AI

Agents are software applications designed to autonomously perform complex tasks on behalf of users. Unlike traditional digital assistants that respond to direct commands, agents act independently, interpreting user needs and executing multi-step tasks (such as researching, purchasing, or booking). The goal is to create a hands-free experience, allowing users to delegate routine digital interactions to an intelligent, reliable assistant. Continue Reading →

Asking for reports is a fact of corporate life. So is requesting updates to your dashboards. But imagine if you could open a chat window and talk directly with your data. You'd just type (or say), "What's the last day we can sell a full-priced widget in market 18 before we have to mark it down or ship it back to the manufacturer?" and the database would give you the answer. No reports, no dashboards, just a conversation. Continue Reading →

Last night, I read a white paper from Google DeepMind about an AI system they are developing designed to mediate discussions, especially on divisive topics, to help groups reach consensus. By the numbers, the system was more successful than human mediators. I was so intrigued that I read the paper twice. It kept me up all night. Continue Reading →

A Florida mother, Megan Garcia, filed a federal lawsuit against Character.AI and Google following the suicide of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, in February 2024. The lawsuit claims Setzer became emotionally attached to a Character.AI chatbot modeled after the fictional "Daenerys Targaryen" from Game of Thrones. Continue Reading →

More than 13,000 creatives (including some famous authors, musicians, and actors) signed a statement that expresses their growing concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models. Continue Reading →

There are two stories in the news today that caught my attention: 1) News Corp is suing Perplexity.ai for aggregating and surfacing WSJ and NYPost content without permission or payment. 2) xAI launched its API, which reminded me that X changed its terms of services last week, informing users that it can (and most likely will) use any content posted on X (formerly Twitter) to train its AI models. Continue Reading →

Using proprietary data in AI workflows has the potential to transform brand marketing, but there aren't any one-size-fits-all solutions. To make matters worse, the field is filled with jargon and hype. I can't do much about the hype, but I can arm you with some high-level concepts to facilitate your AI-focused discussions. With that in mind, here's a brief overview of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), one of the most popular ways to incorporate your proprietary data into generative AI workflows. Continue Reading →

Google’s AI note-taking and research assistant, NotebookLM, has introduced a key update that allows users to guide AI-generated audio conversations that are more customized than the genAI podcasts that made NotebookLM famous a few weeks ago. Continue Reading →

A high school senior in Massachusetts is at the center of a legal dispute after being disciplined for using AI in a class assignment. His parents have filed a lawsuit against the history teacher, school district, and local school committee, arguing that the disciplinary actions taken against their son were unfair and not supported by the school's policies at the time of the incident. Continue Reading →

The New York Times has put Perplexity.ai on notice: "Don't crawl our site, or else!" This is a little comical since Google has been crawling nytimes.com since the beginning of Google, but we need a distinction here. Two verbs, both terms of art: "to crawl," which means to systematically browse the web, index content, and then make it searchable through a search engine; "to scrape," which is the automated process of gathering information from the web to collect content from webpages. Continue Reading →