The Week in Review: Keeping Up with the Experts

Session 2 of last week's TED2023 kicked off with an exhilarating speech from OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman. Brockman's TED Talk set the tone for this week's post, emphasizing the inevitability of the paradigm shift brought about by ChatGPT. If you have already watched the presentation, his confidence is palpable and far more inspiring than that of any of CEO Sam Altman's (often nerve-wracking) interviews. Even within OpenAI, there are two sides to the same coin. Wonder vs. Fear. Possibilities vs. threats. In fact, POSSIBILITY is the theme for the event. The session continues on the AI track with talks from others expanding on the their theme.

There are more videos being regularly posted with commentary, interviews and explanations being posted that can help round out our vocabulary as well as list of subtopics to consider as we collectively build an AI literacy. The AI Explained channel on YouTube is one useful example with topical posts to provide clarity on all these emerging technologies. Another type of channel that has been catching attention are those from computer scientists and developers with years of experience in the field, sharing from their expertise as engineers and/or researchers. For example, visit Gopi Chandrakesan's channel with nearly 200 published videos at various levels of theory and application. Another is Xander Steenbrugge's YouTube channel where he takes his experience in machine learning and produces videos from Cornell University's excellent research repository, arXiv.org, making concepts more accessible beyond academia. Likewise, MIT's CSAIL program has a channel for sharing their breakthroughs with the public. There is even an ardent GPT-4 user posting his daily prompts and interactions with ChatGPT with a tongue-in-cheek blog entitled, "As an AI..."

Then there are those YouTube veterans such as Hank and John Green, with their well-established VlogBrothers channel, where Hank recently spoke about his concerns with the AI revolution hitting a tipping point. Or you could seek out sites with any notable channels being curated by blog authors and tech companies monitoring changes such as you see here.

Some pieces don't extend the conversation as well as others and that's the point of our regular sharing here—to highlight the most efficient and effective ways to keep SAFE AI as the focus for our schools and field of education. If you have found anything of interest worth sharing, please do for the good of the community!

Here are some other recent industry headlines that may be worth noting for your own work within our field of education:

SAFETY

• OpenAI co-founder defends messy roll-out of powerful technologies - The Globe and Mail

• Opinion letter from Ray Kurzweil on request for 6 month delay on large language models that go beyond GPT-4 « Kurzweil

• The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models | Quanta Magazine

• Nvidia has a new way to prevent A.I. chatbots from ‘hallucinating’ wrong facts

ACCOUNTABILITY

• Innovation, Data, and Commerce Subcommittee Hearing: “Addressing America’s Data Privacy Shortfalls: How a National Standard Fills Gaps to Protect Americans’ Personal Information”

• OpenAI previews business plan for ChatGPT, launches new privacy controls | TechCrunch

• US Supreme Court rejects computer scientist’s lawsuit over AI-generated inventions | Reuters

• National Telecommunications and Information Administration: AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment

• AI gets its education from everything we ever wrote for the web

• Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation | The Economist

• ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work - The Verge

FAIRNESS

• False Alarm: How Wisconsin Uses Race and Income to Label Students “High Risk” – The Markup

• U.S. regulators warn they already have the power to go after A.I. bias

• Heuristic Imperatives need Freedom · TechniStuff

• Most people don’t want a company AI to do the hiring, firing, or promoting | TechSpot

EFFICACY

• Bill Gates says AI chatbots will teach kids how to read and write

• What Educators Need to Know About ChatGPT

• How The AI Revolution Is Liberating Workers from the Office | Entrepreneur

• ChatGPT writing: How AI is upending the freelance world

• Stanford and MIT study: A.I. boosted worker productivity by 14%

• WizardLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Follow Complex Instructions