Friday, December 13, 2024
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Hi, it’s Chad. Every Friday, I serve as your AI guide to help you navigate a rapidly evolving landscape, discern signals from noise and transform cutting-edge insights into practical leadership wisdom. If you’d like me to work with your team or speak at an event in 2025, please get in touch asap. The first quarter of the year is always busy for me. And now, on to the content. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Algorithmic Musings: The Magnificent 7
Who are “The Magnificent 7?” Movie buffs are likely familiar with the John Sturges film, The Magnificent 7, which was itself a remake of pioneering director Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. Yet these are not “the seven” currently dominating tech headlines and driving AI innovation. Let’s decode this Silicon Valley remake.
The “Magnificent Seven” are the tech titans shaping our AI future: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla. Coined by Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett in 2023, the term has become shorthand for the companies betting big on artificial intelligence. These aren’t just tech companies anymore – they’re the architects of our digital future.
As of December 2024, these seven firms command a staggering 33% of the entire S&P 500’s market cap – a power concentration that would make any tech historian raise an eyebrow. Like their cinematic namesakes, each brings unique firepower to the AI battlefield. Microsoft plays the strategic leader, forging alliances like their game-changing OpenAI partnership. Nvidia? They’re the weapons specialist, literally arming the AI revolution with their coveted chips. But here’s where the plot thickens: while they seem invincible today, tech history loves a plot twist. Remember when IBM, Intel, and Cisco were considered unshakeable tech royalty? Their stories remind us that even the mightiest can be disrupted.
The key takeaway? Don’t just watch the current headliners – scan the horizon for the next breakthrough. In tech, just like in Hollywood, today’s supporting actor could be tomorrow’s star. The real story isn’t about who’s magnificent today – it’s about who’s coding the future in some virtual garage, ready to rewrite the whole script. After all, every tech giant was once a startup with a dream and a server rack.
2. Paper Trail: AI Research Decoded
Steering Large Language Models to Evaluate and Enhance Creativity
Researchers have developed a method to extract and manipulate the internal ‘creativity direction’ in Large Language Models, enabling both better creativity assessment and enhanced creative generation that aligns with human judgment. This approach revealed that creativity in LLMs can be systematically measured and enhanced rather than treating it as a black box process. Here are the key takeaways:
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While LLMs are capable of generating creative content, they struggle to reliably evaluate creativity on their own – Llama3-8B showed only 20% accuracy in self-assessment compared to 70% for human evaluators
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The study found that manipulating internal model states at middle layers provides optimal results for enhancing creativity while maintaining coherent output
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By using contrastive pairs of creative vs. uncreative content, researchers could identify and control specific “creativity vectors” within the model’s activation space
Read our full analysis of each of these research papers at AI for the C Suite
3. Sound Waves: Podcast Highlights
Our latest podcast episode was released this past Monday, December 9th. Tune in to hear my conversation with Philip Swan as we dive deep into the world of AI. Check it out and Subscribe for free today on your listening platform of choice to ensure you never miss a beat.
New episodes release every two weeks.
4. Digital Dojo
This past week brought several notable developments in the world of AI with some of the biggest coming from Open AI’s self-titled “12 Days of Shipmas.” Most notable was the release of text-to-video tool Sora and the release of “Advanced voice with video” To learn more check out the compilation 12 Days of Open AI and be sure to update your mobile app to ask questions using the new video screen sharing feature. Speaking of questions…
Many thanks to the folks in York College’s Advancement Division for their time, attention and solid questions during our AI workshop this week. Welcome to AI for the C Suite!
Finally, if you’ve got AI questions, our next subscriber-only AMA is Tuesday, December 17 at 12pmET. Subscribe to AI for the C Suite today to participate and begin your journey into the world of AI.
5. AI Buzz: Fresh Bytes
Here are a few articles that caught my eye this week.
- Copilot Vision, Microsoft’s AI tool that can read your screen, launches in preview
- How to Marry Process Management and AI
- Anthropic raises another $4B from Amazon, makes AWS its ‘primary’ training partner
- Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
6. Elevate Your Leadership with AI for the C Suite
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As we navigate this unprecedented fusion of human and machine intelligence, remember: the best leaders aren’t just adapting to change – they’re actively shaping it. Until next week, keep pushing boundaries.
Chad