Innovation Profs - 5/14/2024

Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news

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Innovation Profs
May 14, 2024

Join us today for a free lunch-and-learn

We’re also hosting a free lunch-and-learn called Hot GPT Summer on what’s new in generative AI today. Sign up here before noon to get the link.

Upcoming Innovation Profs Workshops

June 7 Generative AI: Professors Porter and Snider are teaching a one-day Intro to Generative AI Workshop at Drake University (or virtual). Attendees will get hands-on with tools for creating text, images, audio and more. Sign up here.

May 28 Integrating LLMs: Drake Professor and AI expert Eric Manley will lead this hands-on workshop for developers will introduce how to build language-aware applications in Python (in-person and virtual). Sign up here.

May 30 Social Media Strategy: Snider will lead this workshop on how to succeed on social media as a business. Sign up here.

May 30 Data Visualization: Drake Professor and data visualization expert Tim Urness will lead a Data Visualization Workshop at Drake University (or virtual). Urness will teach you how to tell stories with with data, create dashboards, and make use of color, charts, and graphs. Sign up here.

Generative AI News

OpenAI shows newest model

There’s only one news item worth highlighting this week: OpenAI’s release of its latest AI model, GPT-4o (where the “o” stands for “omni”). In addition to being both faster and cheaper than GPT-4, GPT-4o has new capabilities, including a voice assistant that made up a bedtime story and then responded to a voice telling it more dramatic. OpenAI also gave a demo of someone using a smartphone camera to help with a math problem, all while not giving away the answer.

GPT-4o is also vastly improved at embedding text into images, can analyze audio and video, can create 3d images, and can even write a poem in the shape of an image that a user uploads. You can learn more about the new features on OpenAI’s announcement page introducing GPT-4o.

The new model will be rolled out to all users - even free users. Paid users get five times more access to GPT-4o than free users.

Quick Hits

Apple nears deal with OpenAI to put ChatGPT on iPhone: Report

Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc’s Google about licensing that company’s Gemini chatbot. Those discussions haven’t led to an agreement, but are ongoing. An OpenAI accord would let Apple offer a popular chatbot as part of a flurry of new AI features that it’s planning to announce next month.

www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-nears-deal-with-openai-to-put-chatgpt-on-iphone-report-429178-2024-05-11

Meta is reportedly working on camera-equipped AI earphones

Meta is reportedly developing AI-powered earphones with cameras, aimed at object identification and language translation.

www.androidauthority.com/meta-ai-earphones-3442560

An OpenAI rival says its new AI model is not only cheaper to run than GPT-4, but it's also more useful

Cohere has announced the ability to fine-tune its Command R AI model, allowing it to outperform larger models like GPT-4 in some use cases.

www.businessinsider.com/openai-rival-says-model-cheaper-more-accurate-than-gpt-4-2024-5

How sci-fi writer JG Ballard's computer poems predicted ChatGPT

In the 1970s, science fiction writer JG Ballard was intrigued by the growing capabilities of computers – so used one to compose poems. They were a first step on the road to ChatGPT.

www.bbc.com/future/article/20240510-how-sci-fi-writer-jg-ballards-computer-poems-predicted-chatgpt

Stack Overflow suspends users protesting OpenAI deal

Give us an opt-out button or give us (temporary) account death!

www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/stack_overflow_banning_users_who

AI systems are getting better at tricking us

But what we perceive as deception is AI mindlessly achieving the goals we’ve set for it.

www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/10/1092293/ai-systems-are-getting-better-at-tricking-us

Anthropic AI Launches a Prompt Engineering Tool that Generates Production-Ready Prompts in the Anthropic Console

Generative AI (GenAI) tools have come a long way. Believe it or not, the first generative AI tools were introduced in the 1960s in a Chatbot. Still, it was only in 2014 that generative adversarial networks (GANs) were introduced, a type of Machine Learning (ML) algorithm that allowed generative AI to finally create authentic images, videos, and audio of real people. In 2024, we can create anything imaginable using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and others.  However, there is a problem. We can use those AI tools but can not get the most out of them or use them

www.marktechpost.com/2024/05/10/anthropic-ai-launches-a-prompt-engineering-tool-that-generates-production-ready-prompts-in-the-anthropic-console

Tool of the week: Podcastle

Podcastle gives users AI-powered tools to create a podcast. Features include a recording studio to remotely record your podcast, audio and video editing tools and a tool to create an AI clone of your voice.

Users can get started for free, which include unlimited audio recording and editing.

Innovation Profs Homework

Create a song. Elevenlabs music is coming soon, but you can use AI to write the song of the summer right now. Try out Suno or Udio and see what it can do.

We will debut our song of the summer during today’s free lunch event.

AI-generated image of the week

Beloved Iowan Caitlin Clark makes her WNBA regular-season debut tonight, but generative AI image tools don’t seem to know much about the former Iowa Hawkeye. We tried making an illustration of Clark in her Indiana Fever uniform with four popular image tools. Here are the results: 

prompt: illustration of Caitlin Clark playing basketball for the Indiana Fever of the WNBA

Generative AI tip of the week: Prompting

The Wall Street Journal this week shared some research-backed tips for getting better results from large language models like ChatGPT.

Included on the list: tell the chatbot it is an expert, encourage it to do better and ask it to write the prompts for you. You should also be friendly - but not TOO friendly.

Get starting with Generative AI

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

What we found

Elevenlabs is one of our favorite AI audio tools, so we were excited to see that they have an AI music creation tool coming.