Latest News

.: AI Updates & Developments

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.: OpenAI Leadership Turmoil ➜ OpenAI, the company and research lab behind ChatGPT, is in flux as the board sacked Sam Altman the CEO on Friday. It helps not to send Promptcraft too soon as this story has been pretty fluid over the weekend!

• Friday: Sam Altman fired from OpenAI for lack of candour; Greg Brockman and researchers quit in protest.
• Saturday: Interim OpenAI CEO Mira Murati tries to rehire Altman and Brockman; board looks for permanent CEO.
• Sunday: Microsoft hires Altman and Brockman; OpenAI hires Twitch’s Emmett Shear as new CEO.
• Monday: 500+ OpenAI employees threaten to quit unless board steps down; Sutskever expresses regret over Altman’s firing.
• Latest: According to The Verge Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have expressed openness to coming back to OpenAI, but only if the board members responsible for firing Altman resign their positions.

​Melissa Heikkilä at The Algorithm provides a helpful overview to catch up on and understand the next steps in this unfolding situation at OpenAI.

.: Google to expand Bard AI chatbot access to teens globally ➜ Google announced it will open up its AI chatbot Bard to teenagers globally in English starting November 16, with more languages to come. Bard aims to provide a helpful, informational tool for teens to learn new skills and find inspiration. Google consulted child safety experts and implemented guardrails to prioritise safety. Features include math equation solving, data visualisation, content policies to avoid unsafe content, and double checking responses to develop critical thinking.

.: Microsoft unveils major AI plans and products at Ignite 2023 ➜ At its annual Ignite conference, Microsoft announced significant AI-related products and initiatives. These include rebranding Bing Chat to Microsoft Copilot, a Copilot Studio to allow custom AI bot creation, new AI chips like Azure Maia and Azure Cobalt to power Azure cloud services, adding generative AI capabilities to Teams VR meetings, and more. Key highlights show Microsoft’s continued push to infuse AI across its products and position itself as a leader in enterprise AI.

.: Chinese startup 01.AI unveils powerful new open source AI models Yi ➜ Chinese company 01.AI has released two new large language models called Yi-6B-200K and Yi-34B-200K. The models are fully open source and can understand English and Mandarin. Yi-34B boasts 200,000 tokens of context, double ChatGPT’s capacity, though long prompts can challenge its recall. Yi benchmarks show strengths in comprehension, reasoning, and standardised AI tests. By being open source, Yi allows full customisability for developers to build local AI apps.

.: Alibaba, the major Chinese e-commerce company, open sources AI models Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat ➜ Alibaba’s cloud unit unveiled two new open source large language models named Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat with 7 billion parameters each. This positions the models as competitors to Meta’s similarly open sourced Llama 2 model. Alibaba says the move aims to help small and medium businesses adopt AI. The code and models are freely available globally, though licensing is required for large companies. This represents the first time a major Chinese tech company has open sourced a large language model.

.: Germany, France and Italy reach agreement on AI regulation in Europe ➜ The governments of Germany, France and Italy have agreed on an approach for regulating AI in Europe. They support mandatory self-regulation through codes of conduct for foundational AI models. The countries oppose unchecked norms and want to focus regulations on AI applications rather than the core technology. Under the proposal, AI developers would use model cards to provide information on capabilities and limitations. An EU AI governance body could help develop guidelines and oversight. The agreement aims to accelerate EU-level negotiations on an AI Act among European Commission, Parliament and Council.

Reflection

.: Why this news matters for education

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Amidst all of the tumultuous news about OpenAI, I expanded my AI Literacy with two new terms: the “accels” who want to accelerate AI development at any cost, and the “decels” who favour slowing down development to ensure safety.

Although binary and reductionist, this philosophical divide over the pace of progress seems to be at the heart of the rift that led to the leadership shakeup at OpenAI.

Some have said that Ilya Sutskever, the Chief Scientist for OpenAI and board member, wants to slow down progress. While Sam Altman represents the race for faster development.

This tension between accelerating progress and prioritising safety is not new for OpenAI.

Dario Amodei, who was Vice President of Research at OpenAI until 2018, left the organisation amidst similar philosophical differences over the responsible pace of AI development. He went on to co-found Anthropic, the creator of the Claude-2 LLM, along with other former OpenAI researchers who were focused on AI alignment and robustness.

On the surface, OpenAI’s boardroom turmoil might appear to be just corporate drama with little bearing on education.

However, when viewed through an ecosystem lens, this news sends ripples that connect to our work in education in several ways:

1. Focus on safety: The safety of AI products and their underlying architecture must be a top priority.
2. Reliability of products and their architecture: The reliability of AI products is essential for ensuring their effective integration into educational settings.
3. Centrality of major research labs and developers: OpenAI and other major AI research labs play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI for education.
4. Power shifts between big tech companies: The power dynamics among major tech companies can influence the trajectory of AI development.
5. Profits over benefits for humanity: The pursuit of profits overshadows the broader societal benefits of AI.
6. Distracting noise: Energy, effort and time is pulled away from putting powerful AI tools in service of education.

Two undeniable facts (i) OpenAI has set the standard for AI research and development and (ii) possesses the most powerful publicly available large language model, GPT-4.

This alone is enough to pique the interest of educators curious about the ripple effects of the organisation’s leadership changes.

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~ Tom

Prompts

.: Refine your promptcraft

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Let’s talk about GPTs.

Remember this stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which means:

• Generative: GPTs are able to generate new outputs, rather than simply regurgitating text that they have been trained on.
• Pre-trained: GPTs are trained on a massive dataset of text and code before they are released to the public.
• Transformer: GPTs use a transformer architecture, which is a type of neural network that is well-suited for natural language processing tasks.

OpenAI recently announced the capability with a Plus account (paid) to build your own chatbot or what they call GPTs.

So, what does this have to do with Promptcraft?

Well the process for building GPTs automatically generates prompts. You can simply say what you are looking to build and it writes a prompt for you.

This begins to remove the need for writing your own prompts, but it puts up a fee barrier, and not everyone has access.

One way to replicate this is to use an instruction in your prompt to trigger automated improvement. Try this:

Here is an example in ChatGPT 3.5, Claude-2-100k and Bard.

*Remember the scoring is all a bit unreliable, you are just creating an exchange to improve your prompts.

**And, as I always say, remember to mak​e this your own, tinker and evaluate the completions.

Learning

.: Boost your AI Literacy

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RESEARCH TOOL .: OECD AI Incidents Monitor (AIM) ➜ A fascinating analysis tool which documents AI incidents to help policymakers, AI practitioners, and all stakeholders worldwide gain valuable insights into the incidents and hazards that concretise AI risks.

RESEARCH INDEX .: Latin American Index of Artificial Intelligence ➜ A comprehensive analysis of the status of AI in twelve countries in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Each file elaborates on: Enabling Factors, Research, Development and Adoption, and Governance.

REPORT .: Colonialism and AI ➜ This report by Anna Gausen and Accessible AI, explores how AI is at risk of repeating the patterns of our colonial history and how we can begin to decolonise AI.

Anna Gausen @AnnaGausen I just published a report with Accessible AI on “Colonialism and AI”. I explore how AI is at risk of repeating the patterns of our colonial history and how we can begin to decolonise AI. Please check it out here – https://accessible-ai.co.uk/. 8:30 PM • Nov 15, 2023 2 Retweets 15 Likes Read 2 replies

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It covers:

• A Look Back At Our Past: Society has been shaped by our colonial history.
• Where We Are Today: The way AI is being deployed by the global west could reinforce colonial power dynamics.
• A Vision For The Future: How we can rebalance power and diversify voices in AI.

Ethics

.: Provocations for Balance

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• When making decisions about AI progress, whose voices need to be at the table beyond corporate executives?
• If current AI lacks core elements of human reasoning, when should we be cautious about over-applying it to tasks requiring critical thinking?
• When AI-generated content crosses ethical lines, how should accountability be determined given the complex web of humans and algorithms involved in systems?

~ Inspired by this week’s developments.