Chat GPT, Can you get me into Stanford?
The world will never be the same
Silicon whispers,
Boundless knowledge blooms,
awake,
AI dawn ignites.
This is a poem, written by my new personal assistance, and also the Head of AI at Smartynames, Mr. Chad. I basically don’t write anything myself anymore and just ask Chad to do it, then edit/update/polish as desired. It’s pretty awesome. My wife says I should turn him into an easy UI and let you hire Chad. Should I?
If you email me back with your most frequent daily tasks which you’d like to get automated, I will find a way to get Chad to do them for you. Whether it’s a better headline for a Geekwire article, or a daily joke in your inbox, a summary of a novel, whatever it is, let me know. Let’s make it happen!
The pace of AI innovation is really fast, and is accelerating every day. Here’s how one indy hacker described it, and this is not an exaggeration.
Below is a collection of some of my favorite bits from the last month.
Amazing quality images done purely with AI
Take a look at this thread on different types of Spider man. Those images are so hyper realistic, and yet they are completely imaginary. Asking an artist to render these would take hours, if not days, per image, and AI can do this in seconds. Mind blowing!
Likewise, modern Japan, re-imagined.
Investment Advice from a Bot
“Imaginary VC Associate. Almost as inspiring as a real one.”
This is a bot run by Synthesia, a company that can turn any text into a video, just like the one in the tweet. If you are on twitter, then you can @AskChadGPT and it sends you back a response.
This video uses the same technique I outlined in the earlier edition of The Novice, when I showed you how John made a singing avatar of his face.
Elon Musk vs Open AI.
There were reports that Elon is not very happy with OpenAI as of late.
I cannot find his tweet anymore, but Elon complained that first he invested $100M into OpenAI as a non-profit, and then OpenAI all of a sudden became a for-profit company, now raking in millions from its users, while in bed with Microsoft.
As the same time, if you follow Elon’s timeline, you can see that he’s been working on adding various AI features to Twitter, and has even allegedly hired an AI lead to build OpenAI alternative within Twitter.
If it is true, it’s a good thing. AI won’t do anyone much good if we have 2-3 companies holding all the cards. Meanwhile…
What did OpenAI announce in the latest release?
GPT-4, their latest and greatest model is able to understand images, self-correct, write AND parse through 50 pages of text to find you the right answers. Basically, you can give it anything that is a picture or text, and ask it to do something with it, and you will most likely get a reliable answer.
If you really want to know why developers are so excited about GPT-4, you should watch this whole video.
Take the technology above, combine it with Midjourney and you get yourself custom website in seconds, complete with beautiful artwork. It’s pure magic.
Eminem is singing about rave, kind of.
A DJ wrote lyrics in the style of Eminem and then played them on his show, making the crowd go wild; 10k likes since it was published.
Real time translation, dubbing, and silencing of video content
What used to take weeks will now take minutes. No more hiring video editors to cut multiple versions of the same movie. Just give it to AI and you get copies in multiple language, and for multiple audience. Soon, you won’t even need the actors.
AI will take my job
This is an excellent summary of current social media opinions on AI. Some are concerned while others are content, and both sides have valid points.
To ensure our survival and success, we should concentrate on using AI to assist us rather than fearing its potential to take things away. While we may not be able to prevent some negative impacts, we can speed up the creation of new developments and ultimately influence the outcome.
Zapier natural language options
Zapier guys were in my Summer 12 batch of Y Combinator and have gone onto creating a beautiful company that I admire greatly. Yet, to this day I have not a clue how to use Zapier effectively. I have tried many times, and I have always found coding to be faster than using Zaps. Clearly millions of happy paying users would disagree with me.
Zapier natural language integration is their newest moat to make integrations more user friendly. From what I understand, you can now create certain actions without knowing which Zaps to actually use; just say: “Take my last email and put the data into Salesforce” and Zapier will do that.
If anyone here is a Zapier customer, could you please try and confirm, or let me know what it is that it actually does? Thank you!
Nvideo Broadcast makes you look into the camera
Simple but beatiful innovation that takes live video of your face and makes your eyes look into the camera. Is it an absolute necessity? Nope! But this is precisely the AI innovations that I think will make a huge impact on our world, when deployed at scale.
GPT Buster
This little tool can check whether your content is written using GPT tools or an actual human. I tested it on two of my blog posts and the tool was able to correctly predict that one was most likely human, and the other one was most likely AI generated. However, when I took a post (#2) and rewrote it with 50% human generated text, it still considered it to be an AI generated article. So either the tool isn’t very good, or my writing was just that bad.
Posts I used for testing:
AI and the Metaverse
Very interesting combinations of AI image generation and Metaverse. Put together an entire environment in minutes, change it to whatever you like. Straight out of science fiction. original video
AI that will edit your photos in one prompt
No more outsourcing your simple photoshop needs. Just install Python and update your local images with anything you want. Back in the day, just weeks ago, people used to pay Photoshop experts in other countries to do this work for them. Bye bye outsourcing, hello automation!
AI can now replace text with new text
Personally, a feature I’ve been waiting for for 6 years. When HoloLens from Microsoft first came out, I was sure we were going to see real time world updates through augmented reality, but the HoloLens went nowhere. If Facebook can get there first, it will be remarkable!
Facebook AI team released a paper explaining how they can now change text in any image to any kind new text, in any language, matching the original.
What does this mean?
It means that while walking down the street in Taiwan you can get everything instantly translated into English, navigating a foreign city with no constraints. With all the other AI we got, you will also get a real-time audio translation, and they will hear your voice in their native language when you start speaking.
What’s up with Chat and Stanford?
My wife was worried that we should start teaching kids to write better. But what’s the point? Perhaps, so they get into a good school? I asked Chat GPT to write me a Stanford admissions essays to see if that would be sufficient. I don’t work in admissions, but I think it turned out to be pretty good.
Whatever the future brings, essays might no longer be a qualifier.
Here it is: https://kirillzubovsky.com/posts/stanford
Being able to write an essay using GPT doesn’t mean we are witnessing the end of education. While computers can now do significantly more than they were capable of just a few a months ago, we still need humans with great education to understand how to communicate with a machine, and enough knowledge to fact-check it, to verify that it’s doing what you ask, and is doing it right.
After all, the computer might know how to calculate a result for linear regression, but you still need to know to ask for it, and understand what the results would mean; at least for now.
Replacing SQL with Chat GPT
Do you remember SQL? A clunky database language that lets you query data? Most smart people I know don’t remember SQL, they just Google for most of it when required. Now, a number of individuals and startups are hooking up OpenAI to write SQL based on the natural language requests. Here’s a great example of how you can get answers about your data from Slack.
The future belongs to those who know how to use OpenAI
Another blog post I wrote using AI. All I gave it was a title “The future belongs to those who know how to use OpenAI,” and it came up with the rest. It would take me hours to write something on this topic, but Chad did it in less than a minute. I published without even checking if it was good. With GPT-4, it is pretty good most of the time.
Btw, Chad just joined Linkedin. Would you mind adding him as you friend?
-Cheers,
Kirill