Five Things AI: Summer, Hype, Democratization, Energy, Multi-Token Predictions

It's Friday and AI is everywhere around us.

Jul 12, 2024

Hi and welcome back to Five Things AI! My name is Nico Lumma and every week I like to share five interesting articles about AI with you. So instead of researching for hours on the web, just read these five articles here and you are all set. As I’m saving you a couple of hours every week, I’d really appreciate it if you could go paid and spend the equivalent of one large café latte on this newsletter.

This week I had a conversation with a prospective client who was thinking about how AI could be used to improve the understanding of political debates. It was really interesting to see how AI can be used to give people better access to information by finding the proverbial needle in the haystack and adding context around it. Obviously, AI alone won’t help in most cases as we need to embedded it into an offering, but it sure makes it a lot easier to automate analysis. The prospective client was pretty amazed when she found out that her idea would not lead to some crazy project that would cost millions, but would be easily doable on a budget suitable for a smallish media company.

I like how AI can be used for things that required lots of knowledge and money just a short while ago. Yet I also understand that this means lots of people will have to look for new jobs, because AI is just more efficient and cheaper. This development will speed up as AI gets pushed into more and more industries.

Here’s the Five Things AI for this week! Enjoy.

GenerativeAI grew so quickly, it blew everyone’s minds. Benedict Evans discusses the trajectory ChatGPT and other platforms are on right now and how the quest to find product-market-fit could pan out in the future.

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AI bubble set to inflate further

“As US tech companies enter their latest earnings season, a distinct giddiness has started to creep into tech valuations on Wall Street. The middle of 2024 was always destined to be something of an “air pocket” for generative artificial intelligence. The investment boom triggered by the technology has been all too visible, but it takes time for all that new capacity to be put to productive use by the tech industry’s end customers. Wall Street’s patience is about to be put to the test.” - The Financial Times is focusing on the hype around AI.

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AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite

Brian Merchant

is not too thrilled about GenerativeAI shaking up the creative industry: “AI will not democratize creativity, it will let corporations squeeze creative labor, capitalize on the works that creatives have already made, and send any profits upstream, to Silicon Valley tech companies where power and influence will concentrate in an ever-smaller number of hands. The artists, of course, get 0 opportunities for meaningful consent or input into any of the above events. Please tell me with a straight face how this can be described as a democratic process.” He makes a fair point and yet I still see lots of value in creative AI tools as it allows people to unleash their creativity in ways that it was not possible before.

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AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era

I’ve shared articles about the energy and water consumption of all the data-centers necessary to power AI before and I will continue to do so until Big Tech has finally figured out how be more efficient and use only solar or wind energy.

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Meta drops AI bombshell: Multi-token prediction models now open for research

Speaking of increasing efficiency, this is really an interesting development: “Meta’s approach tasks models with forecasting multiple future words simultaneously, promising enhanced performance and drastically reduced training times.”

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If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here: