Innovation Profs - 12/12/2023

Dec. 15 Generative AI Event

Join the Innovation Profs at noon on Dec. 15 for HOLID-AI: A holiday-themed introduction to AI. Professors Porter and Snider will share practical uses of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, D-ID and more - all with a holiday twist. The event is free and open to the public. Sign up here.

Generative AI News

Google launches its largest and ‘most capable’ AI model, Gemini

Last week we shared a story that claimed that the release of Gemini, Google’s new LLM developed to rival GPT-4, was delayed until early 2024. Not so (sort of). Just one day later, Google launched Gemini, which is actually a family of models, listed here in increasing size and power: Gemini Nano, Gemini Pro, and Gemini Ultra. Of note:

• Google’s chatbot Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro.

• Starting on December 13, Gemini Pro will be also available through Vertex AI, Google’s machine learning platform.

• Gemini Pro will not be released until early next year, accessible through Bard Advanced as well as the Gemini Pro API.

• Gemini Nano, which will be used for smaller tasks and mobile devices, comes in two model sizes.

As you can imagine, there’s a ton of Gemini-related news items this week. Check out the Quick Hits below for a selection of articles (some of which are paywalled).

X launches its ChatGPT rival: Grok

Premium+ X users can now access Grok, developed by xAI, an AI company founded by Elon Musk in July 2023. Grok has been billed as having a “rebellious streak.” Since its launch, users have found Grok to behave in unexpected ways, including copying text from ChatGPT, ripping on its creator, and apparently having a “left bias”, more evidence that it’s difficult to control the outputs of an LLM. On this latter point, Musk has vowed to make Grok more “politically neutral.”

As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause

Since late November, some ChatGPT users have noticed a decline in the tool’s performance, refusing to carry out certain tasks or producing overly simplified results. Researchers don’t know why this is happening, but one notable explanation is the “winter break hypothesis,” namely that the LLM is simulating seasonal depression: "What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?"

Mistral shocks AI community as latest open source model eclipses GPT-3.5 performance

Just yesterday, Mistral, a European AI startup, released a new open source model Mixtral 8x7B, which outperforms GPT-3.5 on a number of benchmarks. Open source models continue to play an important roll in the LLM landscape.

Quick Hits - Gemini Edition

Tool of the week: Imagine With Meta AI

Meta’s text-to-image tool - powered by Emu - has been available in chats, but Meta recently made it available to all U.S. users on the web. You can try it out here.

Innovation Profs Homework

We have an internal debate going on here at Innovation Profs about whether you can use ChatGPT to give you a recipe. So… if you’re baking holiday cookies in the next week, help us solve the debate.

Ask ChatGPT for a cookie recipe, try it out, and reply to this email with the results. Or use this festive holiday cookie recipe ChatGPT created for us. We’ll share any results in an upcoming newsletter.

AI-generated image of the week

We tested the “make it more” trend using DALLE-3 (perhaps to get ideas how to dress for Friday’s free virtual holiday AI event). We started with the prompt below, and kept asking for the program to “make it more festive.”

Prompt: create an image of a man wearing a holiday sweater

Generative AI tip of the week

Want to use generative AI to power your note-taking? Google has now made NotebookLM available to all its users.

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:

Twitter user @doganuraldesign used generative AI to bring emoji to life. Here’s an example.