AI is for small business

The current wave of #GenerativeAI technology may get a lot more uptake with #SmallBusiness and smaller businesses will likely be the leaders that eventually drag the large corporations with them. This is not something that will be well-publicized, but it is already out there if you know how to look for it. Invest 10 minutes in my story on how the AI wave is really about small business and why.

#ArtificialIntelligence

The human in the loop

You can't leave #ArtificialIntelligence all the way unsupervised.

Can you use #GenerativeAI to plan an event for you? #Meetup has a button you can click to do this. The answer is "Yes" but in a silly way. Do you care what the event is? What kind of work you have to do to back up the plan? What the event is about? You probably do, and if you do you need to put about as much work into the supervising the AI as you might have spent planning.

If you are involved in managing risk for a large organization, or if you are worried about where the labor market is headed, you should note that you need humans in the loop for the foreseeable future. No matter how good the AI is, you still need to check that it is behaving in a way aligned with your goals and resources. You can have a brilliant employee that creates a problem because you did not bother to communicate with them and AI is not really any different.

Is prompt engineering for real?

Is #PromptEngineering for real? Is it really a coherent, specialized skill that will stay relevant or is it just a buzzword about tinkering with another buzzword? There is a multi-tiered debate going on about this right now and I won't be able to cover all of it here. I will say, though, that there is a lot more to it than you will be exposed to playing with #ChatGPT for personal use and I often see the topic carelessly over-trivialized on social media. If you are building an application using a #LargeLanguageModel or similar, you are really writing prompts for other people that might not be cooperative, you might have prompts helping write those prompts, and the stakes for your business could be pretty high. It is a challenge to take seriously.

#ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #SoftwareEngineering #ApplicationDevelopment

Elon Musk sues OpenAI!

#ElonMusk is suing #OpenAI. This is hot off the presses right now and potentially a really big deal.

In this video I provide context and backstory for this lawsuit including...

Musk's turn as a co-founder, funder and one-time board member of OpenAI,

how OpenAI was in fact founded to be open yet has become closed,

how OpenAI is now oddly a not-for profit with a for-profit subsidiary,

the role of Microsoft and how all these threads fit into OpenAI's recent semi-implosion followed by #SamAltman's return to the helm.

#ArtificialIntelligence

What's in an LLM development library like LangChain? And why?

LangChain is a framework for developing applications powered by #LargeLanguageModel s (#LLM s). Just what does this mean? What is in this library and why? In this video, I start by contrasting #ChatGPT the popular web app with ChatGPT the developer API in order to point out some very basic tasks and problems that many people will quickly encounter when creating applications like chatbots. This is a great lens through which to start explaining not only what functionality is in LangChain but why it is in there in the form that it is and how you might decide to use (or not to use) such a tool.

#ArtificialIntelligence

Why the data breach at Wyze is too classic not to happen again

We used to say "data is the new oil" and I've always enjoyed ironically reinterpreting this maxim from a #DataPrivacy standpoint: data is something that inevitably leaks out of its pipes and when it does it is toxic waste.

It is through this lens that I tell the story of the recent data breach at Wyze. I give the basic facts and explain why this incident is very classic. Not only have things gone wrong in similar ways at other organizations in the past, one can also articulate structural challenges that guarantee things will go wrong in similar ways elsewhere in the future.

#CyberSecurity #SoftwareEngineering

Intelligent AI shopping is not to be taken for granted...

"We'll just buy AI." I hear this statement often and it is eminently reasonable except maybe for the "just" part. There is a flood of AI tools coming onto the market and I don't think intelligent shopping is something to take for granted. To an unusual degree, you will see shadows of the difficulty of building even if you only interested in buying and this situation is worth understanding. In this video, I discuss some unusually treacherous pitfalls you might find navigating this marketplace before exploring them tangibly in the seedy but illuminating AI girlfriend niche.

The tower of communication challenges in AI

Today's thesis because you need this is that getting #ArtificialIntelligence right in a large organization is primarily a #communication challenge. This is especially true to the extent that your company is not primarily an #AI company and I would say it is relevant whether you expect to be building things in-house or whether you expect to be buying them. There is a tall tower of stakeholders, from individual technical contributors with backgrounds like #DataScience or #SoftwareEngineering through corporate #management and potentially all the way up to #WallStreet, that will each have slightly different visions of "AI" that won't necessarily mesh without care and empathy. If you can align this tower, the sky is the limit. If you can't it will appear to everyone that everyone else is talking about nothing... and the microeconomics textbook has scary things to say about where this leads.

Facial recognition nightmares

If #ArtificialIntelligence turns your life into a dystopian hellscape anytime soon, I expect #FacialRecognition technology will be at the tip of the spear...

In December the Federal Trade Commission banned RITE AID from using facial recognition technology for a period of five years after it was revealed their implementation suffered systematic #AlgorithmicBias, often flagging women and people of color as shoplifters without good cause. This is essentially a story about a robot being a bigot across all Rite Aid stores on the company's behalf.

One might hope technological improvement will fix these issues, but I am here to tell you it is out of the frying pan and into the fire. Towards this end, I review some past incidents involving Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. where facial recognition was used not to flag criminals, but employees of law firms involved in litigation against the venue. Facial recognition is something that helps people exercise power, and we are now taking for granted that our would be bullies sometimes struggle to find us in pursuit of our lunch money.

These are nightmarish experiences for everyday people who have not done anything wrong.

This is a high-conviction take and I would like you to take notice. I roll out some of my best agitated hand-talk and idiosyncratic interpretation of Chinese proverbs in hopes of persuading you. Please take notice.

#DataPrivacy

Act on AI, don't react to AI

It's tough to know when to act and when to react, or sometimes even to know which one you are doing at a given moment. I draw on some standard negotiation concepts and folksy old-timer sayings in hopes of convincing you neither to uncritically embrace the current wave of #ArtificialIntelligence hype nor ignore the technology as a passing fad. Let me persuade you of a middle way: #AI is something you need to make part of your strategy for the next several years in a careful, thoughtful way that considers all the small details of how your business works.

#management #hype #strategy

Advice on sizing your project via an AI tabletop RPG toy

Many of us are thinking about how to size our #GenerativeAI projects and I would like to convince you to take care - this one is more subtle than some others. In this installment, I have both some significant figure metaphors from high school chemistry as well as an #AI Dungeons and Dragons toy we built using tools from #OpenAI and #Pinecone in a #RetrievalAugmentedGeneration (#RAG) architecture. The story is that a maximally quick and dirty approach is amazingly cheap, and then you can make superficially the same project infinitely expensive as you add more demands on quality control, #DataPrivacy, and #infrastructure.

AI is a LONG-TERM problem and opportunity for a business

Advances in #ArtificialIntelligence have started your business on a challenging journey whether you like it or not. I'd like to coach on how to end up at a pleasant destination. None of us can all the way avoid the hype and fashion of the moment, but in this matter I think a particular sort of long-term focus is essential. Concretely: you have five to seven years to integrate #AI into your operations in a way that is more pervasive than siloed, more strategic than tactical.

In this video, I tell this story in detail with some reflections on the recent history of #CloudComputing as a motivating example.

Artificial intelligence and ROI culture

#ArtificialIntelligence is different from previous hype cycles in how it is likely to touch about everything in the white-collar world eventually. There is much to be said, though, about how fast this happens for any given function or organization. In this video, I discuss differing cultures around #ROI, the difficulty of measuring #productivity, and share some factors I expect will shape the pace of adoption.

What does it cost? The small details of AI project complexity

"What does it really cost to build and run this?" is a very sensible question to ask yourself about your nascent project #ArtificialIntelligence project involving #LargeLanguageModels (#LLM) or #GenerativeAI more broadly. More than ever, the answer to this question might depend hugely on the fine details of what you want to achieve. In this video, I talk about how the guardrails you put on your implementation (data privacy, vendor stability, and quality control) can quickly add complexity that will put pressure on your bottom line.

Your organization needs to change to leverage AI

If you have worked in a large IT organization you have probably had an experience with "blockers" - you were in a position where you couldn't advance a project because you were waiting for a key someone else to do something. This is a hint at the big challenge of #ArtificialIntelligence from the #management perspective: tactically improving productivity here and there by buying this or that tool may not get you to a punchline faster, and really seeing those gains will require painful reforms in how the organization is run. In this video, I talk about some recurring conversations I have had with everyday people and build you a sort of management fantasy to provide some hints on what you will need to do to stay in the fast lane.

Analysis: The New York Times sues OpenAI

#GenerativeAI and the #LargeLanguageModel are generating landmark, interesting lawsuits if nothing else. In this video, I discuss the recently announced #NewYorkTimes lawsuit targeting OpenAI and its incorporation of copyrighted material into #ChatGPT along with

backstory on the nascent business of selling news for AI

downstream risks for business and IT leaders interested in #LLM

#Reddit as a problematic sleeping giant of #ArtificialIntelligence.

Ugly news on the 23andMe breach + how to protect yourself

There have been some ugly new revelations of late regarding the #DataBreach 23andMe announced Friday with the total number of customers compromised rising to almost 7 million. I cover recent news and basic facts of this breach with a special emphasis on consumer behavior and what to think about if you have been affected. #CyberSecurity #DataPrivacy

Anthropic is a rather unusual public benefit corporation. Is this good?

This next chapter in my series on unusual #CorporateGovernance in #ArtificialIntelligence concerns #GenerativeAI and #LargeLanguageModel vendor Anthropic and it's unusual public benefit corporation (aka #BCorp) structure. I give a bit of context on the ?why? of the B-corp, discuss it's limited history, and discuss how it might increase vulnerability to some standard corporate governance problems. It is worth emphasizing that it is a new thing, so there is not really much history to underwrite these objections, yet novelty per se is not a great quality in corporate governance.

You might consider these issues relative to the tumult at OpenAI which was certainly fueled in part by that other company's own unusual (if different) governance structure.