Innovation Profs - 11/14/2023

Generative AI News

CNN: This was a massive week for AI

As laid out by CNN, this past week was the most significant week for AI since the launch of ChatGPT. In particular we saw:

• OpenAI’s launch of custom versions of ChatGPT called GPTs;

• the announcement of Grok, a ChatGPT rival that will be a part of Elon Musk’s platform X (for premium subscribers only);

• the introduction of Humane’s AI pin (see below);

• a Senate subcommittee hearing on AI and healthcare; and

• a targeted attack on OpenAI’s servers (see the next story).

OpenAI confirms DDoS attacks behind ongoing ChatGPT outages

On Wednesday, OpenAI’s servers were targeted by DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which prevented users from accessing OpenAI’s tools and services, including ChatGPT. The attacks overwhelmed the OpenAI servers with a high number of requests. As a result, OpenAI posted a banner on the ChatGPT interface reading “We're experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems," leading users to believe that the issue was merely due to high demand for the service. As reported by OpenAI, no user information was compromised by the attack.

Forget Bixby, Samsung announces 'Galaxy AI' for Galaxy S24 series

Galaxy AI, Samsung’s new “universal intelligence for phones," will be featured on Galaxy S24 phones when they are launched early next year. Galaxy AI will be a combination of on-device and cloud-based AI. Details about the capabilities of Galaxy AI have yet to be released. It is suspected that Galaxy AI is based on Samsung’s generative AI model Samsung Gauss.

AI could cause ‘catastrophic’ financial crisis, says Yuval Noah Harari

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari raised concerns about AI safety in an interview with the Guardian. “AI is different from every previous technology in human history because it’s the first technology that can make decisions by itself, that can create new ideas by itself and that can learn and develop by itself. Almost by definition, it’s extremely difficult for humans, even the humans who created the technology, to foresee all the potential dangers and problems.” Harari recommends the rapid establishment of regulatory institutions to ensure potential dangers from AI are anticipated and prevented. Steps are being taken in this direction in both the US and the UK.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: the AI Pin

Humane announced the release of its AI-powered wearable, the AI Pin, last week. The gadget, that you wear on your shirt, is designed for interacting with large language models by talking instead of typing.

We don’t know much, but we do know about a few features: the ability to summarize your emails, showing it food to get nutritional value and real-time translation.

We do know the device will cost $699 plus a $24 monthly fee. Pre-orders start Nov. 16. This would make a great early Christmas present for your favorite Innovation Prof.

Innovation Profs Homework

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AI-generated image of the week

ChatGPT now lets you create your own GPTs. Better yet, you can use other people’s GPTs to do tasks. I used one called Logo Creator to turn the drawing of a Christmas tree on the left into the logo on the right.

The tool walked me through a set of questions on the style and complexity of the logo before creating.

Prompt: make a logo based on this

Generative AI tip of the week

We’re learning more about being consistent from one image to another. It’s still difficult to have the same characters in different settings, but we can at least duplicate an illustration style from one image to the next. Here’s how to do it using DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT:

Get starting with Generative AI

New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…

• NightCafe image prompting tips

• Learn ChatGPT prompting

• Best AI image generators

• AI terms everyone should know

What we found: A traditional artist encountering AI image generation for the first time