#41 - Personal AI's

Sorry I haven't sent an update for a bit - the past month was a blur of activity with end of semester at college and a whole string of talks on AI to various audiences, plus the launch of my new AI course with TriGraph that has run twice so far.

A busy month...

In the past 4 weeks, I've delivered AI sessions to University College Dublin, The Royal Photographic Society, the Project Management Institute, the National Standards Authority of Ireland, a 4 session open AI course through Trigraph, Vale Photographic Club, The Digital Learning Institute & the Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education & Training. And I'm working on a new podcast series with a couple of colleagues in Australia - more on that soon...

Drop me a line to [email protected] if you'd like a session for your company or institution.

Here's a video of one of those talks I delivered for the UCD Professional Academy and UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School titled "Supercharge Your Studies". I covered a number of AI tools that give students a leg up in their studies, and also discussed my approach to the use of AI in my own classrooms - which is to encourage it and help the students master what will be a key differentiating skillset as they enter the employment market after their programme. Enjoy!

Personalised AI's

One of the things we're going to see a lot of movement on over the next few months & years is the development of dedicated chatbots, both in the corporate space but also in our personal lives. Our mobile phones are increasingly leveraging AI to deliver all their technical wizardry, and there's clearly moves afoot to ramp this up with Apple this week reportedly in talks with both Google and OpenAI to use Gemini and ChatGPT in their upcoming iOS 18 and perhaps the iPhone 16, both due out later this year.

I'd be interested to hear your comments on Google Gemini - I've found it pretty glitchy on my Mac Air M1 and so have really not spent much time on it - it it just me?

New ChatGPT features

ChatGPT is rolling out some new features this week that address personalising the use of the tool. One feature is a longer term memory, so information that you put in about yourself in chats will be held in a special area that will build up with more and more information about yourself, so later responses can better reflect you. This area will be fully editable, so you'll have full control over what ChatGPT 'remembers" about you.

Another long overdue option included in this release is the ability to specify that a chat is to be confidential. When you do this, anything that you upload or use in your chat will not be retained or used in the wider training data set. This has been an issue for many users up to now - including me - and is a question that comes up pretty much every time I run a session - which chatbots are "safe" to upload information into without it ending up as public data?

Run chatbots locally on your own computer

If you install LM Studio , you can download LLM's (large language models) locally to run on your own computer. Unlike running ChatGPT or others in your browser, this means that anything you ask them stays on your own computer, so it's a great way to be sure that your information isn't ending up anywhere you don't want it to.

The screenshot below shows me downloading 3 LLM's - Llama 3, Mistral & Microsoft's Phi 3 mini.

Each takes up 3 or 4Gb of space, and once downloaded, you can choose which to use by selecting from the dropdown at the top of the screen:

I loaded up Llama 3 and asked it to give me a lesson plan for a 1 hour session to undergrad students on Risk Management for projects:

The answer was pretty good - it not only gave me some content structure but also teaching notes, and even a sample rubric to use for assessment. This is a great way to explore different LLM's in a safe environment that means data isn't going anywhere it shouldn't - and might be well worth looking at for companies worried about data privacy as well - this is easy to install and try out & free for personal use.

I imagine that pretty soon we'll all have our own private LLM that runs across all of our devices, knows pretty much everything there is to know about us and acts as our day to day assistant. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is what Apple unveil later on this year - they've been very quiet in the AI space to date but are clearly working away behind the scenes on something big...

Gadgets and gizmos

We've already seen a few early devices, like Humane's AI pin and the Rabbit r1 , but these are just the start. The Humane AI pin isn't getting a lot of love in the reviews I've seen to date, but the Rabbit r1 seems to be doing much better, and as it's "only" €200 it's priced at a point that might see a lot more people try it just to see what all the fuss in about... Click on the images below to find out more...

Elicit gets a big update - AI powered notebooks

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD keeps us all up to date on new tools in the academic space, and he reported on a big update to Elicit - one of the better AI powered research assistants recently - with this detailed post on LinkedIn.

Great prompt for non-native English students

This post from Pat Hickey is an excellent example of how AI can really help break down barriers to understanding and comprehension:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/patrick-hickey-357ab41b5_prompt-for-eal-learners-activity-7185710410954682368-QPp6?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

AI seminar

Recording of a recent seminar by Michelle Kassorla, Ph.D. on "Embracing the AI mindset - Transformative Strategies for course design".

EPALE - The European Adult Learning Network

Do you know about EPALE - the European Adult Learning Network? I'm one of the Irish Ambassadors for EPALE, and you can join over 100,000 educators across Europe in a free online community - it's a great way to get different points of view, participate in training from across the continent and stay up to date on educational thought. Create your free account at https://epale.ec.europa.eu/en/user/login

Affiliate Links (stuff I use and recommend)

Unriddle AI is a research site that lets you upload docs and then interrogate them.

https://www.unriddle.ai//?ref=JH

Check out Humata - it's another AI that let's you work on your own documents and interrogate them . https://www.humata.ai/?via=joe-houghton

My tool of choice for serious AI image creation is Leonardo. The user interface is easy and very powerful, enabling you to create just what you want in any style really quickly. https://app.leonardo.ai/?via=joe

Notion

This is my tool of choice now for collecting all the bits'n'pieces of information I squirrel away for talk, articles and presentations. I can then generate webpages in a snap and share them, and they update in real-time as I add new info to them! There's so much you can do in Notion - well worth a look:

OK, that's enough for today - see you next time!

Joe Houghton is an Assistant Professor at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he directs the MSc programmes in Project Management. After a career in IT in multinationals, Joe switched into a portfolio career of University teaching, management coaching and training.

He has authored 6 books to date including "Innovative teaching with AI: Creative approaches to enhancing learning in education ", and "Project Management made easy...: the ECCSR approach ". His latest book "Applying Artificial Intelligence to Close the Accessibility Gap: A practical handbook for educators & students! " is now available on Amazon! More on this in a future edition...

Contact Joe on email at [email protected] for any requests for training, seminars, workshops or keynote speaking.