Welcome to Wednesday’s news and views of all things AI. Let’s dive right in

News

UN announces AI Advisory Group: Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced the formation of a 39 member board to tackle the issue of AI governance. Coming as it does just before the UK’s AI Safety Summit which Guterres will attend, this is another move in the right direction. Read the scoop here

Biden issues AI Executive Order: President Biden has issued the first piece of significant legislation in the form of an Executive Order carrying the force of law. You can find a summary of the legislation and my take on it here

The Beatles Release Last Song: with a little help from AI. Now and Then sees the Fab Four back together for the last time using AI to bring a long forgotten recording back to life. Check it out here and watch the trailer here

OpenAI Launch Preparedness Team: In a move welcomed by industry experts, a new team has been established within OpenAI to look at potentially catastrophic developments and threats caused by AI including nuclear, chemical and biological! Read about it here

Spot Gives The Grand Tour: Spot, Boston Dynamic’s four legged robot, has been upgraded with ChatGPT to speak and answer questions relating to the tour it gives of their facilities. Amazing fusion of AI and robotics. See more here

Tools

This week, the focus turns on ChatGPT. Hardly a new tool, but actually it is in the process of having an upgrade and I’ve been afforded a sneak peek! Here’s the lowdown:

First, its training date has been uprated to mid 2023 from September 2021. This will make a huge difference in terms of understanding recent events.

Second, all the disparate versions of ChatGPT-4, that is, Browse with Bing, Analytics, DALL-E3, are now all in the one newly released version. So in one version, you can now ask it to interrogate photos, chat with your own pdf files, get up to the minute analysis via Bing, generate exceptional photo realistic art and analyse all your spreadsheet data. Oh and it can write poetry just as easy as it can write computer code in multiple languages. Speaking of which it can translate on the fly and speak to you in multiple languages too. If thats not worth the $20 per month, then I don’t know what is. It is the best value I get every day.

Prompt

Not so much an actual prompt, more a strategy to get the best outcomes from all your prompts.

Content/SEO specialist Tim Hanson recently shared this prompting gem on LinkedIn. Use it alongside any prompt:

Before you give me an answer, take the time to ask me any number of questions to better understand where I'm coming from with this problem.

After each series of answers, I want you to judge your confidence of understanding my situation out of 100.

When your confidence score is at least 90/100, you will give me an answer

In using this you will ensure that you overcome one of the biggest difficulties people have with ChatGPT or other chat bots: making sure the bot understands what you are trying to do. It’s amazing how often it answers a question that you don’t realise you actually asked. Hope this helps.