w/Wiser! #118 - 24th March 2023
Preamble
Beware the AI
Tech news continues to be dominated by AI and the promise of an automated and super-charged level of productivity. As soon as Elon Musk connects Neuralink to Google Workspace, all you'll have to do is think about answering that email and the AI will do it for you...or so we're led to believe!
Here's The Thing: along with all the excitement, new features and fancy demos comes a bucketful of hype and over-promise. I'm one of the worst when it comes to getting carried away, but that's because I want it to work. This week I downloaded Microsoft Edge onto my MacBook and it runs well, in fact I'm quite impressed with Edge as a browser. But the reason I did it was to play with Bing Chat and the AI enabled 365 productivity suite bundled into Edge. All was great, until I started to use it..and then the limitations became obvious.
I tested Bing chat with a long prompt - I was researching a major brand and their projects in emerging tech. I listed multiple technologies and I got back a comprehensive written answer, organised by technology. My first thoughts were "amazing!" and so much more helpful than getting back a bunch of links to wade through. So I used the same prompt but with a different company name and tried it again.
Guess what, I got exactly the same answers back! Almost word for word. So I tried a different brand name and, guess what? I got exactly the same answer back. I checked the source for each of the three identical answers and they all took me to the same research paper that didn't mention any of the brand names! Bizarre, to say the least.
The lesson is; beware the AI that over promises and under-delivers.
In this week's newsletter, the content is heavily weighted towards AI. Even the supporting webpage, Wiser! Tech is AI focused this week. There are plenty of non-AI stories too and it won't last forever, but its a lot more fun than writing about Elon's Twitter fiasco every week.
Remember: Insight and Information Gives You Leverage!
ATB, Rick
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w/Premium Content
The Future of Anti-Ageing Technology: Extending Our Active Healthspan
For this week's feature article for Premium readers, I look at AgeTech: the technology sector that's invested $billions to understand the ageing process. To be clear, this isn't about finding the secret to ever-lasting life. This is about increasing our "healthspan" - the measure of time when we are fit and healthy enough to lead a full life without the burden of an ageing body. It's the science of getting old without getting older.
w/AI
1. Company with an AI CEO outperforms the Hong Kong stock market
Last August, NetDragon Websoft, a Hong Kong-based online gaming firm with $2.1 billion in annual revenue, appointed a CEO to lead its flagship subsidiary. Unlike a traditional, human-based CEO, the new leader for this business was an Artificial Intelligence CEO.
Here's The Thing: With the new 24-hours-a-day, performance bonus free, boss in charge, the business outperformed the HK stock market. Now, let's be honest, this story is a but gimmicky. But the serious point is that much of what any worker does, let alone a CEO, is repetitive, routine and adds little value. McKinsey calculated a quarter of a CEO's work can be automated. Which is why this story caught my eye, because the thrust of all the new generative AI productivity features from Microsoft, Google, and every other productivity platform is about saving you time and getting you from A to B faster.
Continue reading...➜ (for more details on the AI CEO and data about how much CEOs get paid compared to the rest of us)
w/NFTs
2. Salesforce has built an NFT platform for brands to build customer loyalty programmes
Salesforce, the cloud sales automation company, has launched a new platform that allows consumer brands to create custom loyalty programs using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). They’ve already onboarded well-known brands such as whisky brand Crown Royal, clothing brand Scotch & Soda, and toy brand Mattel.
Here's The Thing: This is exactly what I've been banging on about for the past year. Consumer brands are exploring ways to use NFTs, digital assets, blockchain technology into customer engagement. Salesforce building a platform that integrates with the corporate CRM system is an acknowledgment that big brands want this capability.
Continue reading...➜ (for more details on the Salesforce NFT Cloud platform and the consumer brands using it)
w/Strategy
3. Notion’s strategic bet on AI
If you've not heard of Notion, they're a San Francisco-based productivity startup that built an all-encompassing product, simply called Notion. It's the platform at the heart of everything I do for Wiser! I use it store all my web clippings, write my newsletters, articles and features, manage all my research notes, prepare content schedules, podcast scripts, finances. It even makes a fine cup of tea!
Here's The Thing: Notion has integrated generative AI into the heart of the product. Why? Because overnight they've increased the productivity value of their productivity tool. And they're not alone. I picked NotionAI as the example here simply because I use it every day. The point is that this is not just the domain of Google and Microsoft, there are many tools and products that are integrating generative AI right into the heart of their products.
Continue reading...➜ (for more details on NotionAI and the story behind it)
w/BigTech
4. Microsoft's Copilot AI to be rollout across the whole of the 365 productivity suite
Speaking of Microsoft, they're adding generative AI across the whole 365 productivity suite (which used to be known as Microsoft Office). Called Copilot AI, this is a natural-language-based user interface, ie. you just say what you want to do with your documents and Copilot spits out answers or performs actions.
Here's The Thing: With Copilot AI integrated directly into Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, etc, Microsoft, like Notion, have just made their productivity tools more productive. Now, to be clear, there's still gap between the marketing presentation of what they can do and the reality of what Copilot can do (so be careful of the hype.) But the thing is that these are early days and the AI will only get better. The strategic question is, in the long run, will we actually need spreadsheets and word processors, or just a great big ol' AI machine?
Continue reading...➜ (for more insights on Microsoft's Copilot and strategy for the use of generative AI in its products)
w/Innovation
5. GPT-4 found to be better than GPT-3 at misinformation
In January, Newsguard tested GPT-3.5 to see how it performed when asked to generate content that was known to be inaccurate, misleading or contentious. They found that the previous iteration happily churned out misinformation in 4 out of 5 cases. They've just tested the latest iteration of GPT (4) and found that the latest version better (or worse depending on your POV) at misinformation, scoring 5 out of 5!
Here's The Thing: When GPT-4 was released last week, OpenAI made a point at saying they'd made it safer. They said, "GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” But the Newsguard tests challenge this. They found that not only was GPT-4 MORE likely to write misinformation, it was also more more CONVINCING at doing it! The issue this exposes is that defining misinformation is as tricky as content moderation. (Just look at Twitter. Since Musk relaxed content moderation controls, reports of hate speech and misinformation have soared.
Continue reading...➜ (for more insights on Microsoft's Copilot and strategy for the use of generative AI in its products)
w/AI
Wiser! AI: What's happened in AI this week
There's so much news in the AI space that I've used this week's issue of Wiser! Tech to capture it all. For more insights and information about what's happening in AI than I can put into a single newsletter, read this, you won't be disappointed.
Rick Huckstep
w/Technology
In Other non-AI Tech News
- Bitcoin is on a growth spurt in the wake of SVB. As I put this issue to bed, the price is hovering around $28k, up 12% in a the past week. The whole crypto market is back to round $1.2 trillion.
- TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is about to testify before Congress where he's likely to get a frosty reception. Ahead of his testimony, TikTok parent ByteDance published an update to its corporate structure for the first time in three years.
- Amazon faces lawsuit over alleged biometric tracking at Go stores in New York
- Jaguar Land Rover and Nvidia plan three autonomous vehicle hubs, as the lines blur between car manufacturing and software.
- Meta has launched the greatly anticipated paid verification on Instagram and Facebook in the US. It's wrong, IMHO.
- The latest rumours about Apple’s long-awaited and overdue entry into Mixed Reality smart glasses refer to “realityOS” as the new operating system.
- Outform has unveiled what it says is a first-of-its-kind interactive digital mannequin. Shoppers scan a QR code to chose which outfits they want to see "modelled" for them in a giant screen. This is all about personalised shopping whilst the retailer collects a ton of data.
- Elon Musk apparently wants to build his own town just outside of Austin, Texas. Who had that on their 2023 bingo card?
w/BrandStrategy
The latest in Brand Strategy
This week, I've updated the Brand Strategy Collection with:
- Starbucks: The NFT rewards collection sold out within minutes generating a secondary market value over $120k.
- Yves Saint Laurent: Black Opium NFT marketing campaign goes into 2nd phase, offering exclusivity and status to NFT holders.
- Ikea: use drones across 100 locations for stock inventory management.
- Vodafone: use of virtual and augmented reality for immersive and education experiences.
- Toyota: updates to Woven City, their strategic development of a mobility city of the future.
w/Productivity
🛠️ 7 x Tips to save you time
- 7 AI tools that I use to save me time and boost my productivity.
- How to create unique content with ChatGPT and QuillBot
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w/Wisdom
📰 5 x Newsletters to make you Wiser!
- The Sample uses AI to find the newsletters you're going to love to read.
- Bay Area Times - daily tech and business news
- Superhuman is about tech, AI, productivity, and career growth.
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- Deepculture is the perfect newsletter for curious minds.
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w/AboutWiser!
🤔 Wiser! Newsletter
Wiser! is a twice weekly newsletter that makes sense of what's happening and what's coming next in the tech economy...so that you don't have to. From disruptive technologies, like blockchain, crypto and artificial intelligence, to emerging trends, like Web3 and the Metaverse, Wiser! gives you the top stories of innovation and strategy from the tech economy.
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