Windows Copilot Newsletter #7
ChatGPT turns 1; Amazon releases 'Q'; Bing claims Australia does not exist...
Welcome to the seventh edition of the Windows Copilot Newsletter, where we share some of the most interesting stories from the rapidly evolving field of AI chatbots. Another huge week, let’s dive right in…
Top News
ChatGPT turns one: It’s increasingly difficult to recall a time before AI chatbots, and, in particular, ChatGPT. But it’s only been a year - yet look how much has already changed. Ars Technica gives us a breathless overview of some of the year’s events here.
Amazon releases it’s own chatbot, ‘Q’: At this week’s re:Invent conference, cloud computing behemoth Amazon Web Services unveiled ‘Q’, its own AI chatbot. Fully integrated into the AWS dashboard, Q appears to be heavily tuned to answer questions about AWS practices and procedures - and avoids answering other questions put to it. Safe, pointed - and one future of enterprise AI. Read about it here.
Copilot coming to Windows Terminal: Though many people never need to touch Windows’ Terminal app, it’s an essential tool for more technical users of Windows. With its own programming environment - Windows Power Shell - it’s rich, obscure, and hard to master. That makes it ideal for Copilot integration - a feature now being tested in the ‘Canary’ pre-release branch of Windows 11. Read about that here.
Top Tips
Bard can now watch YouTube videos for you: Google’s Bard - the perennial also-ran AI chatbot - has a nifty new feature: it can watch a YouTube video for you, and write up a summary. Rather than sitting through that boring 50 minute presentation for three key sentences, why not let Bard be bored? Learn how to do this here.
Use ChatGPT as an advice columnist: A recent study showed that ChatGPT outperformed professional advice columnists in the quality of its responses. Does that mean we should be using ChatGPT as our Agony Aunt? Possibly - if you don’t mind OpenAI knowing all your most private confidences. Read about it here.
Safely and Wisely
A new attack exposes data used to train AI chatbots: Although AI chatbots are trained on large amounts of text, they’re ‘aligned’ so as to not regurgitate verbatim the content they have been trained upon. So goes the theory. Research released this week - led by Google’s DeepMind team - shows how you can reach this ‘hidden’ knowledge with some fairly simple techniques. This is a big security hole. Read about that here.
AI image generators can be fooled into creating ‘bad’ images: Another group of researchers have revealed how, just by adding strings of nonsense to the prompts of image generators like DALL-E 3, those image generators ignore their ‘guardrails’ to generate NSFW/explicit/violent images. A must-read for anyone using AI image generators.
Bing claims Australia does not exist: Why would Microsoft’s AI chatbot & search engine refuse to believe in Australia? Most likely because of a conspiracy theory circulating around the darker corners of the Internet a few years back. In any case, this information recently surfaced, with red faces all around. Read about that here. (As this newsletter is published in Sydney, we take these sorts of conspiracies rather seriously.)
Longreads
The AI-accelerated end of Sports Illustrated: Once one of the mightest and most popular of American magazines, Sports Illustrated began a slow decline two decades ago, a decline that has dramatically accelerated as its new owners incorporate generative AI. Futurism charts the story of how the mightiest of the mighty have fallen here.
Book News
We’re less than a week away from the release of my next book, Getting Started with ChatGPT and AI Chatbots! BCS Publishing has been turning the cranks as fast as possible to get copies to us here in Australia for the worldwide launch on the 6th of December. Pre-order a copy here.
If you’re Sydney-based, please join us for my book launch, at noon, Wednesday 6 December 2023, at the Sydney Startup Hub (Level 6, 11 York Street Sydney 2000). It’s free to attend, but it will be very helpful if you can grab a ticket, so we can know how many folks will be joining us. Register by clicking on the button below.
That’s all for this week - we’ll be back next week with more news about AI chatbots. (And definitive read on whether Australia exists...)
Until then, thanks!
Mark Pesce
www.markpesce.com // Need help with AI?