+ AI - 180 people = 2x stock price

Hey there,

yesterday we launched a big rebranding of AI Academy, as well as four new courses: AI Career Compass, Build Ethical AI, Foundations of AI, and No-Code GPT3. Check them out!

Also: On the 21st of March I’ll be hosting a workshop titled “Democratising access to AI education - why and how” for the Mozilla Festival.

I’ll take a hands-on approach to increase access to AI education. We will explore real-world examples of why we need to expand the pool of people engaged in AI, and discuss actionable ways to make this happen.

Join me at MozFest! Get your ticket here.

This post has been sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation.

Now let’s get to this week’s news:

• 🍕 + AI - 180 people = 2x stock price
• Pizza Bytes 🍕: AI for music, ChatGPT plus, Elon lawsuit, quintillion dollar asteroid
• Tiramisù 😋: catGPT, How to cancel ChatGPT

🍕 + AI - 180 people = 2x stock price

The media company Buzzfeed has fired 180 people less than two months ago. That’s 12% of its workforce. Last week, they announced that they were going to use ChatGPT to “enhance” their content and personalize it for their audience. Their stock has doubled the price since the announcement, with a peak of 400% more.

Buzzfeed’s CEO has said that they are taking copyright issues very seriously and don’t want to use AI to replace people, but to make them more efficient instead.

Sure.

There seem to be two approaches in this AI revolution: embrace it or fight it. Buzzfeed is embracing it, and so is the stock images website Shutterstock which has started integrating AI-generated images into its product. Shutterstock’s competitor Getty Images is fighting it and sued Stability AI.

I believe that the “embrace it” strategy should also be split into two: the “replacing” strategy which seems to be the case for these two companies or to empower people by giving them AI tools to do their best work.

We haven’t seen yet really good tools for human-AI interactions, so it’s understandable that a lot of companies embracing AI are in the first category: seeking efficiency to replace people. My wish is that as time goes on, we’ll see more and more tools specifically designed to allow people to make their best work, powering a new wave of AI companies.

I’ll for sure work on this second category, and I hope you do too. Competition is welcome in this case 🙂

AI Pizza bytes 🍕

Other tech news in 5 lines or less.

• OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Plus. It costs 20$/month and it gives you access to ChatGPT even during peak times, it’s faster, and gives you priority access to updates. It’s available just in the US for now. The free version will keep being available.
• Google releases a demo for MusicLM: an AI model capable of generating music from text. Think about DALL-E but for music. You can even start with an image and generate a soundtrack for it! To be honest the quality is not always great, but it’s for sure an impressive beginning. Scroll down if you want to hear Bella Ciao done with Tribal drums and flute.
• Neeva launches an update to its search engine powered by a ChatGPT-like experience, but backed by real data and citations. This is the kind of experience that threatens Google.
• OpenAI launches an AI algorithm to detect AI-generated text. It’s kinda disappointing: it can catch just 26% of AI written text, and mistakes 9% of human-written text for AI-written. It works even worse for short bits of text.
• Meta’s Chied AI Scientist Yann LeCun commented on ChatGPT’s success in an interview. Summary: ChatGPT isn’t innovative, OpenAI is not ahead of anyone, Google and Meta haven’t released anything because “both have a lot to lose by putting out systems that make stuff up”. I think he’s right, but he’s forgetting that Meta has already released AI models that “make stuff up”, and is missing the point: openAI succeeded in creating a compelling user experience. That’s not easy.
• Microsoft officially confirmed their investment in openAI.
• Google released a research paper describing what looks like ChatGPT’s copy. Just in case you thought they were sleeping on it.
• Meta released a research paper with demos for a tool that creates 3d objects from a simple text description.

Pizza bytes Crypto

• Celsius is a crypto lending platform that went bankrupt in July. They would like to create a new imaginary token called Asset Share Tokens (AST) that just creditors can buy, and they should reflect the value of the assets they lost in the bankruptcy.
• The idea of using crypto to trade the bankruptcy claim of bankrupt crypto exchanges seems contagious. That’s also the idea behind GTX, a new exchange funded by a bunch of crypto entrepreneurs who…funded bankrupt crypto exchanges and stole money 🤦‍♂️
• It turns out Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has sold almost all of his fund’s crypto before the crush, netting $1.8bn in returns. Good for him, too bad that he kept saying to people that BTC’s price was going to increase 100x after he sold all of his…

Pizza bytes - More in tech

• Elon Musk got sued in Germany because he’s failing to enforce its own rules against antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial.
• This year NASA is starting a mission to an asteroid that could be worth 70,000 times the global economy. Asteroid mining sounds kinda crazy but hey, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars in materials are a lot of dollars.

Tiramisù 😋

The sweet part of the newsletter: fun news from the crazy world of tech.

• CatGPT: if ChatGPT was a cat. My Labrador Martin is not happy, please someone builds LabGPT.
• How to cancel ChatGPT

You reached the end of this edition 😢

I’ll talk to you next week.

Ciao 👋

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