.

Paywall removed here.

2/

As we’ve touched on a number of times in this newsletter, at Ben’s Bites we’re big fans of integrating AI into the education system and embracing the change associated with doing so. Ethan Mollick provides an update on the lessons learned so far from integrating ChatGPT into his curriculum. They’re undoubtedly eye-opening and I’m looking forward to hearing more from him on this!

Two key takeaways: 1) Work produced by prompting with a co-editing approach (bouncing ideas back and forth with the chatbot) tends to end up with students doing the best work; 2) Students need to be taught how to write prompts effectively - it doesn’t come naturally!

3/

I used to have an absolutely wild time discovering cheat codes that created flying cars and all sorts of other mania in Grand Theft Auto when I was younger. Roblox, the gaming company, are about to take sneaky cheat codes to a whole new level with AI. As far as I can tell, users will be able to enter textual descriptions of game mods - customising weapons, changing colours, creating new cheat codes - and AI will generate under-the-hood code to get them implemented in real-time. Wicked!

Paywall removed here.

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🛠️ Cool Tools

  • Magick - Supercharge your app with no-code AI tools. (link)

  • Coqui AI - Direct emotive, generative AI voices for video games, post-production, dubbing and much more. (link)

  • Google Colab Copilot - AI assistant that writes python code for you on Google Colab. (link)

  • Iswrite - Learn and correct your copywriting. (link)

  • Background Remover - Remove backgrounds using AI. (link)

  • Igniter - Find the right AI tool to ignite your workflow. (link)

  • Formula Generator - Easily generate excel formulas, VBA automations etc. to solve your spreadsheet problems. (link)

  • FigCopy - Use real copy for your designs. (link)

  • Langotalk - Learn languages 6x faster with AI. (link)

  • MyCelebs - Supercharge your search with AI keytalk deep search. (link)

  • AiBert - The genius WhatsApp bot for ChatGPT and Midjourney. (link)

  • AI Avatar Generator - Create the perfect professional headshots. (link)

  • Ingest AI - Turn your knowledge base into ChatGPT-like bot within your Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram. (link)

  • EdgarGPT - Targeted summaries of recent SEC 10-Q/10-K MD&A sections via OpenAI davinci-003. (link)

  • Let users send text messages with your Langchain app. (link)

  • AI autocompletion that can be activated by typing "+++" anywhere on your Mac. (link)

  • Unofficial demo for Photoguard - Safeguarding images against manipulation by ML-powered photo-editing models. (link)

  • Apply ControlNet to a video with HF spaces. (link)

  • Background AI - Create AI wallpapers in seconds. (link)

  • GPT Twitter Bot - Find out who AI thinks you are based on your Tweets. (link)

  • ShipSense - AI vision model to detect ships from space and monitor overfishing hotspots. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

  • Scale AI picks a tiny Puerto Rican port as a test lab for trade fluidity. (link, without paywall here)

  • The power of Zapier & OpenAI. (link)

  • Langchain AI adds self-critique chain and self-hosted model support. (link)

  • AI-based tools will be a massive opportunity for calm companies, but a dud for VC. (link)

  • AI music video - Rock Co. Kane Flow. (link)

  • Everything you need to know about Coda’s new alpha AI. (link)

  • How not to test GPT-3. (link)

  • Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird. (link)

  • Superhuman intelligence isn’t always what you think. (link)

  • Microsoft's Bing plans AI ads in early pitch to advertisers. (link)

  • The future, soon - What I learned from Bing's AI. (link)

  • Bing Chat’s identity crisis reflects the mixed messages we’ve given it. (link, without paywall here)

  • GPTZero case study (exploring false positives). (link)

  • Bing - A history in 7 stories. (link)

  • OpenAI is faulted by the media for using articles to train ChatGPT. (link)

🎓️ Learn

  • Level up your prompt game - How to process GPT-3 prompts. (link)

  • How to make LLMs say true things. (link)

  • Create consistent characters in Midjourney. (link)

  • A guide to writing essays with AI. (link)

  • Special lecture on prompt engineering techniques, applications, and much more. (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 it over.

🔬 Research

  • Tuning computer vision models with task rewards from Google. (link)

  • Kohonen self-organising maps (KSOMs) as alternative vector quantisation algorithm for unsupervised learning of neural discrete representations. (link)

  • Pretraining language models with human preferences. (link)

  • Massively multilingual shallow fusion with LLMs for automatic speech recognition by Google. (link)

  • JEIT from Google - Joint end-to-end model and internal language model training for speech recognition. (link)

  • Speaker change detection for transformer transducer ASR by Microsoft. (link)

📰 Unclassifieds

  • Sharpen your math + CS skills. For professionals and lifelong learners alike—Brilliant is the best way to learn. Start for free today.

  • Combat digital fatigue with custom Japanese art. Click here to order Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Bizen Pottery, and Noh Theatre Masks.

  • Founder’s AGI Hackathon Series by Langchain & Gen AI on 25th February. RSVP here >>

  • Vial is hiring a machine learning Research Scientist. Learn more >>

  • Samsung Research America is hiring a ML for Web Engineer Intern. Learn more >>

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