🥟 Chao-Down #358 Testimonials from early adopters of Microsoft Copilot, Sam Altman's op-ed piece on who controls the future of AI, The ways that AI is showing up at the Olympics
Plus, how China is closing the gap on AI with the United States.
Is AI really making us more productive? According to the latest survey from freelance marketplace Upwork, the hyped technology is falling short of realizing its potential.
In particular the report calls out this eye-opening stat:
However, this new technology has not yet fully delivered on this productivity promise: Nearly half (47%) of employees using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect, and 77% say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.
A ton of expectations are being put on not just the tech providers of AI but also the workers who use it as companies seek to get a return on investment in adopting new tech. The result is a push for more productivity that paradoxically looks like more work as people try to integrate AI into their work lives.
Will we get to the promised land of increased productivity without burnout?
-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.
What happened in AI? 📰
Microsoft’s AI Assistants Will Revolutionize the Office — One Day (Bloomberg)
China Is Closing the A.I. Gap With the United States (The New York Times)
Opinion | Sam Altman: AI’s future must be democratic (The Washington Post)
Three ways AI is changing the 2024 Olympics for athletes and fans (Nature)
Microsoft is adding AI-powered summaries to Bing search results (Engadget)
Runway’s AI video generator trained on thousands of scraped YouTube videos (The Verge)
Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖
From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models for the Future (upwork.com)
How to Create a Timeless Logo (johannesippen.com)
The AI job interviewer will see you now (Rest of World)
Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠
apify/crawlee-python: Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Python to build reliable crawlers. (Github)
mem0ai/mem0: The memory layer for Personalized AI (Github)
Lightning-AI/litgpt: 20+ high-performance LLMs with recipes to pretrain, finetune and deploy at scale. (Github)
The Latest in AI Research 💡
PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs (arxiv)
AriGraph: Learning Knowledge Graph World Models with Episodic Memory for LLM Agents (arxiv)
WorkBench: a Benchmark Dataset for Agents in a Realistic Workplace Setting (arxiv)
The World Outside of AI 🌎
Hosting the Olympics has become financially untenable, economists say (CNN Business)
Switzerland federal government requires releasing its software as open source (ZDNET)
What America can learn from Rwanda to solve its mental health crisis (nationalgeographic.com)
Why scientific support for alcohol’s health benefits is fading (The Guardian)
Virtual reality users break bones, suffer cuts and bruises while playing (The Washington Post)
Social Media Has Created a Crisis in American Slang (The Atlantic)
One Last Bite 😋
