Edition 5: Where to upskill for free, scaleup investments, and the importance of human writers

This week in AI:

• Oracle and Cohere announce partnership
• Courses are springing up everywhere so you can learn more, faster
• The tool that can tell you if someone has used Gen AI in an academic paper

Oracle and Cohere announce partnership

First up, a disclosure – I work at Oracle.?However if you’ve been following my newsletter for a while you know that I write about the big things happening in AI, and this is one big bit of news.?All views are my own :)

Oracle has invested in LLM scaleup Cohere’s Series C investment round.?Cohere, headquartered in Toronto, was founded in 2019, and focuses on giving developers and businesses access to powerful NLP tools and LLMs through API access.?Oracle joined the likes of other companies like NVidea and Salesforce, and investors such as Index Ventures and Schroders Capital, in the $270m Series C round.?You can read more about it here.

So what does the partnership look like??There are more details to be found here, but it goes far beyond investment.?Speaking on Monday’s earnings call, Larry Elllison spoke of the shared vision to make it:

“very, very easy for enterprise customers to train their own specialised large language models, while protecting the privacy of their training data.”?

Cohere is running in OCI, which also happens to be the “first platform to offer an AI supercomputer at scale to thousands of customers across every industry” in collaboration with NVIDEA.?(Source here)

Courses are springing up everywhere so you can learn more, faster

Hot on the heels of my top tip to try Andrew Ng’s prompt engineering course from OpenAI, a multitude of companies have opened up free training courses for LLMs.

This brings me so much joy!?It’s so, so important that LLMs and generative AI are understood by as many people as possible, so that as diverse a group as possible can help build systems surrounding them, to try and combat the tricky problem of bias in AI.?So even if you’re not in the field of software engineering, AI or data science, I really recommend trying some of these courses and seeing if you enjoy them, or continuing to read around the subject.?It’s great that companies are not putting up barriers to entry with cost, and instead choosing to roll these out for free.

There are three on my list to investigate properly:

Microsoft's AI for Beginners

Google's Generative AI Learning Path

Cohere's LLM University

Let me know if you try them, I’d love to hear what you think.

The tool that can tell you if someone has used Gen AI in an academic paper

Finally, the University of Kansas is working on a tool that checks for the use of generative AI technologies in academic papers.?Claiming to have reached 99% accuracy, the tool “reads” papers and flags suspect content.

Why is this important??More and more people are turning to platforms like ChatGPT for content creation.?According to Forbes, 89% of college students have admitted to use ChatGPT in assignments, but a third of academics believe that the use of LLMs in this context should be banned.

I think that the detection of LLM generated content is super important, as it will raise a flag to us human readers to be cautious.?These systems can be easily influenced – they’re led by the data they’re fed – so we need to be more rigorous in fact-checking content.?As an aside too, I don’t think that LLMs will ever replace the creative flair of a great writer, journalist or academic; the investigative journalists who can think outside the box and dig for facts far beyond what's currently in existence, the writers who make technical concepts easier to digest yet still make them engaging and a joy to read and learn from, the authors who are coming up with new, mindbending fiction which isn’t a derivative work, and the academics who are making breakthroughs that haven’t been seen.?There’s some human talent that just can’t be emulated by a machine or learnt, in my opinion.?What do you think?

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In case you don’t know me, my name’s Jenny.?I work at Oracle as VP of Data Science, but all views expressed here are my own.?I try to cite others’ work whether possible, so please follow links in my writing to dive deeper into topic areas, written by others.?I’m not responsible for the contents of those links.