AI Top-of-Mind for 4.16.24 — The US vs the World
Top-of-mind are the different approaches to AI across the globe. First, a good update from the ‘NY Times’ on Mistral from France, probably the best-known European AI company. From the article quoting the company’s founder, Arthur Mensch:
• A more imminent threat, he said, is the one posed by American A.I. giants to cultures around the globe.
• “The issue with not having a European champion is that the road map gets set by the United States,” said Mr. Mensch.”
• Mistral subscribes to the view that A.I. software should be open source, meaning that the programming codes should be available for anyone to copy, tweak or repurpose.
- “These (closed) models are producing content and shaping our cultural understanding of the world,” Mr. Mensch said. “And as it turns out, the values of France and the values of the United States differ in subtle but important ways.”
Also overseas, and related to the above, more on Singapore’s AI initiatives. An often-overlooked stop on the AI global tour, Pranath Fernando in ‘AI Advances’ dives into its perspective including the AI Government Cloud Cluster, which I’ve mentioned before. Two very telling paragraphs from the article on AI perspectives:
• The Chinese guidelines derive from a community-focused and goal-oriented perspective. “A high sense of social responsibility and self-discipline” is expected from individuals to harmoniously partake into a community promoting tolerance, shared responsibilities and open collaboration. This emphasis is clearly informed by the Confucian value of “harmony”, as an ideal balance to be achieved through the control of extreme passions — conflicts should be avoided. Other than a stern admonition against “illegal use of personal data”, there is little room for regulation. Regulation is not the aim of these principles, which are rather conceived to guide AI developers in the “right way” for the collective elevation of society
• The European principles, emerging from a more individual-focused and rights-based approach, express a different ambition, rooted in the Enlightenment and coloured by European history. Their primary goal is to protect individuals against well identified harms. Whereas the Chinese principles emphasize the promotion of good practices, the EU focuses on the prevention of malign consequences. The former draws a direction for the development of AI, so that it contributes to the improvement of society, the latter sets the limitations to its uses, so that it does not happen at the expense of certain people.
AI of course will also impact the workplace. A view from Will Lockett in ‘Predict’ on the use of low-paid workers to augment AI apps and models. From the post:
So, for ChatGPT4, they decided to screen its training data, ensuring that the AI model wasn’t trained on the type of text they didn’t want to replicate. They didn’t do this task in-house, but instead hired a small army of remote workers in Kenya for $2 an hour and got them to filter through the texts and remove anything offensive.
Turning to AI skillsets, and hopefully not the ones above, ‘Creative Blog’ looks at what is important in the age of AI. A survey by Autodesk found that AI literacy is critical for those in film, gaming, and advertising.
On the practical front, more help with medical diagnosis, this time for TB patients. Sriram Chandrasekaran in ‘The Generator’ looks at different TB outcomes and how AI is beginning to play a role in more accurate treatment predictions. Then on maybe practical, Keith McNulty describes how to create a RAG-based avatar based on personal data and documents. An example from the posting on how documents cluster in the vector database:
Finally, some of the more interesting examples if ChatGPT use including palm reading and recipe stealing. More from Gencay I in ‘Level Up Coding.’
