Unbundling higher education, lifelong forgetting, automated agent design, 8 year olds using AI, and more

September 02, 2024

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”― Haruki Murakami

Education is perhaps the single most important issue in creating a positive future of humanity. It should be all about amplifying human potential - including cognition - to deal with an accelerating world.

This week I gave a keynote to the leadership team of a major U.S. higher educational institution on envisaging the creating the future of education. "Humans + AI" teaching will be central in integrating the potential for hyper-personalized learning pathways with teachers' ability to connect, engage, guide, inspire, and indeed instruct in ways that AI cannot. Read more below.

Ross

 

📖In this issue

  • Unbundling and Rebundling Higher Education

  • Philippines call centers are adopting AI to support staff

  • BCI with AI achieves unpredented brain-to-speech performance

  • You will be replaced by 8 year olds using AI

  • OpenAI in discussions to raise additional funds to value it at over $100 billion

  • Erica Orange on constant evolution, lifelong forgetting, robot symbiosis, and the power of imagination

  • Automated Design of Agentic Systems

🤸 Framework

Unbundling and Rebundling Higher Education

‘This week I gave the keynote for the leadership strategy session of a U.S. tertiary institution with over 120,000 students, on re-envisaging the future of higher education.

See my article for a discussion of the framework and how it can be used for framing the future of higher education institutions.

 

👩🤖Humans + AI update

Philippines call centers are adopting AI to support staff

BPO now accounts for over 8% of national GDP. AI is hitting the call center industry, with dramatic changes already sweeping the industry. Some players are intent on using AI tools to support and help their staff, but it’s not clear whether the augment movement will outweight the replace wave.

BCI with AI achieves unpredented brain-to-speech performance

“A new brain-computer interface (BCI) developed at UC Davis Health translates brain signals into speech with up to 97% accuracy — the most accurate system of its kind. The researchers implanted sensors in the brain of a man with severely impaired speech due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The man was able to communicate his intended speech within minutes of activating the system.”

Cursor and amplified coding

The latest meme is “You aren’t going to be replaced by AI. You’re going to be replaced by an 8 year old using AI,” pointing to the tutorials of an 8 year old building apps. A key component of her setup is Cursor, which can integrate with development environments and LLMs to provide very effective coding enablement, even for (almost) non-coders. AI doyen Andrei Karpathy has switched over much of his coding to Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5.

🔥Hot news in AI

  • OpenAI in discussions to raise additional funds to value it at over $100 billion - CNBC 

  • Amazon’s Alexa voice interface is reported to relaunch at $5-10 per month, powered by Anthropic’s Claude - Reuters

  • Anthropic has shared the system prompts for Claude, providing interesting insights - Anthropic

  • Meta’s open source Llama LLMs have been downloaded 350 million times and are being used by major banks etc. - Reuters

🎙️This week’s podcast episode

Erica Orange on constant evolution, lifelong forgetting, robot symbiosis, and the power of imagination  

What you will learn

  • Lifelong learning vs. lifelong forgetting

  • The intersection of humans and technology

  • The importance of imagination in the future of work

  • The role of judgment in an AI-driven world

  • Navigating the blurred lines between reality and AI

  • Rethinking education for a digital age

  • The evolving workplace and redefining workspaces

 

💡Resources and insights

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS) "aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways," with performance demonstrated to be often considerably higher than "hand designed" systems.

This research, including prompts and code on GitHub, applies this to building a Meta Search Agent, which searches for agents relevant to the task, and uses these to iteratively build new agents with improved performance.

Here we have in practice "AI improving AI", in this case not at the foundation model level, but in agents built on top of these models. Since agentic AI is currently the domain most amplifying AI capabilities-in-practice, this may have the greatest impact.

Thanks for reading!

Ross Dawson and team