As some teachers start to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their work, a majority are uncertain about or see downsides to the general use of AI tools in K-12 education, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2023.
A quarter of public K-12 teachers say using AI tools in K-12 education does more harm than good. About a third (32%) say there is about an equal mix of benefit and harm, while only 6% say it does more good than harm. Another 35% say they aren’t sure. — Read More
Tag Archives: Strategy
Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing
When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous.
Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isn’t even warm. The shrinkage shows how rapidly researchers are refining AI models to make them leaner and more efficient. It also shows how going to ever larger scales isn’t the only way to make machines significantly smarter. — Read More
PwC’s 2024 AI Jobs Barometer
AI is the Industrial Revolution of knowledge work, transforming how all workers can apply
information, create content, and deliver results at speed and scale. How is this affecting
jobs? With the AI Jobs Barometer, PwC set out to find empirical evidence to help sort fact
from fiction.
PwC analysed over half a billion job ads from 15 countries to find evidence of AI’s impact at worldwide scale through jobs and productivity data. — Read More
The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization
The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection.
But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences. — Read More
Google Consolidates AI-Building Teams Across Research and DeepMind
Google is consolidating the teams that focus on building artificial intelligence (AI) models across Google Research and Google DeepMind.
All this work will now be done within Google DeepMind, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a note to employees posted on the company’s website Thursday (April 18). — Read More
UMD-LinkUp AI Maps Transforms AI Job Tracking
UMD-LinkUp, a collaboration between the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, LinkUp Job Market Data, and Outrigger Group, introduced the world’s first tool for mapping the creation of jobs requiring artificial intelligence skills: UMD-LinkUp AI Maps.
AI Maps leverages LinkUp’s industry-leading job data to visualize the spread of jobs requiring skills in AI across the country – by sector, state and more granular geographic levels. The resulting interactive map allows users to track the creation of U.S.-based AI jobs each month; rank states by their share of those jobs; do a deeper dive across economic sectors, metropolitan areas, and counties; and determine a region’s AI Intensity: the ratio of its AI jobs to all other postings. — Read More
Is AI a platform shift or a paradigm shift? With Benedict Evans
AMAZON GIVES ANTHROPIC $2.75 BILLION SO IT CAN SPEND IT ON AWS XPUS
If Microsoft has the half of OpenAI that didn’t leave, then Amazon and its Amazon Web Services cloud division needs the half of OpenAI that did leave – meaning Anthropic. And that means Amazon needs to pony up a lot more money than Google, which has also invested in Anthropic but which also has its own Gemini LLM, if it hopes to have more leverage – and get the GPU system rentals in return.
We live in strange times. … Microsoft investing $13 billion in OpenAI – with a $10 billion promise last year – and now Amazon making good on its promise to invest $4 billion in Anthropic by kicking in the second traunch of $2.75 billion is a brilliant way to buy a stake in any AI startup. You get access to the startup’s models, you get a sense of their roadmap, and you get to be the first one to commercialize their products at scale.
As we have pointed out before, … [t]here is a danger of this looking like roundtripping, where the money just moves from the IT giant to the AI startup as an investment and then back again to the IT giant. (This kind of thing used to happen in the IT channel from time to time.) It would be enlightening to see how these deals are really structured. But there is a likelihood that they are really minority stakes in the AI startups for enormous sums and an actual exchange of goods and services on the part of both parties. — Read More
Weapons of Mass Production
Post Malone is having a good month.
The artist was featured on Beyoncé’s new album Cowboy Carter in the song “LEVII’S JEANS.” And in a few weeks, Post Malone will feature again on spring’s other big release—Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.
Post Malone’s feature on Tortured Poets comes in a song called “Fortnight,” and the song already leaked online. Well, not actually—but a lot of people were fooled into thinking so. An AI-generated version of “Fortnight” took TikTok by storm last month (it’s actually a banger) and duped everyone into believing the track leaked. — Read More
We’re Focusing on the Wrong Kind of AI Apocalypse
Conversations about the future of AI are too apocalyptic. Or rather, they focus on the wrong kind of apocalypse.
There is considerable concern of the future of AI, especially as a number of prominent computer scientists have raised, the risks of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—an AI smarter than a human being. They worry that an AGI will lead to mass unemployment or that AI will grow beyond human control—or worse (the movies Terminator and 2001 come to mind).
Discussing these concerns seems important, as does thinking about the much more mundane and immediate threats of misinformation, deep fakes, and proliferation enabled by AI. But this focus on apocalyptic events also robs most of us of our agency. AI becomes a thing we either build or don’t build, and no one outside of a few dozen Silicon Valley executives and top government officials really has any say over. — Read More
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