Threads Makes a Fashionable Debut and AI is Gobbling our Words With no Payback
July 27 | 3PM EDT | Zoom?Bring Us Your Pandemic Memories?The WHO (World Health Organization) says the pandemic officially ended on May 5th, but the changes in our lives, notably in our events’ lives, linger.?Dahlia El Gazzar,?Mary Ann Pierce, and?Michael Hiskey?guide us through what we’ve gained, what we’ve lost, and what we’ll never forget.?
Threads Makes A Fashionable Debut???We took a week off from this newsletter to steal a little vacay time and look at what happened! Meta, after losing billions of dollars (not to mention goodwill) on its Metaverse dreams, hit it big with something refreshingly simple and a lot less costly to develop. Threads, Meta’s new Twitter-like text-based service, appeared at precisely the right moment, and if Meta is smart, it’ll make posting to FB, Insta and Threads as easy as posting once.?
Threads had a trifecta moment.?Here’s why:
Threads?even bypassed ChatGTP in terms of adoption rate. It boasted 5 million sign-ups in the first 4 hours after the service went live. In its first 48 hours it?surpassed 70 million sign-ups, rattling Twitter enough to?threaten legal action against Meta.
Early Threaders laud it for being easy to use, (you download the app and attach it to your Instagram account), and friendly (though it’s hard to imagine that the mean-spirited and the disinformers are going to stay away for long).
Our guess is that the novelty will wear off and personal identity and social media ills will plague Threads like any other platform. But, for this one brief moment, Threads is enjoying Camelot status. It could be that Threads remains focused on friends, co-workers, and shared interests as opposed to Twitter, which has become a quagmire. But, doubtful.
We’d also be surprised if the?FTC??didn’t scrutinize Threads for anti-competitive practices. After all, owning WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads gives them way too much skin in the social game. Zuckerberg came out of this round looking like a hero (an interesting role reversal) but the match is far from over.?
I Measure That Emotion???I learned about?Heartbeat AI?from event behavioral psychologist?Victoria Matey’s?podcast featuring?Daniel Alferov, the Director of Empathy Analysis at Heartbeat AI. Heartbeat uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and custom taxonomies to understand a wide range of emotions, sorting them into primary and secondary emotions. We'll be speaking to Heartbeat about its secret sauce for combining AI and human analysis in a future issue.
The software claims to analyze emotions from texts. The site says that basic emotions (fear, rage, care, search, panic, play, and lust) are driven by evolutionary survival needs that are hard-wired in the older limbic system of the brain. Secondary emotions, emotional states, and feelings arise in our awareness after they’ve been processed in evolutionarily more recent parts of the brain, such as the neocortex. Unstructured text, they contend, is a goldmine for exploring feelings.?
Exploring emotional responses via tech is not new. Other attempts include everything from biometric wearables to products like?Zenus, which analyzes facial patterns to measure sentiment. But Heartbeat is the first I’ve heard that is based on an AI chatbot. My only problem after reading?the whitepaper?is that people tend to write the most when they’re pissed off and that humans still need to find patterns in the data to figure out what actions to take.
Scuttlebutt???ChatGPT PlugIns?
It’s worth paying for the ChatGTP upgrade ($20/month) if only to get the plugins. You can have up to three plugins in use at a time. Jeremey Caplan, one of our favorite featured speakers, details the wonderful world of ChatGPT plugins in his?Wondertools blog?this month.?
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Happy Non-Independence Day
On July 3rd, Google made a quiet sleight of hand, changing its policies to say something along the lines of “if it’s on the web, then it’s fair game for us to use it to train our AI models.” The pushback is coming in quickly from many sources: Reddit, Twitter, the media industry, and more. Individuals everywhere are beginning to lobby for their “large language model” rights. Simply put, if Google uses my data to train its model, I want it to ask me to opt in or figure out how to reimburse me for my time. We all work for Large Language Models now, and that is a thought to be reckoned with. Alfred Poor wrote me to say it reminds him of “shrinkwrap licenses”.?You open the wrap you accept the license.?
ChatGPT Continues its Trajectory
The number of people using generative AI at least monthly will catapult almost 900% this year to 61.5 million, according to?Insider Intelligence forecasts. They predict that 25.5% of the US population will be using ChatGPT by 2025. It will "radically" change how consumers obtain information and make purchase decisions and it "will require new formats and relationships to place ads." Trust us, ad models are being reimagined as we type.?
Hybrids Are Dead; Virtual and Physical are Not?
Practicing what we preach, we’re about to take a small but wildly successful 22-year-old conference on green investing called?Wall Street Green?and blow it out worldwide as a virtual conference. That said, we’re not holding the in-person and virtual conferences at the same time. Everything about each event will be crafted for the chosen platform.?
What does that mean? The virtual conference will have much shorter sessions, built-in time for networking, and guided tours of sponsored areas. It’ll have more one-on-one meetings to foster green investments, and those meetings will have been carefully planned in advance. Best of all, the virtual will spring out of the live event, with an installed base of attendees wanting to dig deeper after the live event, continuing to have experiences on a global level. With some exceptions, we are firm believers that virtual and physical events are two different beasts, and trying to cobble them together is a mistake.
Connections Will Be Made
We’re starting to understand that meetings are not just about attendees meeting exhibitors. Exhibitors need to meet each other (M&A and partnerships happen), and attendees need to meet each other. First-timers should meet old-timers, and influencers should meet exhibitors they might be able to work with. Intergenerational mentoring can be meaningful and bidirectional. The list goes on. Connections come in many forms. Keep plugging at them. They are worth the effort.?
If You Missed AI for Good
The?AI for Good Summit?took place in Geneva last week and featured conversations with robots as one of its main attractions. Freaky and fantastic. You can still meet the lineup of smartass?robots?and?read more?about what went down.
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