🤝 AidfulAI Newsletter #22: Big Updates for ChatGPT and Bard!

Dear curious minds,

Welcome to the ultimate newsletter for those interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). In this week's issue, I bring to you the following topics:

• DALL·E 3: A New Midjourney Competitor From OpenAI

• Googles ChatGPT Competitor Bard Gets a Boost: Multiple Changes Make Bard More Useful Than Ever

• AI in a Box: A Privacy-First Smart Speaker Without Internet Access!

• Sal Khan on How AI Can Revolutionize Education

• The Secrets to Productivity and Success With Seth Godin

If nothing sparks your interest, feel free to move on, otherwise, let us dive in!

Major AI News

🤖🖼 DALL·E 3: A New Midjourney Competitor From OpenAI

• Finally, the already quite dated txt2img AI from @OpenAI DALL·E 2 gets an update.

• The new DALL·E 3 will live in ChatGPT and is announced to be soon usable for Plus and Enterprise users.

• The first sample images shown by OpenAI look impressive as they closely follow complex prompts and add text within images.

  

  Gallery of images created with DALL·E 3.

• Due to the copyright controversies, DALL·E 3 will decline requests asking for an image in the style of a living artist.

• In contrast to DALL·E 2, the images can be freely used without any restrictions.

• My take: Good to see more competition, as Stable Diffusion has a hard job to keep up with Midjourney. From my perspective, the three major txt2img AIs are comparable to the major operating systems: Windows=DALL·E, Linux=Stable Diffusion, macOS=Midjourney.

🤖🚀 Googles ChatGPT Competitor Bard Gets a Boost: Multiple Changes Make Bard More Useful Than Ever

• The September update brings various new features to Bard.

• Bard extensions (so far in English only) can now find and show relevant information from Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, YouTube, Flights, and Hotels and Bard can combine information from multiple sources in its responses.

• Bard can now double-check its responses with Google Search and highlight the things that are confirmed and those that have conflicting information.

  

  Fact-check of Bard replies: Press the G button below the response to get green highlights showing web sources, and orange highlights for no sources found.

• You can now share conversations that you had with Bard with other people, and they can continue the conversation from where you left off.

• The extensions are not yet available for Google Workspace users, only regular Gmail accounts.

• My take: Letting Bard use all my mails and documents as input sounds a bit scary, even with Google's commitment to not sharing content with human reviewers or for ad targeting. The ability to use web-search to answer questions and cite sources is currently a selling point on its own, as neither ChatGPT nor Claude offer that. On top, Bard can still be used without limitation for free. I have to admit, well done Google.

Privacy-Friendly AI

🤖📦 AI in a Box: A Privacy-First Smart Speaker Without Internet Access!

• Crowdsourcing project AI in a Box with the intention to create an offline alternative to smart speakers like Amazon Alexa.

• Announced by Pete Warden, CEO of Useful Sensors.

• Custom enclosure, including a screen, microphone and speakers.

  

  Render of the all-in-one design that combines the microphone, speaker, display, and the compute board.

• No network connection, neither wired nor wireless.

• Uses open-source models like Whisper and Llama 2.

• Powered by an RockChip 3588S SoC which brings in addition to two Cortex quad-core processors, also an NPU (neural processing unit) which supports INT4/INT8/INT16/FP16 operations with up to 6 TOPs.

• Costs $299 plus shipping and is targeted to be shipped end of January 2024.

• My take: Interesting product, but not sure if it is worth the money. The computing power is quite limited as a comparison to the new Jetson Orin shows, where the smallest model, Jetson Orin Nano 4GB, already achieves 20 TOPs.

PKM and AI

🤖📚 Sal Khan on How AI Can Revolutionize Education

• Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, argues in his TED Talk against the notion that AI will undermine education. He believes AI can be a transformative force for good in the educational sector.

• He discusses the "2 sigma problem," which suggests that one-on-one tutoring can dramatically improve student performance but is difficult to scale. Khan believes AI can help solve this problem by providing personalized tutoring at scale.

• Khan highlights how AI can also assist teachers by acting as a "teacher's guide on steroids," helping with lesson planning, grading, and more.

• Their educational chatbot Khanmigo is designed to be Socratic and engages students in a dialogue rather than just providing answers. It can also help students with writing by co-writing stories and offering feedback.

• Salman emphasizes the importance of putting the right guardrails and regulations in place to ensure AI is used responsibly and effectively in education.

• My take: Thoughtful implementation of AI in education important to empower students. Overall, these AI capabilities could enhance learning and growth for people of all ages and backgrounds, not just traditional students.

Podcasts

🤫💰 The Secrets to Productivity and Success With Seth Godin

• In Episode 281 of the Indie Hackers podcast, the hosts Courtland and Channing interviewed Seth Godin.

• Seth Godin is an American author, entrepreneur, and marketing expert. He has written numerous best-selling books on marketing, leadership, and personal development. He's also known for his blog and online courses that cover a range of business and personal growth topics.

• In the podcast episode, Seth shared his view on indie hacking, finding new business ideas, meaningful jobs vs mechanized jobs, dealing with internet trolls, his secrets to productivity, freelancing vs bootstrapping.

• Seth states that Feedback loops are crucial for improvement in sports, science, and entrepreneurship, and success requires both skill and adaptability.

• Anyone can have a voice now, and indie hackers should focus on identifying problems that big companies aren't solving yet to create valuable tools.

• My take: Listening to this podcast episode was truly enjoyable. I did not consume content from Seth Godin before, but his books and blog look quite interesting to me, and I put his bestselling book "This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See" on my reading list.

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Disclaimer: This newsletter is written with the aid of AI. I use AI as an assistant to generate and optimize the text. However, the amount of AI used varies depending on the topic and the content. I always curate and edit the text myself to ensure quality and accuracy. The opinions and views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the sources or the AI models.