How to be a centaur, democratic AI, video walkthrough, living networks, and more

The release of Google’s Gemini Ultra, which is at GPT-4 level capabilities and possibly ahead of it in some respects, points to increasing model performance through this year. Increasingly the focus will need to be on how well we can apply their powers to our work.

Which goes to the themes of this week’s podcast episode with Kes Sampanthar on Human-AI “centaurs”, augmenting intelligence, and how we can use and develop our unique human capabilities in conjunction with rapidly developing AI.

We’ll start sharing more specific techniques for AI-enhanced thinking, see below for our first video walkthrough.

Ross

Walkthrough of generating diverse perspectives

We’ll be sharing more quick video walkthroughs of useful techniques for enhancing thinking and decision-making with AI.

This one is on generating diverse perspectives for any situation you are in. It includes full prompts used.

Making the AI development process more democratic

Polis, a platform for democratic deliberation, is being used by OpenAI to get broad involvement in the AI development process. There are challenges to using AI in broad engagement, but these tools could help improve democratic discussions in all domains.

Inside OpenAI’s Plan to Make AI More ‘Democratic’

‘Signals’ will provide AI-assisted breaking stories

“SIgnals will highlight breaking news and analysis, offering a dozen or so posts per day. All stories will be written entirely by journalists, with the AI effectively acting as a research tool.” The future of journalism will inevitably involve human journalists + AI - this is part of the journey to find how that will work.

Microsoft is teaming up with Semafor on AI-assisted news stories

Hugging Face introduces Assistants

AI platform Hugging Face has introduced Assistants as a space to compete with character.ai and, to a point, OpenAI Custom GPTs. The assistants show the prompts used in Settings, unlike the others, and use open source models

Hugging Chat Assistants Beta

Podcast main points

• Navigating the confluence of artificial intelligence and human empathy

• Augmenting human potential in the age of Generative AI

• Exploring the paradox of generative AI in creativity and competition

• Shaping the future with diegetic prototyping

• Reframing competition and innovation in the AI era

• Unlocking the synergy between human creativity and AI

• Decoding the architecture of thought, from cognitive blueprints to AI applications

Ross Dawson on the Agora podcast

Byron Reese and I recently discovered strongly overlapping interests and outlooks. I loved our conversation on his Agora podcast where we dug into my enduring fascination with the "living networks" that are the foundation of society, business, and our emerging collective human intelligence.

We discuss the past and future of social networks, the network economy, foundations for a positive future, and far more.

Thank you for reading!