The Friday Thing #784

Thanks for all the notes back on last week’s edition . I think I alarmed some people with the first two lines of Ultra Violet. Oops!

The Friday Thing #784 comes at the end of an energizing week for me. It began last weekend in many ways with a fun (but very cold) bike ride around Basel with a great friend and though I was exhausted when I arrived back in Seattle, I became more energized as the week went on – fueled by the excitement of this new era of artificial intelligence (AI) we’re entering. Almost every conversation I had in Switzerland the week before was focused on AI and ChatGPT and I came back to work excited about what the next few weeks, months and years hold. I’m a geek at heart who loves technology and the impact it can have and as I drove to work this week, I was reminded of my final year university dissertation that was titled ‘The Impact of the Internet on Education’. I wrote the dissertation in the midst of the Mosaic web browser being released and have ridden that wave ever since – it helped me get my first job at AstraZeneca, my second job at Microsoft and well, that story continues. It feels like we’re in the same foothills of those Mosaic days – on the cusp of something that will change the way we work, live, learn and so much more. I believe the foothills analogy is appropriate here too as there will no doubt be ups and downs on this journey with AI, but the promise outweighs the peril in my mind.

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I was also reminded that I’ve rambled towards these foothills over the last few years. A few times during the week, I was asked to help explain AI and share my thoughts on the potential. It took me back to 2017 when I was involved in the creation of a Pocket Guide to AI that we distributed at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It was a fun, light intro to a topic that many were just getting to grips with and while the technology has moved on, especially with generative AI, the content of that guide remains a useful (and fun) explainer.

So, here’s a video of the Pocket Guide to AI .?Oh and I may have a few copies still lying around too ?? ....and there is PDF version.....hmmmmm.

In 2020, for Microsoft’s Build conference, we continued the theme with illustrator Craighton Berman creating a short video of Kevin Scott explaining Microsoft’s work to build an AI supercomputer . It’s this technology that OpenAI has used to train its breakthrough models to build products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT. If you’ve not seen the video, I’d highly recommend it as it’s very pertinent to this current wave of AI.?

Suffice it to say, my reading list of late is chock full of AI content – from the tech side of things to the social impact, economic impact and more. There is so much to learn, so much to do and so much optimism I have for what the future holds. Apologies in advance if the next few weeks of Friday Things are AI heavy ??

That’s all for this week.

Happy Friday, everyone.

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- Steve