Game of LLMs

Winter is coming...and so are the lawyers

Author

David Williams
November 28, 2024

Welcome targ-AI-ryen’s,

This week's newsletter is full of battles and OpenAI seems to be at the center of them. Why OpenAI? why? 🤔

Along with some prompt tips, an app that looks good (but I haven't actually tried yet), and the usual news and links to upcoming workshops, I found two must-read articles for you:
1) If you teach English or really are unmoved by the AI hype, read Burn It Down: A License for AI Resistance
2) If you are worried about the environment impact of generative AI, read Hannah Ritchie's essay on the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand
Find them both below (I'm not giving you the link here so you have to scroll through all the other interesting stuff I found for you 😉)

Prompt of the Week 💡

Not a prompt, more like a prompting guide...from Ethan Mollick again. It is well worth a full read, but the main points are:

  • you need to put in at least 10 hours of playing around with a gen AI tool to start to understand their capability
     

  • think of AI as a capable, but new coworker who

    • has infinite patience

    • forgets each conversation

    • Needs clear context

    • works best in your own area of expertise

  • Consider two broad categories of interactions

    • Tasks you want the AI to do. For these, be specific, provide relevant background, ask for multiple versions ("Don't ask for 5 ideas, ask for 30") and provide feedback

    • As a thought partner. For these tasks, engage in natural dialogue and consider using the voice mode (especially the advanced voice feature on ChatGPT)

AI App Spotlight 🔍

I have had several recommendations to try out the AI writing tool lex.page. I really wanted to get into it, but haven't had a chance to yet. It was created by people who write for a living and is designed with a simple, distraction free interface along with a writer focused AI interface with shortcuts to help with grammar, brevity, cliches, passive voice, confidence etc.
There is a free version and a paid version. The free version limits the number of AI interactions and allows you to use Claude Haiku 3.5 or GPT-4o mini The paid version gives unlimited AI usage, access to the top end models (e.g. GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5) and support via discord.
Craig van Slyke from the AI Goes to College substack has a more detailed review .

AI News of the Week 📰

  • I've written about system prompts before. These are the comprehensive prompts written by the chat bot providers that provide overall guidance to the responses of the chatbots. Anthropic, which is the company that develops Claude, now provides the system prompts they use in their release notes

    • Amanda Askel, is one of the main authors of the system prompt and she provides a breakdown of what it does, here on Twitter

    • One of the most interesting thing to me, is the language she uses to guide Claude. For example using phrases like "don't do this" really only turn the dial to 50%, while phrases like "never ever ever do this..." turn the dial to about 80%. There doesn't seem to be a way to block a type of response completely (I actually got this from her interview with Lex Fridman, not from the above Twitter link)
       

  • Could an LLM be conscious
     

  • Google Gemini is at the top of the chatbot leader board at the moment./p>

    • The top 3 (ChatGPT, Claude Sonnet 3.5, and Google Gemini) always seem to be trading places at the top, so my advice remains the same. Play around with the different models and pick the one that you like best.
       

  • Advanced Voice mode is available on the desktop version of ChatGPT for Pro users and it is available for free users for 10 minutes per month.
    Top use cases of Advanced Voice Mode:

  • AI safety book from the AI Safety, Ethics and Society is available for free
     

  • France's Mistral AI has released a large and open weight large language model (open weight means that you can download the neural network and run on your own system...assuming you have powerful enough computers)

    • It supports a canvas feature (like Claude artifacts), PDF analysis, web search, image generation, and the ability to create agents

    • All available for free on Le Chat (best name for a chatbot)

    • If you are just a casual user of LLMs, it may not be worth your time to use it since you have ChatGPT for free too, but if you want free image generation, I do suggest trying it out because it uses one of the better image generators: Flux 1.1
       

  • In 2017, before any of us were even thinking about generative AI, the founders of OpenAI were locked in an epic battle for control of the company. Their email battle is now on full display due to the lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against the company

AI Powered Pedagogy 📚

  • OpenAI, in an attempt to win over educators and students released OpenAI's Guide to Writing With ChatGPT .

    • The article itself is not super detailed, but each tip links to an example chat within ChatGPT that you can then build upon
       

  • OpenAI's guide was not well received by all educators and Arthur Perret put forward some good counter arguments in his Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT

    • For example: OpenAI suggests that you "Delegate citation grunt work to ChatGPT" but Perret counters saying, why risk the mistakes that ChatGPT could make when you could use free tools like Zotero to help you manage citations.
       

  • Things get even more heated in Melanie Dusseau's article in Inside Higher Ed Burn It Down: A License for AI Resistance

    • Basically, Dusseau gives you permission to object to adopting AI in your teaching practice "dismantl[ing] the imaginative practice of human writing is abhorrent and unethical"
       

  • You missed the ai4libraries conference, but all keynotes and sessions are available online at https://www.ai4libraries.org/2024recordings

  • Learn With AI (at University of Maine) Navigation is a bit wonky, but there are so many user shared resources as well as links to past and upcoming events

Upcoming Events 📅

Upcoming events, workshops, conferences etc. for AI in education. Links here are not an endorsement.

The mAIn Event 🎯

What's the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand

I'm not going to write a mAIn event this week. Is it because I'm lazy? Yes, but also because this article by Hannah Ritchie is a must read if you are fretting about the energy impact of generative AI.
Spoiler: according to predictions by the International Energy Agency, it's probably not as bad as you think...at least for the next five years.

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