AI Weekly Digest #9: Beyond the Hype, Towards AI Adoption

Welcome to this new edition of our AI newsletter, where we bring you the latest updates on artificial intelligence!

• The Main Headlines: StarCoder, MPT-7B, PI chatbot, Bing AI public release and enriched features, US AI plans, Midjourney 5.1

• Beyond the Hype, the story: Towards AI Adoption

• Bonus: TED Talk about Khan Academy's Personalized AI Tutor .

Beyond The Hype

In the months following the release of ChatGPT and GPT-4, our society has gradually grown to depend on these powerful AI technologies on a daily basis.

Fast paced innovation

It's safe to say that we have moved beyond the initial hype and entered a new chapter: the widespread adoption of AI, as a technology, as a set of tools, and as a mindset.

Analyzing the key news from April 2023 (see image), we can identify two main trends:

• Private and Open Source Competition Aiming to Catch Up with ChatGPT and GPT-4: As we have covered in our previous newsletters, numerous organizations are striving to develop AI systems that can rival the capabilities of ChatGPT and GPT-4 (Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude, LLaMA based models, and so on).

• Accelerated Evolution of AI in Areas Beyond NLP. Besides NLP, AI technology has made significant strides in other domains, such as video processing, 3D modeling, and voice recognition. These advancements are reshaping various industries and pushing the boundaries of what AI can accomplish.

We are entering the era of AI first companies!

Slow AI mainstream integration

However, the process of AI companies adapting and innovating based on ChatGPT and GPT-4 is not without its challenges. Indeed, while there have been thousands of AI-based use cases demonstrated (e.g., AI enabling various scenarios such as generating presentations, analyzing data, and autonomously solving problems), building a production-grade product or integrating these technologies into existing products will take time!

It may take months or even years for all companies to fully embrace these new models, much like the time it took for businesses to adopt digital transformation strategies.

High Disruption Impact

Of course, some organizations will experience the impact sooner than others, as evidenced by the case of Chegg.

• Some context: Chegg is an education technology company that provides online tutoring and textbook rental services.

• News: Chegg has recently experienced a downturn in earnings and growth, which it attributes to the rise of ChatGPT. The news brought its stocks down by more than 50%!! This development echoes the situation faced by Stack Overflow, which we previously reported as having lost 12% of its traffic due to ChatGPT. And it’s only the beggining! Khan Academy recently unveiled khanmigo, its GPT-4 powered tutor, bringing fully personalized education to the masses!

The big disruption coming ahead

The Chegg case serves as a stark reminder for businesses to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting and integrating AI technologies. As AI continues to revolutionize various sectors, organizations must remain agile and innovative in order to thrive in this rapidly changing landscape.

In conclusion, while the initial hype surrounding ChatGPT may be subsiding, it is now more crucial than ever for businesses to stay vigilant and embrace change. The great disruption has begun, and we eagerly look forward to witnessing how it unfolds and reshapes industries across the globe. The time is ripe for organizations to harness the power of AI and ride the wave of transformation that has only just started to gain momentum.

Main Headlines

• StarCoder: A coding large language model, 30 times smaller than Google’s PaLM model, beats all other models! It also can tell you whether the suggested code is present in the training dataset or not!

  

• MPT-7B: a new family of open-source commercially usable LLMs. It has a context that can go up to 84k tokens (to be compared with ChatGPT’s 4k tokens, and GPT-4’s largest model with 32k tokens!). We need to test its coherence on such a large context window, but this is for sure a very big deal and very exciting recent development!

• PI by Inflection AI: Inflection AI announces the release of its new Personal Intelligence, PI, “because it provides infinite knowledge based on your unique needs”.

• Ask a video anything: GPT for videos! What if you could chat with a video? Well now it’s possible! This is an experimental project exploring the possibility to chat with a model about a video,

  e.g.,

  - Identifying what, or who, is in the scene

  - explaining what's happening

  - describing the ongoing action

  Look at this impressive demo here.

• Bing AI open preview release: you don’t need to join the waitlist anymore, including new features, such as : Bing Chat Plugins, Multimodal answers (text & images), Persistent chat & chat history. We can all leverage Bing AI now! (read more)

  

• US AI plans:

  • “The US government plans to introduce policies that shape how federal agencies procure and use AI systems, the White House said. The step could significantly influence the market for AI products and control how Americans interact with AI on government websites, at security checkpoints and in other settings.” (source)

  • “Lawmakers propose banning AI from single-handedly launching nuclear weapons” (source)

• Midjourney releases a new version: say hello to Midjourney 5.1: Midjourney is already the best image generation model out there (to the frustration of all developers since we don’t have a Midjourney API available yet!).

  With the release of v5.1 “Images are more coherent, sharp, and beautiful!”. Check this twitter thread with some amazing creations!

Bonus!

Listen to this 15-minute TED Talk about Khan Academy's Personalized AI Tutor announcing the educational revolution unfolding ahead. Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, believes that artificial intelligence could ignite the most significant positive transformation education has ever experienced.

That’s it for today! If you made it this far, I’d appreciate a quick feedback 😋! I know there’s room for improvement! So don’t hesitate to share with me the things you liked and those that you didn’t.

Have a great Sunday and may AI always be on your side!