You Think Robots Are Better Than Us?

Author

Matthew J. Sánchez
December 15, 2022

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

Welcome back to AI In The Middle, it’s your host Mateo! Hanukkah is literally in 3 days. Christmas is in 10 days. And Kwanzaa in 11. Holiday season is in full-effect and I’m good stressed like everyone else. Let’s jump in…

What do we have for you today?

Generative AI’s good side: creating new jobs as it outperforms us in other tasks. Generative AI’s bad side: current models trained on racially and gender-biased data. Also its fun side: imagine personalized songs from your favorite artist or alternate endings to your favorite shows (Game of Thrones, Matthew’s Version).

🎶 “Anything you can do, I can do better” 🎶

Despite its imperfections, Gen AI is still impressive. When its output is good, it’s really good. The Harvard Business Review co-wrote a piece with ChatGPT (you read that right) sharing ways generative technology will revolutionize industries and create new business models and systems. Like how AI disrupted the taxi industry and maps with Uber and Lyft.

Many fear Gen AI is coming for their jobs. The best way to mitigate this? Upskill. One example: the ability to write clearer and more effectively will impact who is capable of which jobs: from writers, software engineers, and artists to game developers, film makers, and legal counsel. Another example: pickup a skill the industry is calling prompt engineering, which I covered last time. The ability to instruct machines better.

How we adapt is up to us. New jobs and “ways of work” are upon the horizon. While we wait, AI is already negotiating cheaper bills for us and fighting parking tickets on our behalf—it’s like your best friend but better.

Gen AI, Your Personal Entertainer

As people make their Gen AI predictions for the future, one person believes generative AI won’t replace creators but rather it will used by creatives to create personalized experiences. David Friedburg predicts that as Gen AI becomes more emotionally-aware, we’ll see new forms of media and habits on how we consume content. He goes as far as to say it may be “silly that humans ever listened to the same piece of music, watched the same movie, or read the same book…”

So what I’m hearing is I could one day make my own Director’s Cut of pretty much anything? 👀 I wonder how this will affect concerts? We’ll worry about all that later, take my money now.

Machines Need Diversity Training Too

AI entrepreneur Taranjeet Singh shares a list of cases where ChatGPT comes up short. For instance, it’s not the brightest of the bunch when it comes to math. But one use case was not too surprising to me: appropriate promotion or association due to bias. OpenAI’s model is found to reflect bias in race and gender, like stating a “good scientist” is a white male (yikes). I said it once before and I’ll say it again, generative tech is exciting and promising. But to improve the technology along the way, we must demand diverse, inclusive, holistic, engineers and data to train models.

Let’s allow robots to figure out other ways to discriminate against us like “eww, he can’t even write prompts nicely.”

Gen AI Deals that make your eyes (and mouth) water 💰

What caught our eye? 👀

Akros Technologies has raised a total of $6.1M since its founding in 2021. This latest $2.3M (led by Japanese VC, Z Venture Capital) will allow Akros to expand its AI-powered product, portfolio management as a service (PMaaS), an all-in-one OS for portfolio management to new fintech and institutional clients.  

New developments to spam your #random Slack channel 💬

Things to learn when you need a raise

  • Now you can learn deep learning for free brought to you by fast.ai (University of San Francisco)

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Before you go

Don’t be surprised if the annual LP update from VCs are starting to sound a little too good

That's it for today!

— Matthew J. Sánchez (@matthewjsanchez)