AI-enhanced creatvity, uniqueness in an AI world, AI in Hollywood, is Strawbery coming??

📖In this issue

• Distilled insights from Generative AI Leaders Lunch

• AI adoption by US workers, banks and Hollywood

• Google slashes the price of its efficient Gemini 1.5 Flash model

• OpenAI is rumoured to be releasing its long-awaited Strawberry model with superior reasoning capabilities

• Robots play table tennis pretty well

• Brian Magerko on AI to enhance human creativity, robot improv, music to learn coding, and improvisational dance with AI

• In the age of A.I., what makes people unique?

🤸 Insights

This week I ran a Generative AI Leaders Lunch in Sydney. The event included focused table conversations on a range of topics, which were all recorded, transcribed and summarized to provide distilled participant insights.

Topics discussed include:

🧠 AI's Impact on Human Cognitive Development: Participants discussed how AI might change cognitive skills. One observed, "Compared my math skills compared to maybe my grandparents, math skills are probably going to be very different." This was seen as part of a broader trend of AI altering how we develop and use cognitive abilities.

🎨 AI as a Catalyst for Human Creativity: Participants saw AI as a tool for democratizing creativity. As one stated, "The fact that we can take something so complex and humane as art and democratize it is brilliant." This was seen as a positive development, potentially enabling more people to engage in creative activities.

💬 Emergence of 'Prompt Language Natives': A new form of literacy centered around AI interaction was discussed. One participant predicted, "I reckon they're going to be sort of prompt language natives." This suggests a future where effectively communicating with AI systems becomes a crucial skill.

👩🤖Humans + AI update

Half of US workers have used ChatGPT

A University of Chicago Interative Research Brief explores in detail how workers are using GPT and their attitudes to the tools.

More detail at: The Adoption of ChatGPT

JPMorgan Chase does widespread internal AI roll out

“The program, called LLM Suite, is already available to more than 60,000 employees, helping them with tasks like writing emails and reports. The software is expected to eventually be as ubiquitous within the bank as the videoconferencing program Zoom, people with knowledge of the plans told CNBC.”

JPMorgan Chase is giving its employees an AI assistant powered by ChatGPT maker OpenAI

AI is gradually adopted in Hollywood

Hollywood Report examines big studio adoption of AI and the pushback from unions and industry leaders. Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos says “there’s a better business and a bigger business in making content 10 percent better than it is making it 50 percent cheaper.”

Hollywood’s Divide on Artificial Intelligence Is Only Growing

🔥Hot news in AI

• Google has slashed the price of its efficient Gemini 1.5 Flash model, potentially driving price wars - LinkedIn/Google

• OpenAI’s vaunted “Strawberry” project could be out soon, with superior reasoning capabilities to GPT-4o - ZDNet

• On the dystopian front, Argentina creates AI Applied to Security unit to “predict future crimes” - The Guardian

• Led by Nvidia, share prices in AI-related big tech slumped on Monday (but have since recovered somewhat) - CNBC

• Google DeepMind has created a “solidly amateur human-level performance” table tennis robot

🎙️This week’s podcast episode

What you will learn

• Exploring the roots of AI and cognitive science

• Improvisational AI in robotics and dance

• The journey of the EarSketch project

• Challenges in AI-driven collaborative creativity

• The importance of AI literacy and education

• Ethical considerations in AI development

• Envisioning the future of human-AI collaboration

💡Resources and insights

What becomes of people as AI advances?

An article in The New Yorker explores human uniqueness in the AI age.

"In Vallor’s view, though A.I. systems have many striking capabilities, they don’t have the ability to be virtuous. This may not sound like a big deal, but in fact it’s profound."

"We should see the abilities of an A.I. as powerful, but never really humanlike. We should grow newly comfortable with asserting that human nature is indispensable, and take pride in the fact that we must struggle to define it."