Digital Digestibles #7 - It's Bigger! It's Badder! It's GPT-4!

SAY HELLO TO GPT-4

GPT-4, a text-generating powerhouse, amazes with its vast improvements over its predecessor. It has leaped from the bottom 10% on standardised tests to the top percentile, showcasing remarkable advancements in understanding and reasoning.

With 175 billion parameters and $12 billion spent on research, GPT-4 truly represents a new frontier in AI development.

The ChatGPT API allows developers to harness GPT-4’s potential, opening up opportunities in content creation, customer service, and language translation for businesses.

Fluent in over 50 languages, GPT-4 bridges communication gaps across the globe, creating a more connected world.

Not just a problem solver, GPT-4 dabbles in creative content like poetry, short stories, and music lyrics. Its imaginative side redefines what AI can achieve, blurring the lines between human and machine creativity.

Despite its power, GPT-4 has a robust content-filtering mechanism to mitigate risks of harmful or misleading content, reflecting OpenAI’s commitment to safety and ethics. Trained on a vast dataset until September 2021, it may lack recent knowledge but remains a reliable and informative AI companion.

TIKTOK CEO GRILLED FOR OVER FIVE HOURS

The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users, at a testy congressional hearing on Thursday that came amid a bipartisan push to ban the app entirely in the US over national security concerns.

The hearing marked the first ever appearance before US lawmakers by a TikTok chief executive, and a rare public outing for the 4o-year-old Chew, who has remained largely out of the limelight as the social network’s popularity soars. TikTok now boasts tens of millions of US users, but lawmakers have long held concerns over China’s control over the app, which Chew repeatedly tried to assuage throughout the hearing. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said in Thursday’s testimony.

(Via The Guardian)

LESSONS FROM THE COLLAPSE OF SILICON VALLEY BANK

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, SVB, sent shockwaves through the financial system, reviving memories of the global crisis in 2008. SVB failed because of mistakes made by the bank, the financial authorities, and the bank’s clients. We were assured that bank management and regulators had risk under control after the global crisis in 2008, but here is another large bank failure. Is SVB an outlier or the canary in the coal mine and the first of many?

SVB failed for one of the oldest reasons why banks fail. It raised funds from demand deposits, investing them into longer-term assets, creating a classic liquidity mismatch. That is what all banks do, and it is the job of the banks’ risk managers and the regulators to minimise the danger created by such a mismatch.

The danger plays out when the bank’s clients all wish to take their money out of the bank at the same time — a classic bank run. This process is, of course, familiar from the global financial crisis, not the least the Northern Rock bank run in October 2007. Behind the fancy facade, depositors never really know how safe their money is, and when fear starts to spread, depositors run to get their money out.

(Via LSE)

ADOBE MADE AN AI IMAGE GENERATOR

Adobe is finally launching its own AI image generator. The company is announcing a “family of creative generative AI models” today called Adobe Firefly and releasing the first two tools that take advantage of them. One of the tools works like DALL-E or Midjourney, allowing users to type in a prompt and have an image created in return. The other generates stylized text, kind of like an AI-powered WordArt.

This is a big launch for Adobe. The company sits at the center of the creative app ecosystem, and over much of the past year, it’s stayed on the sidelines while newcomers to the creative space began to offer powerful tools for creating images, videos, and sound for next to nothing. At launch, Adobe is calling Firefly a beta, and it’ll only be available through a website. But eventually, Adobe plans to tightly integrate generative AI tools with its suite of creative apps, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere.

(Via The Verge)

INTRODUCING MICROSOFT 365 COPILOT

On Thursday, Microsoft Corp. announced it is bringing the power of next-generation AI to its workplace productivity tools with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Currently in testing with select commercial customers, Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with business data and the Microsoft 365 apps, to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills.

Customers will experience Microsoft 365 Copilot in two ways

Microsoft 365 Copilot isn’t just a better way of doing the same things. It’s an entirely new way of working. Copilot will work alongside Microsoft 365 customers in two ways:

• First, it is embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more.
• Today, the company also announced an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and a customer’s calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts to do things that people weren’t able to do before. With natural language prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” Business Chat will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.

With Copilot, the customer is always in control. Customers decide what to keep, modify or discard. With these new tools, people can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.

(Via Microsoft)

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