Category Archives: Ai

The emergence of free, powerful and easy-to-use generative artificial intelligence (AI) has caused significant disruption in higher education as institutions and educators ponder the implications of student access to tools such as DALL-E and ChatGPT. Many argue that this is only the beginning of what will be a significant reshaping of higher education, as sweeping as those that have been affected in the past by computers, the Internet and social media.

A panel of Boise State faculty from across disciplines will lead a discussion of how AI will affect the landscape of higher education from noon-1 p.m. on May 3 in the College of Innovation and Design space on the second floor of Albertsons Library. The Center for Teaching and Learning, College of Innovation and Design, and the AI in Education Task Force invite participants to bring their lunch along with questions, concerns, insights and areas of excitement to the conversation.

Visit the Center for Teaching and Learning event calendar to register. Registration will be limited to the first 65 participants.

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Impact of AI on higher education panel event May 3 - Boise State University

The stunning capabilities ofChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment inartificial intelligence. But late last week, OpenAIs CEO warned that the research strategy that birthed the bot is played out. It's unclear exactly where future advances will come from.

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OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100 million.

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But the companys CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models, he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. We'll make them better in other ways.

Altmans declaration suggests an unexpected twist in the race to develop and deploy new AI algorithms. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft has used the underlying technology to add a chatbot to its Bing search engine, and Google has launched a rival chatbot called Bard. Many people have rushed to experiment with using the new breed of chatbot to help with work or personal tasks.

Meanwhile, numerous well-funded startups, includingAnthropic,AI21,Cohere, andCharacter.AI, are throwing enormous resources into building ever larger algorithms in an effort to catch up with OpenAIs technology. The initial version of ChatGPT was based on a slightly upgraded version of GPT-3, but users can now also access a version powered by the more capable GPT-4.

Altmans statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge from OpenAIs strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4, OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centers the company can build and how quickly it can build them.

Nick Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere who previously worked on AI at Google, says Altmans feeling that going bigger will not work indefinitely rings true. He, too, believes that progress on transformers, the type of machine learning model at the heart of GPT-4 and its rivals, lies beyond scaling. There are lots of ways of making transformers way, way better and more useful, and lots of them dont involve adding parameters to the model, he says. Frosst says that new AI model designs, or architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising directions that many researchers are already exploring.

Each version of OpenAIs influential family of language algorithms consists of an artificial neural network, software loosely inspired by the way neurons work together, which is trained to predict the words that should follow a given string of text.

The first of these language models, GPT-2, wasannounced in 2019. In its largest form, it had 1.5 billion parameters, a measure of the number of adjustable connections between its crude artificial neurons.

At the time, that was extremely large compared to previous systems, thanks in part to OpenAI researchers finding that scaling up made the model more coherent. And the company made GPT-2s successor, GPT-3,announced in 2020, still bigger, with a whopping 175 billion parameters. That systems broad abilities to generate poems, emails, and other text helped convince other companies and research institutions to push their own AI models to similar and even greater size.

After ChatGPT debuted in November, meme makers andtech pundits speculated that GPT-4, when it arrived, would be a model of vertigo-inducing size and complexity. Yet whenOpenAI finally announced the new artificial intelligence model, the company didnt disclose how big it isperhaps because size is no longer all that matters. At the MIT event, Altman was asked if training GPT-4 cost $100 million; he replied, Its more than that.

Although OpenAI is keeping GPT-4s size and inner workings secret, it is likely that some of its intelligence already comes from looking beyond just scale. On possibility is that it used a method called reinforcement learning with human feedback, which was used to enhance ChatGPT. It involves having humans judge the quality of the models answers to steer it towards providing responses more likely to be judged as high quality.

The remarkable capabilities of GPT-4 have stunned some experts and sparked debate over the potential for AI to transform the economy but also spread disinformation and eliminate jobs. Some AI experts, tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, and scientists recently wrote an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of anything more powerful than GPT-4.

At MIT last week, Altman confirmed that his company is not currently developing GPT-5.An earlier version of the letter claimed OpenAI is training GPT-5 right now, he said. We are not, and won't for some time.

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OpenAIs CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over - WIRED

The recent wave of generative artificial intelligence services, from ChatGPT to Midjourney, are designed to be simple to use: The idea is that anyone can produce text or images using natural, non-technical language. There's a low barrier to entry.

That said, there's still a lot to learn about how to get the most out of these tools and about the technology underpinning them, especially if you want to do something truly creative with the help of these tools. Spend some time with the resources we've listed here and you'll quickly become a smarter-than-average AI operator.

From demos of what AI is capable of, to discussions of how it's best implemented, these videos, podcasts, newsletters, and blogs are well worth bookmarking if you're keen to invest in the generative AI revolution happening around us.

Inside My Head

Some of the best resources out there when it comes to generative AI are Substacks, and Inside My Head is a case in point. Run by technologist Linus Ekenstam, it features a host of useful AI-related material, covering tutorials on getting the optimum results from these tools and crafting the smartest prompts.

There's also news on the latest happenings in the world of AI, pointers on different apps that can be of help to you, and promises of much more to comeincluding an AI training course. Some posts are free to read, while others require a $10/month subscription.

Inside My Head on Substack

Towards AI

Towards AI is a one-stop online shop for all your generative AI needsit includes news and opinion, tutorials, a busy online community, and more, with artificial intelligence and the latest developments serving as the thread running through everything.

The site covers tools to help you get more out of AI, offers interviews with engineers working in the field, and of course has the obligatory email newsletter you can sign up to. There are also stories on some interesting applications of AI that you might not have thought about before.

Towards AI on Medium

The AI Podcast

The AI Podcast from Nvidia drops episodes every fortnight and covers every aspect of artificial intelligence, including generative AI. It covers the impact of the technology on gaming, science, sports, language, hardware, and more.

Each week there's a special guest or two from a different organization in the field of AI, and it's an engaging and thought-provoking resource for expanding your AI knowledge and figuring out where these various innovations might be going next.

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9 Resources to Make the Most of Generative AI - WIRED

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddits array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddits conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industrys next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social networks vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. But we dont need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social networks charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAIs popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they arent likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors automated duplicates to Reddits conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddits conversation forumshave become valuable commodities as large languagemodels, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

A brave new world. A new crop of chatbotspowered by artificial intelligence has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technology could upend the economics of the internet, turning todays powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industrys next giants. Here are the bots to know:

ChatGPT. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacationsand translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images(and ace the Uniform Bar Exam).

Bing. Two months after ChatGPTs debut, Microsoft, OpenAIs primary investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing internet search engine. But it was the bots occasionally inaccurate, misleading and weird responsesthat drew much of the attention after its release.

Ernie. The search giant Baidu unveiled Chinas first major rival to ChatGPT in March. The debut of Ernie, short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a flopafter a promised live demonstration of the bot was revealed to have been recorded.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Googles conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAIs Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitters A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines crawl Reddits web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or scraping, isnt always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation, Mr. Huffman said. Theres a lot of stuff on the site that youd only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.

Mr. Huffman said Reddits A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators the users who volunteer their time to keep the sites forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, its time to pay up.

Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with, Mr. Huffman said. Its a good time for us to tighten things up.

We think thats fair, he added.

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Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems - The New York Times

CHICAGO The Philips Future Health Index 2023 global report released here at HIMSS23 today shows healthcare leaders are focused on addressing staffing shortages and stepping up planned AI investments.

The investments are to increase critical decision support and operational efficiency that will also help tackle staffing shortages.

First and foremost, providers are concerned with staffing shortages and are looking to right-size the issue through AI and machine learning that will help them do more with less, according to Shez Partovi, chief innovation and strategy officer and business leader, Enterprise Informatics, at Philips.

It shows virtual care continues to be a key area for patient access.

"The second thing we saw was, coming out of the pandemic, there continues to be a big desire to use virtual care delivery for quality access and cost of care," Partovi said. "The third thing, we're stronger together; individuals signaled to us that they see building partnerships with health system partners and with tech partners as a way of addressing the other two items in improving access to care."

WHY THIS MATTERS

Access to care, and not just in the hospital setting, has been among the themes to emerge from the HIMSS23 Global Health Conference & Exhibition.

Kicking off Monday's Executive Summit,HIMSS President and CEO Hal Wolf told a ballroom of C-suite leaders that healthcare is "inside-out" that is, no longer happening inside the four walls of a hospital.

The Philips report also shows the broadening of access points, with 82% of respondents talking about virtual intensive care, Partovi said. Ambulatory sites such as walk-in clinicsare also increasing access.

"People are investing in the broadening of access points," Partovi said.

Somewhat surprising, he said, is that the report shows an increased willingness to partner to improve care. Thirty-four percent of respondents said they are in favor of partnerships and collaboration to improve care. This number climbed to 43% for younger respondents.

Other healthcare IT experts at HIMSS23 have also talked of a new willingness to collaborate and share data.

There's less of proprietary competition and more of willingness to say, "'How can we do this together?'" said John Halamaka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform, during Monday's Executive Summit.

Said Partovi: "It signals the direction we're going in healthcare."

THE LARGER TREND

Royal Philips is a Dutch multinational conglomerate and a health technology company.

The eighth annual Future Health Index 2023 report,"Taking healthcare everywhere," is based on proprietary research among nearly 3,000 healthcare leaders and younger healthcare professionals conducted in 14 countries.

It shows providers plan investments in AI over the next three years with the biggest increase in critical decision support (39% in 2023, up from 24% in 2021). This was a top choice among cardiology (50%) and radiology (48%) leaders.

The percentage of healthcare leaders planning to invest in AI for operational efficiency, including automating documentation, scheduling patients and performing routine tasks, remained steady at 37%.

Twitter: @SusanJMorseEmail the writer: SMorse@himss.org

Zenobia Brown will offer more detail in the HIMSS23 session "Views from the Top: Can Technology and Innovation Advance Behavioral Healthcare?" It is scheduled for Tuesday, April 18, at 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. CT at the South Building, Level 1, room S100 B.

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Philips Future Health Index shows providers plan to invest in AI - Healthcare Finance News