All posts tagged: generative

The top 3 ways to use generative AI to empower knowledge workers 

The top 3 ways to use generative AI to empower knowledge workers 

Published by skeptic

Our approach When it comes to AI at Adobe, my team has taken a comprehensive approach that includes investment in foundational AI, strategic adoption, an AI ethics framework, legal considerations, security, and content authentication. ​The rollout follows a phased approach, starting with pilot groups and building communities around AI. ​ This approach includes experimenting with and documenting use cases like writing and editing, data analysis, presentations and employee onboarding, corporate training, employee portals, and improved personalization across HR channels. The rollouts are accompanied by training podcasts and other resources to educate and empower employees to use AI in ways that improve their work and keep them more engaged. ​ Unlocking productivity with documents While there are innumerable ways that CIOs can leverage generative AI to help surface value at scale for knowledge workers, I’d like to focus on digital documents—a space in which Adobe has been a leader for over 30 years. Whether they are sales associates who spend hours responding to requests for proposals (RFPs) or customizing presentations, marketers who need competitive intel for …

Meta’s new generative AI features aim to make it easier to create ads – and they’re free

Meta’s new generative AI features aim to make it easier to create ads – and they’re free

Published by skeptic

Meta Social media feeds are an ideal place to advertise, and a well-executed campaign can help businesses grow significantly — but creating them is a lot of work. Meta’s new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools aim to help make curating the perfect ad easier. On Tuesday, Meta unveiled new generative AI features and upgrades that build on its current offerings to assist businesses in creating and editing new ad content, aiming to make the process quicker and more efficient.  Also: Apple’s new Logic Pro adds AI ‘band members’ for iPad and Mac users Meta first introduced generative AI features for advertisers in October, including background generation, which allows users to swap backdrops for their product images; image expansion, which automatically fits creative assets to different aspect ratios; and text variations, which generates multiple ad text options from an advertiser’s original copy.  Now, the company is adding new image and text generation capabilities, the highlight being a new image variation feature that can create alternate iterations of your content based on the original creative.  As seen in the video …

Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem

Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem

Published by skeptic

Hallucinations — the lies generative AI models tell, basically — are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate the technology into their operations. Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong. In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, a source recounts an instance where Microsoft’s generative AI invented meeting attendees and implied that conference calls were about subjects that weren’t actually discussed on the call. As I wrote a while ago, hallucinations may be an unsolvable problem with today’s transformer-based model architectures. But a number of generative AI vendors suggest that they can be done away with, more or less, through a technical approach called retrieval augmented generation, or RAG. Here’s how one vendor, Squirro, pitches it: At the core of the offering is the concept of Retrieval Augmented LLMs or Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) embedded in the solution … [our generative AI] is unique in its promise of zero hallucinations. …

This Week in AI: Generative AI and the problem of compensating creators

This Week in AI: Generative AI and the problem of compensating creators

Published by skeptic

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way — TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter soon. Stay tuned. This week in AI, eight prominent U.S. newspapers owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement relating to the companies’ use of generative AI tech. They, like The New York Times in its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI, accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of scraping their IP without permission or compensation to build and commercialize generative models such as GPT-4. “We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the big tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” Frank Pine, …

Can Generative AI Explain or Innovate?

Can Generative AI Explain or Innovate?

Published by skeptic

Generative AI burst onto the scene in November 2022 with the advent of ChatGPT, and many people, including me, have been amazed at its intelligence. For example, it appears to have human-level capability to generate and evaluate explanatory hypotheses. But these models have been challenged by distinguished skeptics, including Noam Chomsky and Alison Gopnik. Is AI Incapable of Explanation? In an opinion piece in the New York Times, the eminent linguist Noam Chomsky and his colleagues argue emphatically that ChatGPT and its ilk operate with a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge. They claim that their reliance on machine learning and pattern recognition makes them incapable of explanation (Chomsky, Roberts, and Watumull 2023): “Such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case—that’s description and prediction—but also what is not the case and what could and could not be …

Code faster with generative AI, but beware the risks when you do

Code faster with generative AI, but beware the risks when you do

Published by skeptic

Yaroslav Kushta/Getty Images Nowadays, developers can turn to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to code faster and more efficiently. Nevertheless, they should do so with caution and no less attention than before. While the use of AI in software development may not be new — it’s been around since at least 2019 — GenAI brings significant improvements in the generation of natural language, images, and — more recently — videos and other assets, including code, Diego Lo Giudice, Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst, told ZDNET. Also: Why the future must be BYO AI: Model lock-in deters users and stifles innovation Previous iterations of AI were used mostly in code testing, with machine learning leveraged to optimize models for testing strategies, Giudice told ZDNET. GenAI goes beyond these use cases, offering access to an expert peer programmer or specialist (such as a tester or a business analyst) who can be queried interactively to find information quickly. GenAI can also suggest solutions and test cases. “For the first time, we are seeing significant productivity gains that traditional …

Tim Cook on Generative AI: ‘We Have Advantages That Will Differentiate Us’

Tim Cook on Generative AI: ‘We Have Advantages That Will Differentiate Us’

Published by skeptic

During today’s earnings call covering the second fiscal quarter of 2024, Apple CEO Tim Cook again spoke about Apple’s work on generative AI. He said that Apple has “advantages” that will “differentiate” the company in the era of AI, and some “very exciting things” will be shared with customers in the near future. We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI. We are making significant investments and we’re looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon. We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software and services integration, groundbreaking Apple silicon with our industry leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create. Rumors have suggested that Apple’s first AI features are designed to run on-device rather than contacting a cloud service, which would make Apple’s AI much more private and secure than an online AI option. Apple’s plan …

The Unsexy Future of Generative AI Is Enterprise Apps

The Unsexy Future of Generative AI Is Enterprise Apps

Published by skeptic

However, that amount includes massive funding from corporate backers, like Microsoft’s infusion of capital into OpenAI and Amazon’s funding of Anthropic. Stripped down to conventional VC investments, funding in 2023 for AI startups was much smaller, and only on pace to match the total amount raised in 2021. Pitchbook senior analyst Brendan Burke noted in a report that venture capital funding was increasingly being funneled towards “underlying core AI technologies and their ultimate vertical applications, instead of general-purpose middleware across audio, language, images, and video.” In other words: A GenAI app that helps a company generate ecommerce sales, parse legal documents, or maintain SOC2 compliance is probably a surer bet than one that drums up a clever video or photo once in a while. Clay Bavor, the cofounder of Sierra, says he believes it’s not necessarily computing or cloud API costs driving AI startups towards B2B models, but more likely the benefits of targeting a specific customer and iterating on a product based on their feedback. “I think everyone, myself included, is fairly optimistic that …

Google Launches a New Course Called “AI Essentials”: Learn How to Use Generative AI Tools to Increase Your Productivity

Google Launches a New Course Called “AI Essentials”: Learn How to Use Generative AI Tools to Increase Your Productivity

Published by José

This week, Google announced the launch of Google AI Essen­tials, a new self-paced course designed to help peo­ple learn AI skills that can boost their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Taught by Google’s AI experts, and assum­ing no pri­or knowl­edge of pro­gram­ming, the course ven­tures to show stu­dents how to “use AI in the real world,” with an empha­sis on help­ing stu­dents: Devel­op ideas and con­tent. If you’re stuck at the begin­ning of a project, use AI tools to help you brain­storm new ideas. In the course, you’ll use a con­ver­sa­tion­al AI tool to gen­er­ate con­cepts for a prod­uct and devel­op a pre­sen­ta­tion to pitch the prod­uct. Make more informed deci­sions. Let’s say you’re plan­ning an event. AI tools can help you research the best loca­tion to host it based on your cri­te­ria. You can also use AI to help you come up with a tagline or slo­gan. Speed up dai­ly work tasks. Clear out that inbox faster using AI to help you sum­ma­rize emails and draft respons­es. Google AI Essen­tials fea­tures five mod­ules (the video above comes from Mod­ule 1) and …

NIST launches a new platform to assess generative AI

NIST launches a new platform to assess generative AI

Published by skeptic

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, on Monday announced the launch of NIST GenAI, a new program spearheaded by NIST to assess generative AI technologies including text- and image-generating AI. NIST GenAI will release benchmarks, help create “content authenticity” detection (i.e. deepfake-checking) systems and encourage the development of software to spot the source of fake or misleading AI-generated information, explains NIST on the newly launched NIST GenAI website and in a press release. “The NIST GenAI program will issue a series of challenge problems [intended] to evaluate and measure the capabilities and limitations of generative AI technologies,” the press release reads. “These evaluations will be used to identify strategies to promote information integrity and guide the safe and responsible use of digital content.” NIST GenAI’s first project is a pilot study to build systems that can reliably tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated media, starting with text. (While many services purport to detect …