The Weekly #4
Yet another LLM, fancy note taking and training AI models with your social media posts.
OpenAI o1-Preview
The release of new LLMs is relentless and OpenAI have just contributed another model to the mix, OpenAI o1-preview. Their new o1 model has been created to take a pause before blurting out an answer, and as such, has an element of reasoning. I won’t delve into the details on o1 as there’s a mountain of content already out there, but I want to highlight the fact that this LLM is well suited to coding and maths use cases. That is something to bear in mind as you start to use LLMs in your work or own time. Whilst ChatGPT might grab the majority of headlines and media coverage, it isn’t the best option for all use cases. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 3 is well regarded to be a much better LLM for coding, especially as it covers a range of programming languages, even more outdated ones like COBOL and FORTRAN (which by the way is really important for keeping legacy solutions updated). Then, you have other models like BioBert, which are specially trained to focus on medical knowledge. When combined with cost considerations, as we use LLMs more and more, you’ll want to start testing combinations of prompts on different models and understand what works best for your task at hand.
Google NotebookLM
NotebookLM is not new, as it was first released by Google back in August 2023, but I only came across it last week after Google made an interesting update called Audio Overview that allows you to create an audio conversation between two “AI hosts”.
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NotbookLM is designed as a personal research assistant that allows you to add your own sources, which you can query using the standard chat format we’ve come to know. What is really interesting here is that NotebookLM only references the data you’ve uploaded and doesn’t pull in sources from the internet or anywhere else. If you are a user of Google apps, this will be very useful as you can connect to both Google Docs and Google Slides. You can also write your own notes or connect to specific websites. I’m currently planning a road trip around Utah, so I’m planning on testing out NotebookLM to see if it can help me decide on a great itinerary.
Meta to Use Facebook and Instagram to Train AI Models
If you were already concerned about Meta holding a lot of information about you to target you with adverts, then you might feel even more anxious about Meta using your public social media content to train their AI models. As this is not allowed under EU privacy laws, this practice will only happen in the UK for now, with Meta saying it will help train it’s models to better understand British culture. Meta have confirmed that users can object at any time to their data being used to train AI models
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