Artificial Intelligence and LLMs
“The paper adds to a small but growing body of evidence that today’s most advanced AI models are becoming capable of strategic deception.”
From Time Magazine, 3 days before publication of the article. Is this interpretation inflammatory or just exaggerated?
US media is not following this development in AI. A whistleblower from OpenAI who recently left the company is found dead. Police say it is suicide, but it is not revealed for more than a week. And it takes the BBC to report on it before it makes news in the US.
NYTimes interviewed him a few weeks ago, but has not printed anything about his death yet. Mysterious.
I polled my students and the ONLY AI they used was ChatGPT. It felt like the iPhone phenomenon, but even worse. They were unaware of any others. I am set to remedy that in the next couple of weeks with a 3-week intro to “Using AI for Language Learning”, the final module of three of my classes.
It seems that AI researchers use different AIs for different purposes. The new favorite in Silicon Valley is Anthropic’s Claude AI. Here is Kevin Roose from the NYTimes on this. (Gift article)
I’m curious about what you use for yourself and for students. I’ve been playing around with TalkPal to improve my Japanese. It seems to work. I do get a flavor of how nervous my students are using AI for learning. I hope to teach them to feel more in control. I’m beta testing IDoRecall where you can add spaced repetition learning to almost anything you encounter, and link back to it if you don’t remember the flash cards. I’ve signed up for a similar site at YouLearn. Still looking into both.
Advances in technology are, for me, heartwarming. I am at heart a progressive. As a world, we must always be improving, or we are decaying. Sometimes both happen at the same time. But these are in the plus column.
Khanmigo gets better. This looks like something we may even use for language learning. Especially the writing part. Watch this 13-minute section from the TV documentary 60 minutes.
I get a firehose of new tools with daily newsletter/posts from There’s an AI for That (TAAFT) and TLDR. It’s nice to focus on one thing once in a while. I like the first better because I can customize what it sends to me more easily.
Three more from Google this week. One for right now, one for a year or two down the road, and a third farther out.
Here is one for teachers and other spreadsheet users. Kevin Stratvert has wonderful how-to videos. He used to do pretty much excusively Microsoft software. This is new for him and for me. AI in a spreadsheet. It does a couple of things like matching up names and grades on two different sheets that take me a long time to do. I’ve signed up and plan to use it this weekend.
That’s all for now. Lots more stuff coming down the pike, though. Teachers, check out Russel Stannard‘s channel for lots of good hands-on tools. Check out his latest on Magic School.
Ethan Mollick (new book out, I’m on the waiting list at the library)has a new newsletter out about things you should and should not use AI for. Check out #4 if you are a teacher, and then look closely at the NOT part. If you are a student who wants to LEARN a language (or anything else), be very careful on how you use AI.