🧑‍🎓 Will AI spell the end of college?

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🧠 AI and Machine Learning

Is ChatGPT Getting Worse? (3 minute read)
ChatGPT is changing, though so far it’s been incredibly hard to say how or why. Users have widely complained that the GPT-4 language model powering the paid version of OpenAI’s chatbot has been degrading over time, spitting out false answers and declining to follow through on prompts it once happily abided. New research shows that, indeed, the AI has experienced some rather thorough changes, though maybe not in the ways users expect. A new paper published in the ArXiv preprint archive from researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley claims the GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 respond differently today than they did a few months ago, and not always for the better.

Meta’s Open Source Llama Upsets the AI Horse Race (4 minute read)
In May an anonymous memo apparently written by a Google researcher concerned about the company’s future leaked online. It argued that, while executives squabbled about the competitive threat of text-generation technology from OpenAI, open source software was “quietly eating our lunch”. Last week, Meta released the second version of its unexpectedly popular model, Llama 2. This time, it is open source and free for commercial use from the start. The new version was made using 40 percent more data than the original, and a chatbot built with the model is capable of generating results on par with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta claims.

ChatGPT Android app is now available for download on the Play Store (1 minute read)
OpenAI’s ChatGPT app is now available for Android devices through the Google Play Store, months after it arrived on iOS. The app has been sitting in the Play Store for a while now, with pre-registrations opening just last week. If you’re downloading the new ChatGPT Android app, make sure it’s the original one developed by OpenAI. There are several clones hanging around on the Play Store that might fool you into downloading them instead of the real thing. Currently, the Android ChatGPT app is only available in select regions, including the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil. The company plans to expand the rollout to additional countries “over the next week.”

💼 Business

If You Know What an AI Manager Is, Netflix Just Might Hire You for $900,000 (2 minute read)
Netflix is currently hiring a new AI manager position at a salary of at least $300,000. The official title of the position is Product Manager - Machine Learning Platform, and has a salary range listed for the California-based position with a minimum of $300,000 all the way up to $900,000. It would appear that Netflix doesn’t even have a clear idea of its plan for machine learning, as one of the key objectives of the position is to “define the strategic vision for [the machine learning platform].” Qualifications include experience working with a centralized machine learning platform, the ability to collaborate with and lead Netflix’s engineers, and written communication and strategic thinking skills.

Amazon wants Alexa to bring AI into the home (3 minute read)
Amazon expects generative AI to jolt its middle-aged Alexa voice assistant to new life. Why it matters: The giant online seller sees the AI boom as a chance to dust off the more than half a billion devices that have Alexa built in and give them fresh relevance as delivery channels for the equivalent of a voice-enabled ChatGPT — and more. Amazon has pitched its web services as an ideal place to host and run generative AI applications, but has been relatively quiet about offering services directly to consumers. That's about to change, Axios has learned. The first visible signs of this effort are expected to turn up when Amazon announces new devices at a Sept. 20 event at its HQ2 offices in Arlington, Virginia. However, more complete integrations will take until next year and beyond.

❓ Misc

Will AI Finally End Our Love Affair With College? (3 minute read)
A lot of the conversation around the rise of artificial intelligence has focused on its threat to white-collar jobs and knowledge workers. What is to become of the brokers, traders, graphic designers, software engineers and an endless array of other professionals? Creatives long believed we’d be relatively immune to AI; could a soulless, non-sentient machine really infuse passion and humanity into art? Apparently yes. As the youngest in our workforce begin to plot their higher education and career choices, the question of which professions and skill sets can withstand the next industrial revolution looms large. Is this the moment when university education loses luster? Will American society put a higher premium than before on skilled labor jobs? Will younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha be encouraged to matriculate to trade and vocational schools, certification programs, or apprenticeships instead of fixating on a bachelor’s degree?

A year ago, DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI changed the shape of science — but there is more work to do (4 minute read)
OpenAI’s ChatGPT may have captured the AI zeitgeist last fall, but it was DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI that shook the science world last summer. A year ago, on July 28, 2022, the Alphabet-owned company announced that AlphaFold had predicted the structures for nearly all proteins known to science and dramatically increased the potential to understand biology — and, in turn, accelerate drug discovery and cure diseases. Today, DeepMind (now Google DeepMind) says the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database has been used by over 1.2 million researchers in over 190 countries, and that adoption rates of AlphaFold are growing fast in all domains. A few weeks ago, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told The Verge that while AI chatbots have gone viral, he believes it is AlphaFold that has “had the most unequivocally biggest beneficial effects so far in AI on the world.” Nearly every biologist in the world has used it, he pointed out, while Big Pharma companies are using it to advance their drug discovery programs.

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