Distilling conversations, encoding AI with humanity, browser tab mnagement, and more

“Collective intelligence” has to be future of humanity. Unless we are collectively more intelligent than we are individually, we will not be able to shape a positive future in our incredibly complex, challenging, fraught world.

AI will undoubtedly be a central enabler of that, partly in orchestrating the combination and integration of human intelligences, but also in participating as a complementary intelligence alongside humans in a multi-intelligence ecosystem.

Collective intelligence including strategic decision-making, notably AI-enabled, will be a central theme of my work in 2024. An extremely simply example is the conversation distillation below. Some great ideas came out, a reflection of the quality of human thinking, but capturing it was only possible with AI.

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• Multi-state distilling of insights from conversations

• Mass spying through AI

• Gemini for scientific paper insight extraction

• Encoding humanity in AI

• Browser tab management as a superpower

Multi-stage distilling of conversational insights

This week I ran a Generative AI Leaders lunch, bringing together top people working in the space. Participants selected which topics they wanted to discuss in small groups, with conversations all AI-transcribed and distilled.

As I have also been doing in the group conversation for the currect cohort on my AI-Enhanced Thinking & Decision-Making Course, I used AI to distill the most interesting insights from each conversation, and then in turn the meta-themes across the many table discussions.

Replicate platform enables AI-app builders

Replicate, a platform for running and deploying AI models, allowing AI entrepreneurs to build AI apps extremely easily, has raised $40 million. It’s a great example of the democratization of AI entrepreneurship. Read the back story for insight on how it got built.

The story of Replicate, a $350M company powering million-dollar AI businesses

Mass surveillance could become mass spying

Cybersecurity legend Bruce Shneier has written that our existing mass surveillance and data capture will become mass spying, as AI’s ability to turn unlimited data into anomaly detection will allow governments and companies to know all about us and action it. Chilling but important.

AI and Mass Spying

Google’s Gemini for scientific paper insight extraction

The big AI news of the week was the announcement of Google DeepMind’s Gemini. The biggest discussion has been about what seems to be pretty poor performance of the Gemini model currently used in Bard, though the advanced Ultra model is not available until early next year. What was particularly commented on by AI researchers was the Google ‘demo’ of Gemini distilling insights from 200,000 papers on genetics. This application will be invaluable for scientific advancement.

Gemini: Unlocking insights in scientific literature

Browser tab management can be a productivity superpower

A recent study from Carnegie Mellon University found that “People are attached to tabs because they view them as opportunities…They’re kind of like opportunities for a better life: gathering more knowledge, getting a better job, becoming enlightened. People are queuing up these things and hoping to get to them because no one likes to lose out on opportunities.”

But there are useful tab management strategies. Read for more.

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