🤔 Wiser! #128: Quantum Computing Is Coming | Meta's AI Speech Box | Goldman Sachs' 300 Million Jobs | ChatGPT Fact v Fiction
Have IBM made the breakthrough that will take quantum computers mainstream? Meta's new AI voice tech is 20 times faster than the rest. What's the story with Goldman Sach's 300 million jobs lost to AI?
What’s In Wiser! This Week?
In case you're wondering what happened to last week’s issue of Wiser! I’m currently travelling and taking some time out to recharge and refresh. I'm exploring Girona and the far North East of Spain, a fascinating region and I highly recommend it. Anyhow, I’ve also been busy writing and just finished my 2nd book - The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to ChatGPT. It’s free to all Premium Subscribers, or you can read a sample here.
Forget AI, quantum computing will be the next big tech thing…
Have you ever experienced an awkward moment trying to explain quantum computing to your friends and they just stare at you blankly? Premium subscribers who have been with me since the beginning may know what that’s like because it was one of the very first subjects I covered for them.
Well, a solution may be just around the corner because IBM appear to be making it easy for us mere earthlings to understand this next major technology wave! Move over ChatGPT, it's time for quantum computing to take the stage.
In an article for Nature, Davide Castelvecchi writes:
Four years ago, physicists at Google claimed their quantum computer could outperform classical machines — although only at a niche calculation with no practical applications. Now their counterparts at IBM say they have evidence that quantum computers will soon beat ordinary ones at useful tasks, such as calculating properties of materials or the interactions of elementary particles.
Here’s The Thing: This new computing method from IBM is like no other. It uses quantum mechanics principles to perform complex calculations at lightning-fast speeds. And when I say lightning-fast, I mean exponentially faster than traditional computing. This technology holds promise for advancing many areas that require substantial compute power, from AI, to cryptography, to drug discovery.
It appears that the secret to IBM’s latest success is that they’ve developed a solution to the barrier that has been disrupting quantum development; it’s called 'quantum noise' and it leads to high error rates. However, IBM claim that they are onto something big.
They recently published a proof-of-principle experiment in Nature, which demonstrated that quantum computers will soon beat ordinary ones at useful tasks. In other words, we're one step closer to seeing quantum computers do real things in our daily lives.
So, if you think that generative AI is disruptive, you wait and see what mass scale quantum computing will do to the way that the Internet and the digital economy works!
ATB, Rick
P.s. Remember: Insight and Information Gives You Leverage!
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What’s Happening in the Tech Economy
🎨 Adobe’s News AI Feature Gives Creator’s An Infinite Colour Pallet
Adobe are a dark horse in the AI race. They’ve wasted no time in pushing out some awesome generative AI features to enhance their creator toolkit. The latest is a new AI tool called Generative Recolor that allows users to easily swap and explore colours in any image. They can even create colour schemes based on text prompts.
It is powered by Adobe’s generative AI platform called Firefly, which I’ve been using for over a month now. I stopped using DAll-E, Midjourney and Canva’s integrated text-to-image tools, and made Firefly my go-to AI image generator.
Here’s The Thing: Generative Recolor has many utilities and is not just a plaything feature. At an enterprise level toolkit, Adobe are showing themselves to be the only game in town, ahead of Microsoft and Google in the enterprise space. Their strategy for Firefly appears to bet on text prompts becoming the new human interface. I wouldn’t bet against them either.
🤖 Meta's Revolutionary AI Voicebox: Is This The Future of Speech Generation?
Meta has released a new text-to-speech AI called Voicebox. The new AI platform synthesises speech across 6 languages, can perform tasks it wasn't trained on, has noise removal, allows content editing and style conversion, and more. It supports text-to-speech synthesis and cross-lingual style transfer.
Here's The Thing: The key feature is that the AI is 20x faster than current models, and outperforms single-purpose models through in-context learning. Meta are keeping this new tech close to their chest and the model/code is not being made publicly available due to the potential for misuse. (See Meta’s previous experiences with Galactica)
🚀 ChatGPT Is About To Get New Updates That Won't Know Fact From Fiction
OpenAI announced a set of new updates for ChatGPT to come into effect on 27th June. They’re rolling out upgraded processing in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, a new function-calling feature, and a price cut. Of these updates, it’s ChatGPT’s new ability to interact with the outside world that is the most significant.
This new function-calling feature lets ChatGPT call external functions to answer a prompt. This is new and goes someway to address a current limitation in ChatGPT (which is that its knowledge base ends in September 2021).
For example, today, ChatGPT can not answer a prompt like “What’s the weather in Boston right now?” (without the use of plugins.) But with this new feature, ChatGPT will be able to return the answer, “The weather in Boston is currently sunny and 22 degrees Celsius.”
Here’s The Thing: This is new and expands ChatGPT’s utility. However, it comes with a downside. ChatGPT doesn’t know fact from fiction. The issue of untrusted data has not been resolved by OpenAI although they acknowledge they’re working on it. Like all things ChatGPT, the ultimate responsibility for any output remains with the user!
💪 Goldman Sachs Report Says 300 Million Jobs Will Be Lost Due to Generative AI.
In March, Goldman Sachs published a report on the impact of Generative AI to the jobs market. The headline focused on the downside, with some 300 million jobs displaced due to Generative AI. However, they also made the point, which is historically reflected in the trend in the post World War II era, that technology has created more jobs than those it has displaced.
Here's The Thing: Technology replacing jobs is nothing new. Humans used to collect money on a bus, press the buttons on a lift or manually switch telephone lines to make a connection. Before all being replaced by technology.
In the post-war era, technological advancements were synonymous with both job displacement and the creation of new employment prospects. In other words, amidst the headline concerns raised by Goldman, there remains a silver lining: the positive influence on labour productivity growth. Basically, those 300 million lost jobs will become new jobs.
What else is happening in Tech?
Investors accuse Elon Musk of insider trading of Dogecoin
New AI autopilot algorithm helps pilots avoid crashes
AI finds three new Nasca Lines of the Peruvian Desert. Researchers use AI to find ancient geoglyphs etched by humans around 200 BC
GitHub survey reveals that 92% of programmers have used AI tools. 30% of them claim they didn’t benefit from using AI
A new report by The Wall Street Journal, in conjunction with Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts, found that Instagram has become a key tool for connecting a vast pedophile network, with members sharing illegal content openly in the app
Twitter has left the European Union's voluntary code of conduct against online disinformation, making it the only major social media platform to do so
McKinsey is embracing generative AI tools, with nearly 50% of its workforce using ChatGPT and similar technology
Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood told investors that new AI-powered services, including those powered by OpenAI, will contribute at least $10 billion to the company’s revenue over an unspecified time period
Amazon has partnered with tech firm Hexa to allow sellers to create 3D images, immersive 360 visualisations, virtual try-ons, and augmented reality content for their Amazon product pages
The 2024 Republican presidential campaign supporting Ron DeSantis used AI-generated deepfakes in an attack ad against rival Donald Trump!
Chart of the Week
Spotify is reportedly launching a new subscription tier called "Supremium" that includes a HiFi feature and access to audiobooks. The company hopes to convert more free users to paying subscribers, as the latter accounts for 97% of its cumulative gross profit since 2017. Meanwhile, Spotify has scaled back its podcast division and shifted its strategy around "Spotify Originals.”
For more data driven insights like these, sign up directly with Chartr.
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to ChatGPT
🤖 Everyone has heard of ChatGPT by now. But that doesn’t mean everyone understands it, is using it, or even knows how to get the best from it.
According to Pew Research, less than 14% of Americans who have heard of ChatGPT have used it, even if that’s only once.
According to Goldman Sachs, as many as 300 million jobs globally could be lost in the next 25 years due to this new wave of generative AI. That means anyone who is a knowledge worker, from secretaries to analysts, from marketeers to creators. Anyone in these roles is under threat.
And if that’s you, then now is the time to get on the right side of history. By embracing the utility of this emerging technology and learning how you can make generative AI work for you.
And the best place to start is with the king of them all, ChatGPT.
This book is a comprehensive explainer and starter system for a beginner to use the free version of ChatGPT (GPT3.5), the most well known of the large language models. Each chapter includes easy-to-understand explanations, practical tips, and actionable advice to ensure that inexperienced users can effectively navigate and leverage the power of generative AI.
So, far from fearing the rise of generative AI, embrace it, master it and, most importantly, get one step ahead of your colleagues and competitors.
It’s free to all Premium Subscribers, or you can read a sample here. It’s not too late to start.
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