2024 will be a year of AI innovation

Hello again and happy new year! I genuinely hope you have an amazing 2024. Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk AI!

This being a weekly newsletter, it would seem that fresh new, relevant content could be hard to come by, but 2023 was such a whirlwind year for artificial intelligence that it was hard for many to even keep up, which made my job both harder and easier at the same time. 2024 shows no signs of stopping or slowing down.

Major players like Apple, Meta, OpenAI, DeepMind and scores of startups are charging ahead with big plans for AI this year. LinkedIn is even working on their own AI, with cofounder Reid Hoffman in the space with his Inflection AI, makers of Pi - another great AI chatbot that released released its V2.

Key areas like natural language, computer vision, quantum computing, and healthcare will likely see exciting new capabilities emerge. For instance, AI is already discovering new materials, assisting disease treatment, powering rapid robotics innovations and showing immense creative potential. 2023 gave us AI-generated movies on par with Hollywood, and AI-composed music rivaling the creations of top human composers.

We’ll witness AI discovering new building blocks of reality and materials with massive implications, yet with such great potential comes great responsibility. As promising as these systems are, we must carefully consider risks, ethics and safeguards too.

If 2023 set the stage, 2024 may bring an embarrassment of AI riches. My newsletter will cover the key innovations, separate hype from reality, and spotlight the pioneers who are pushing the boundaries.

The pace is dizzying, but progress could profoundly improve life. I’m wildly curious what’s in store. Let’s unpack it together this year!

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NEWS

• 🛡 Shield AI's alien ship-like surveillance drones get a half-billion funding boost

  Shield AI has announced that it has managed to raise $500 million in funding in a mixture of debt and Series F funding.
  

• 🛞 Toyota teaches AI to drift GR Supra, world's first self-drifting car

  Dive into the future of road safety as Toyota introduces the world's first self-drifting GR Supra, combining racing instincts and AI magic!
  

• 🤑 Job security, AI, personal finances and the economy top list of stressors for American workers into 2024

  Women are more stressed than their male counterparts, and those aged 45 to 60 experience far higher stress than their millennial colleagues.

MUST READ

Retrofit AI and automation: the future of construction and mining

What if autonomous technology could relieve humans from the most tedious and hazardous manual labor? In our latest Lexicon podcast, Bibhrajit Halder shares his vision for AI-driven robots to revolutionize industries like mining and construction.

Halder is CEO of retrofit autonomy company SafeAI, and joins us to describe how their systems enable vehicles to perform automated tasks safely with full remote oversight. By upgrading existing trucks and heavy equipment rather than requiring new platforms, SafeAI provides an easier onramp to autonomous operation.

Halder envisions automation expanding across trucking, delivery and other sectors reliant on manual labor. With advanced computer vision, machine learning algorithms and teleoperation, AI-guided vehicles could take over dull, dirty and dangerous jobs, freeing up the human workforce for more meaningful and satisfying roles while increasing productivity and safety.

We discuss the journey to founding SafeAI and opportunities for autonomous technologies to assist human expansion into space. Ultimately, Halder paints a picture of smarter bots intelligently handling more industrial tasks on Earth and beyond. Click below to learn more and listen to the conversation.

OTHER IMPORTANT UPDATES

• 🔬 AI aids colonoscopy by acting as 'extra pair of eyes', spotting tumors

  A new AI tool shows promise in detecting adenomas, particularly those smaller than five millimeters in diameter..
  

• 🔮 Four major themes we’re expecting at Consumer Electronics Show 2024

  CES 2024 is all set to unveil the latest tech on January 9 in Las Vegas and it promises to be a landmark event to see how AI will change the world.
  

• 🌍 AI expert warns against digital colonization in Africa by foreign bodies

  Explore expert insights from Seydina Moussa Ndiaye as he warns against the specter of digital colonization through AI in Africa.

PROMPT OF THE WEEK

• For this week’s prompt of the week, we’re going back to the basics, the foundation of a great prompt. This format seems to be the most effective for all the chatbot AIs out there. It’s simple, but mission critical to a good prompt: the structure! To craft a great prompt, begin by providing the following:
  

  PERSONA

  CONTEXT

  QUESTION

  TONE

  FORMAT
  

  The Persona (or Role) is important because it determines what lens to frame the query through and what to prioritize (remember, AI predicts the next word, so this all makes it have to work and guess less).
  

  Context should be self explanatory, it describes the outcome you’re hoping for should accomplish.
  

  The Question is what I see most people missing out, but it has a massive impact. Asking the question, whatever that might be, helps the persona respond and “show its math,” to a degree.
  

  The Tone is also so important because it influences the output — do you want it to sound professional, academic, conversational, witty, profound, etc? It needs to know this, otherwise it will default to a tone and output that is likely inferior.
  

  Finally, Formatting is what you need to get the best results in the way that best serves your needs. Some great examples are a step-by-step list, table, bullet points, essay, and image.
  

  I will construct a “perfect prompt” in the tutorial of the week section below.

AI PICTURE OF THE WEEK

A still from a short movie created using RunwayML and Eleven Labs by Bret Jenny of DCRBN Labs.

TUTORIAL

Using our prompt of the week: An example

Building off the Prompt of the Week, above, let’s create a sample “perfect prompt” using PERSONA, CONTEXT, QUESTION, TONE, and FORMAT.

Let’s say we want to create an online course to sell, and want ideas around creating and scaling it, with all components of the go-to-market strategy. We could say:

“Act as an accomplished business mentor with domain expertise in launching and scaling successful online courses (PERSONA), help me as an aspiring businessperson ready to create and launch an online course about how to use and leverage AI to figure out how to create, host, launch, monetize, market and do this full time (CONTEXT), what things can you actually do for me, and what things should you teach me how to do, so I can make this a reality? (QUESTION) Tone should be easy for me to understand and follow along but also high level enough for me to action it immediately, and format should be in a step-by-step guide (FORMAT) with actual sites and software to use, ideas around what to charge, how to get initial customers, ideas for posts about it on social media, and a comprehensive list of everything I’ll need to do and how to do it.”

Try this structure out with your own ideas!

TOOLS OF THE WEEK

🤩 Janitor AI - I hadn’t heard of this until I researched the most visited AI sites of 2023. I checked it out and it’s actually pretty cool. You can create a character and chat with others’ characters, and it seems that they’re going to animate the characters as full video avatars soon too, which would be very cool.

The bots are often very funny, or smart, or rude, and almost all I’ve played with have been great. They’re more for conversation and play, so there isn’t a huge practical application for their characters yet, but imagining teledoctors, therapists, and virtual employees in this way is definitely encouraging. And it is fun, which is utility in and of itself.

🎞 Pika Labs just released their website so you know longer need to go to Discord to use it, and their text to video is some of the best out there. The website version has additional utility and is much easier to use. I can see Pika getting ready for some major updates this year, as RunwayML also keep innovating, and Leonardo AI now has text to video available as well, all of which are pretty good.

Recent videos of people making Hollywood style videos are popping up everywhere. I’ve share one from my team in our Picture of the Week, above.

👩‍🎨 Kittl AI is like Canva, but with next level generation, similar to Dall•e, Midjourney, etc; but there’s a big difference between Kittl and the other ones, inasmuch as it’s great for generating logos, icons, and original professional images using generative AI. These are the best AI generated logos I’ve seen yet, and all aspects of the creations are fully editable, which is a huge upgrade over all other AI logo generators I’ve seen previously.

🎨 Lora Ease may be a legit game changer. Currently available on HuggingFace, it’s a tool the you can train on your own select repository of images and knowledge base for generating your own hybrid images, even using proprietary art. Being able to train our own models is a step toward a more “closed AI” which is more needed than ever (see last week’s episode for ChatGPT security issues that are highly concerning).

Being able to upload your own art, or a series of favorite art, images, and themes, then training your own model with them has massive upside and potential. It’s also incredibly affordable (like only a few dollars to train your own model).