Prompt engineering could be a thing of the past

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Welcome back, Superhuman

Prompt engineering — the craft of writing prompts to communicate with an AI — is all the rage these days. But a new study shows that the bubble for prompting gigs might be about to burst.

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TODAY’S MENU

• AI is better than humans at crafting prompts, study finds

• How to create mind maps with ChatGPT

• AI is finding a new home in America’s classrooms

• Chart: How many names are too many?

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI Generated Images: Unlikely bar patrons

NEWS

Today in AI & Tech

• AI Pal: Inflection AI releases a new AI model that gets close to GPT-4 (pictured above) and an upgraded chatbot that’s designed to be personal and empathetic.

• India Wants In: The world’s most populous country says it will invest $1.25 billion in new LLM projects to fuel its AI market.

• Star Wars: U.S. House Democrats are investigating whether Russia used Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellites in its war against Ukraine.

• Premium Perks: In a rare financial disclosure, LinkedIn revealed that its premium service generated $1.7 billion in revenue last year.

• Retro Rebuttal: Microsoft says that the New York Times copyright lawsuit against it had no merit because its LLMs are no different from VCRs, player pianos, and other old-school tech.

NEXT IN AI

Researchers find that AI is its own best teacher

Prompt engineering has emerged as one of the most sought-after new skills since ChatGPT’s launch last year — some companies are willing to pay more than $300k in salaries for the role. Andrej Karpathy, who was part of OpenAI’s founding team, even went as far as to tweet that “The hottest new programming language is English.“

But a recent study introduces a new wrinkle: What if AI is actually its own best teacher? 

A pair of researchers at cloud computing company VMware tried to figure out the best prompts for solving different math equations across three open-source platforms. But no matter what they asked, they found that the ideal prompt completely changed depending on each unique scenario.

What worked better, they found, was simply letting each model create its own parameters, and then allowing the platform to test each of those prompts on itself. The study’s results — that AI knows itself more intimately than its human counterparts — weren’t totally surprising, one of the researchers told IEEE Spectrum: “It doesn’t speak English. It does a lot of math.”

While it might not be wise to quit your job and chase a career in prompt engineering, there’s still plenty of mileage left in learning how to write better prompts. Many studies show how certain prompting techniques yield better results than others. OpenAI even has an official prompting engineering guide that you can read here.

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AI AT WORK

How to create mind maps with ChatGPT

• Go to ChatGPT and search for the Whimsical Diagrams GPT or access it directly here.

• Write your prompt and press enter.

For the example, I have used the following prompt:

Prompt: Make a mind map that explains business communication

You can use it to make flowcharts, mind maps, and sequence diagrams. You can also write detailed descriptions and ask the GPT to visualize it for you.

AI IN SCHOOL

AI is finding a new home in America’s classrooms

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, teachers across the country braced for a wave of AI-generated essays and homework assignments. Some of the nation’s largest school districts, including New York City and Los Angeles, banned generative AI platforms altogether.

Despite the bans, many teachers used AI tools to help them sniff out AI-generated content submitted by students. But after more than a year of experimentation, some educators are coming around to the idea that AI tools might have a place in the classroom after all. 

One of these tools is Writable, a new ChatGPT-powered platform that generates feedback and suggestions for student papers. Design giant Canva also recently released a number of AI tools for teachers and students.

Teaching-oriented AI platforms might one day become as ubiquitous as today’s education-based internet tools. Nearly 4 in 10 teachers expect to use AI in their classrooms by the end of the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey from education publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Handy guide: you can find a list of AI prompts for teachers and students from Wharton professor Ethan Mollick here.

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CHART

Making sense of countless AI product iterations

If you’ve had trouble keeping up with each of Google’s AI products, you’re far from alone. 

Reddit user danfromplus has created a handy chart to help make sense of the many iterations of the tech giant’s AI products, starting with Google Now, a Siri rival that launched back in 2012. 

After using the names Bard and Duet recently, the company announced in February that it was consolidating most of its AI products under a single banner called Gemini in a bid to “clean up” its AI branding.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

Rask AI: Translate video and audio into over 130 languages — and turn long videos into shorter clips.

AIVA: A personal music generation assistant that can generate songs across more than 250 styles.

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Fireflies AI: Transcribe, summarize, and search meeting notes and voice conversations.

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AI GENERATED IMAGES

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Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain

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