ChatGPT gets real-time access to internet and shows sparks of AGI, personal website building blueprint, and 10x speed up with new Pandas

Mar 26, 2023

Welcome to my Effective AI newsletter, where I share my thoughts about AI, discuss latest digital news, as well as productivity and creativity tips for the AI community. If you missed my previous editions of this newsletter you can check them out here. Additionally, you can visit my website for more of my articles, tips and tricks.

🧠 What’s on my mind?

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence in GPT-4

The latest paper from Microsoft research suggest that GPT-4 has sparks of Artificial General Intelligence. More details in my article but here are the main points:

GPT-4 can use external tools with minimal instructions and uses their outputs appropriately
Passes tech interview on LeetCode and potentially be hired as a software engineer
GPT-4 created a working 3d game in zero-shot fashion in HTML.
Common sense grounding
Higher level math - got International Math Olympiad (IMO) question right
Answered consulting estimation question or Fermi questions
Managing calendar and email and browsing the web for information
Theory of mind

Personal website journey and my blueprint

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

Last year I decided that I want to start a personal blog about Effective AI practices. After reflecting back on the steps that I took to develop this website and start publishing content, I came up with the following high level blueprint, with details in my article.

Here are the steps that I used to create it, more details in the article:

Define your vision, purpose and audience - your WHY.
Strategy and planning - Plan 12 months ahead, including the development steps, experiments and any components that you'd like to learn about.
Decide on the platform and frameworks - clarify your requirements based on the plan, short-list platforms and frameworks and choose the one that suits you best.
Website development. Configure all the platforms, frameworks and tools. In my case I used AWS cloud and Jekyll static site generator.
Content creation process. Set up a personal process for idea generation, prioritisation, research, and drafting outlines.
Create content. Actually create your content. I use ChatGPT-4 to to help me write about my ideas.
Re-purpose and publish on multiple other platforms.
Feedback. The magic of this whole process is to iterate on each of the previous steps and improve as quickly as possible.

ChatGPT is getting real-time access to internet through plugins

OpenAI made another massive announcement this week: they implemented initial support for plugins in ChatGPT! This is the way of ChatGPT to get real-time information from the real-world, which it didn’t have before. OpenAI created and published their own plugins: web browser (to access internet) and Python code interpreter. The plugin access is still restricted to a small subset of users but they will be extending from their waitlist.

OpenAI basically created an AI app store where users can already connect with. I imagine there will be a lot of opportunities to profit out of creating new apps.

Bill Gates’ notes on the age of AI

Photo by Lyman Hansel Gerona on Unsplash

Bill Gates released an article about the age of AI. Interesting read. TLDR

GPT-3 and 4 is a new breakthrough, as significant as graphical user interface, computer, internet, mobile phone
Bill Gates challenged the team at OpenAI for GPT to pass biology exam test in a few years. The team accomplished it in a few months.
These technologies will be essential in improving productivity, fighting climate change, inequality, healthcare, education
There will be an explosion of companies creating new products with AI, both from hardware and software side

Microsoft Image Creator

Microsoft released its version of stable diffusion through Bing chat. Check it out: https://www.bing.com/create

NVIDIA is becoming enterprise-first AI provider

NVIDIA’s Dr Jim Fan:

‘Foundation Model as a Service is coming to enterprise, customized for your proprietary data… Multimodal from day 1: text LLM is just one part. Bring your images, videos… 2023 is an inflection point. NVIDIA is going beyond a pure hardware provider and becoming an enterprise-first AI provider.’

🛠️ Practical tip or trick - Pandas 2.0 with Pyarrow backend speeds up to 10x

Pandas 2.0 is expected to be released this month and one of the main differences is pyarrow backend, instead of numpy. My personal experiments with the beta version show that basic functions, like aggregation, joins, creation of data frames and basic calculations run up to 10x faster with pyarrow backend. Some other advantages include: