Adopting AI is a once in a lifetime, game-changing opportunity for enhancing efficiency and productivity. I have studied and experimented with this technology full-time for 9 months and we’re going to cut through the hype right now.
As a leader, you don’t need to have a deep technical understanding of AI to take advantage of it. You also don’t need to be overwhelmed (or disappointed) with tools like ChatGPT, or buy the “Top 500 Business Prompts” or purchase other shiny AI-enhanced apps.
AI Large Language Models (LLMs) - The Intern
You’ve hired the smartest intern ever, who has read almost every book in the world, knows most everything on the internet, and can write, answer questions, reason, and even create new ideas based on that knowledge. This intern can pass the Bar exam and med school exams without effort.
That's what an LLM is—a type of AI that understands and generates human-like text based on the vast amount of information it's been trained on. But it’s not perfect - our intern lacks real-world experience and he doesn’t have your company knowledge…so he’s not helpful with work tasks. The intern needs to take notes about your business in order to be effective - so let’s get him a notebook…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) - The Notebook
Let’s have The Intern take continuous notes about your business - static documents, databases, systems, HR policies, quality policies, parts, schedules, etc. The latest, most current and relevant information that your company stores.. Armed with The Notebook, suddenly The Intern isn’t so useless.
RAG combines the broad knowledge of LLMs with specific, up-to-date information from your business, making The Intern the most capable employee ever. The Notebook, in the hands of The Intern, ensures your AI solutions are always informed and accurate.
Process Automation - The Toolbox
The toolbox represents Process Automation. The Intern uses the tools in the Toolbox to automate and streamline various tasks. They are completed and incredible speed, from ordering parts, sending emails, performing workflows - This is where the intern brings AI to the real world and performs tasks that humans did, If the work is done on a computer, the intern can do it.
analyzing vast datasets to automate routine communications, without sacrificing accuracy. This doesn't just make them faster; it transforms the scope of what's possible, enabling real-time data analysis, instant report generation, and the automation of complex workflows that would otherwise require extensive manual effort by humans.
The Toolbox doesn't replace The Intern’s expertise or the value of The Notebook; it extends its capabilities to actually performing work.
So let’s find work for the intern! Let’s switch to the screen where I’ll show you the tools that I use to set up Interns.
Finding work for The Intern:
Identify Key Processes & Areas Within Your Operations
The first step in leveraging The Intern is identifying where he can have the most significant impact. Start with your Key Processes and look for areas that require a lot of data processing that could benefit from automation, such as:
Troubleshooting: The Intern, armed with The Notebook with specific technical information, will instantly diagnose and suggest solutions for technical issues with products or services. He accelerates resolutions for customers, diagnosing the right parts every time. The intern automatically orders parts if needed, and can send signals to the inventory system using The Toolbox.
Inventory Management: The Intern predicts inventory needs by analyzing the production schedule, customer demand, supply chain trends, and other dynamics from The Notebook. This ensures optimal stock levels, reducing both overstock and stockouts, and significantly improving supply chain efficiency and customer satisfaction - always having the right products available at the right time. Using The Toolbox, The Intern adjusts appropriate stock levels among other automations.
HR and Recruitment: The Intern quickly identifies the most suitable candidates from a large pool of applicants, based on skills, experience, and cultural fit identified on The Notebook. Manage routine HR inquiries and automate administrative tasks with The Toolbox, allowing your HR team to focus on strategic initiatives like employee engagement and talent development
Understand How AI Can Solve Real-World Challenges
AI, especially when augmented with RAG, can tackle various challenges by:
Enhancing Efficiency: Automating routine tasks and data analysis with AI allows your team to focus on strategic activities.
Improving Accuracy: AI can process information with remarkable accuracy, reducing human error in data-driven tasks.
Providing Personalization: AI can tailor communications and recommendations to individual customers, improving satisfaction and loyalty.
Conclusion
By understanding and applying AI technologies like LLMs and RAG with modern automation processes, you can transform your business operations, making them more efficient, accurate, and personalized. The key is to start small, identify specific areas where AI can make a significant impact, and gradually expand its use as you become more comfortable with its capabilities. Embrace AI as a partner in your business's growth, and you'll unlock new levels of productivity and innovation.
NEWS & RESOURCES
How to Pilot Generative AI - by Gartner and deepset (Sponsor) Learn how to successfully build generative AI pilot applications. Analysis and recommendations for product and IT leaders.
Find out how to shift the discussion towards the business potential of generative AI, rather than focusing solely on technical feasibility.
Gain insights on identifying the most valuable and feasible use cases.
Understand how to build an efficient AI team and collaborate effectively with business partners, AI, and software engineers.
Lay the foundation for faster development cycles and prioritizing Gen AI initiatives.
Learn how to build a product, not just an IT demo, and how to mitigate the risks associated with generative AI.
Read the full Gartner report here (courtesy of deepset).
Headlines & Launches
Anthropic Takes Steps To Prevent Election Misinformation (2 minute read) Anthropic is testing Prompt Shield, a technology designed to redirect U.S. users of its chatbot Claude seeking political and voting information to authoritative sources like TurboVote.
OpenAI's next AI product could be after your job (again) (2 minute read) OpenAI has been reportedly developing two types of AI agent software for over a year. The first type can be used to automate complex tasks by taking over a customer's device. The second AI agent class handles web-based tasks and can gather public data. It is unclear when the company plans to release these agents.
Gemini 1.5 pro (12 minute read) Google released a new MoE model that matches Gemini 1.0 Ultra in performance but scales up to 1m tokens in context while using less compute due to its smaller size. It is natively multimodal.
Research & Innovation
Long is More for Alignment (28 minute read) It is often challenging to know which examples should be used when aligning language models using preference data. This work suggests a surprisingly robust baseline - choose the 1,000 longest examples.
Extreme video compression with pre-trained diffusion models (18 minute read) Diffusion models can be repurposed for their broad ‘knowledge’ of the world as they get better at synthesizing images and videos. This paper found a phenomenal 0.02 bits per pixel compression. The key trick here was to measure perceptual similarity along the way and resend an original video frame as needed.
Improving Math Skills in LLMs (19 minute read) Researchers have created OpenMathInstruct-1, a new dataset for training open-source Large Language Models in math, matching the performance of closed-source models. This breakthrough, featuring 1.8 million problem-solution pairs, opens the door for more accessible and competitive math instruction AI tools.
Engineering & Resources
Minbpe (GitHub Repo) Andrej Karpathy released a minimal, clean, and extensible implementation of the byte pair encoding used in language model tokenizers.
GPTScript (GitHub Repo) GPTScript is a new scripting language that automates interactions with OpenAI large language models. The project's ultimate goal is to create a fully natural language-based programming experience.
Qwen 1.8B and 72B LLMs (GitHub Repo) These models, which look similar to Llama 2, are trained on 3T tokens and excel at a number of tasks. The Qwen team has released chat versions and quants. Excitingly, the models seem to excel at reasoning, math, and code.
Miscellaneous
Sora reference papers (HuggingFace Hub) A list of 30 papers that relate to the newly released Sora video model.
The Data Revolution in Venture Capital (10 minute read) Over 75% of public market trades (AUM of $1T+) are now driven by data-driven algorithms, a revolution initiated by hedge funds in the 90s. Today, that data-driven approach is rapidly infiltrating venture capital, with projections indicating that over 75% of VC deal reviews will involve AI and data analytics by 2025, transforming how investments are sourced, evaluated, and managed.
Community, collaboration, creativity in the age of AI (11 minute read) How we talk to each other, collaborate, and undertake creative tasks has meaningfully shifted since we introduced software. We’re starting to see the beginnings of another meaningful shift with AI. How substantial this shift will be is being underestimated. Startups born with AI integration in their products from day one will have a huge advantage over existing companies adding it on top of their existing products.
Quick Links
OpenAI surpasses $2 billion in annualized revenue (3 minute read) OpenAI has achieved an annual revenue run rate exceeding $2 billion propelled by the immense success of ChatGPT, making it one of the fastest-growing tech firms. With strong interest from enterprise clients looking to adopt Generative AI, OpenAI aims to more than double this figure in 2025.
Sam Altman Wants Washington Backing For His $7 Trillion AI Chip Venture (1 minute read) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is working to secure US government approval for his chip project as it risks raising national security and antitrust concerns.
NVIDIA Chat With RTX (1 minute read) Chat with RTX now supports multiple file formats and can import content directly from YouTube playlists for convenient content querying.
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