⚠️ Make AI work for you (your job may depend on it)

Last week, AI dominated CES 2024. This week, it’s center stage at Davos. We’re seeing AI emerge as a potential cure for cancer, it powers smart homes and devices, it can cook, do our laundry better, and then fold it for us. It can help us waste less food, make better investment decisions, overcome language barriers and mental health issues, and so much more.

New language models like Bloom, Falcon, OPT, XGen, and others continue to be trained and launched. Smaller “closed” models and trainable custom models are gaining in momentum and popularity too. The priorities seem to be data sovereignty, provenance, on-device AI (which doesn’t need WiFi to work), and embedded intelligence.

Sam Altman, Bill Gates and other pioneers continue to surprise at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos. Just before I wrote this intro, the OpenAI chief said AGI (general artificial intelligence) may be “reasonably close” but “will change the world much less than we think” — two statements that are equally shocking, particularly coming from Mr. Altman.

With Siemens reveal of their Industrial Metaverse, Google DeepMind making historic breakthroughs in cancer research, and so many more high-level and positive real-world applications of AI, one thing remains certain: AI is here to stay, and the implications are crucial.

Understanding how to use AI is not an option anymore, rather, it’s the one critical skill every professional needs to embrace and hone, as we continue to race into the new AI powered world — one in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says is already capable of having AI replace 40 percent of the human workforce (more on that below).

This is why we take this newsletter so seriously, and why we continue to improve based on your feedback. Thanks for being with us on this AI Logs journey. With that, we bring you Issue 14.

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NEWS

• ❤️‍🩹 New AI tool predicts death and complications after heart surgery The tool can help patients and doctors make informed decisions about the treatment.
  

• 🗳 OpenAI readies for challenges as the world gears up for election season 60 nations across the planet are scheduled to go to polls in 2024, making it one of the biggest polling years in history.
  

• 🍗 First-of-a-kind AI air fryer 'senses' cooked food, US launch this year Chef AI's air fryer uses deep learning models and sensors to determine the size, shape, thickness, and weight of the food.
  

• 🩻 MIT AI models detect the most common type of pancreatic cancer earlier AI models show 35 percent early detection rates for pancreatic cancer cases.

MUST READ

International Monetary Fund warns of AI’s threat to 40% of global jobs

A new IMF study suggests up to 40 percent of the world’s employment faces a high potential for disruption as artificial intelligence’s ability to handle predictable tasks expands, and richer countries will experience the biggest impact.

The study estimates that 60 percent of roles in advanced economies will see major changes, from new robot teammates to lost responsibilities. That translates to around half of workers will need to adapt or switch fields if higher wages don’t compensate for reduced opportunities.

By contrast, developing countries show lower vulnerability given that they have less existing automation, though they also risk missing productivity gains from limited tech infrastructure. As the technology’s promise and pitfalls grab attention at Davos 2024, political readiness is key — governments must urgently close skills gaps while protecting workers.

With questions around ethics and regulation intensifying at a similar pace to progress in AI capabilities, a smooth transition requires immediate action before these advancement divides society. However, examples like medical breakthrough show that there is real potential for improvements if AI is guided responsibly. Click below to learn more about the report and its predictions.

OTHER IMPORTANT UPDATES

• 🎮 Nvidia's AI NPCs enable endless life-like conversations in video games The new Nvidia ACE platform could allow video game NPCs to generate life-like conversations and even respond to questions from the player in real-time.
  

• 🔫 Bosch's AI gun-detection system will help make schools safer Bosch's Gun Detection System, a CES 2024 honoree, blends video and audio AI for proactive school security, offering a cost-effective approach with minimal invasion..
  

• 🧬 DNA sequencing and AI help craft largest database of marine microbes The new catalog helps in "understanding the ocean’s full diversity, containing more than 317 million gene groups from marine organisms around the world.

PROMPT OF THE WEEK

1. To supplement my weekly AI Logs prompts of the week, I would love to feature some of your best prompts as well - please feel free to submit via our email.

   Many of you will already know the significance of providing context, a persona, formatting and voice guidelines, and to incorporate a question for a thorough prompt likely to yield positive outcomes. But many still get stuck when their AI tells them what it cannot do, and why it won’t deliver the requested outcome/output. Let’s try to minimize this frustrating scenario.

   The most common fix for this is to use the first prompt to remind the AI that you know that it can deliver the expected result, and then to tell it to avoid telling you what it can’t do and to avoid making excuses. Rather, it should creatively figure out how to deliver the ideal deliverable.

   With this as a foundation, when it still seems to hit a wall or block, just remind it that it can do it and ask it to keep going, changing the wording of the prompt’s subtext. Often it’s just a word or phrase that needs to be changed, particularly when reminding the AI that it can, in fact, produce the exspected results.

   Lastly, if or when you come up against the AI not delivering the results you want, just ask it to “show its math” and explain why it can’t or isn’t doing what you’ve asked it to do.

2. You may need to go back and forth a bit conversationally, but once you can get it to tell you why it won’t do what you’ve asked it to, you can identify subtle ways to ask differently, and even ask the AI to write itself a prompt and deploy it that will get the expected outcome. This is the power of AI: It IS the user manual!

AI PICTURE OF THE WEEK

TUTORIAL

How to learn Python

Please submit requests for specific tutorials and I’ll do my best to accommodate. For this week, here’s a tutorial on how to learn to code in Python, easily:

Just ask ChatGPT to act as a code instructor and to work with you as an aspiring Python coder to learn to program in Python. Ask it if it understands, and how it can best help you. Tell it to keep it conversational and to make daily progress; also tell it how much you want to learn, and in what time frame.

From here, return to this same thread daily and ask for your daily lesson and homework. Ask questions daily you had from the day before, and make sure you are fully grasping the concepts and code every step of the way. Keep at it, and you can be coding in no time - FOR FREE.

This same method works for learning virtually anything using AI.

TOOLS OF THE WEEK

🎶 Cassette AI: This generative music creator is one of only a few gAI music platforms I’m aware of, including Suno and UberDuck, both of which also impress me, and both of which I’ve featured here previously. But Cassette is cool become it feels as though you have even more control of the nuances, and more editing capabilities. It has an easy-to-use mobile-friendly web interface, great original music outputs, and seemingly lots more to come. Free to play with.

📹 InVideo AI: An AI that comes close to helping “creators” generate faceless videos for social media, Invideo has a powerful custom GPT in the GPT store as well as a website, and it can go from text ideation to a script and video with b-roll footage and a voiceover that is available for free with watermark or unlock premium functionality. The experience is intuitive, outcome is good, and the potential is massive.

🟧 Rabbit AI r1: Most will have seen this coming out of CES, but this AI-powered handheld with no preloaded software or apps intuitively understands the users’ needs and delivers results using proprietary AI. Some are saying this could render the smart phone obsolete for some. In any regard, it’s a very cool technology at an attractive price point (under $200 but currently sold out / waiting list).

▪ Lore Machine: Now this is COOL! Currently building a community on Discord and slowly opening closed beta access, Lore is a bring-your-own-script storyboarding and movie making AI that can make really cool custom films from your prompts or writing. New character generator and more directorial capabilities coming very soon (within weeks) but I highly recommend getting early access by signing up for early access (currently free although generation is token based).