Learn more from the Generative AI Success Stories Superstream on June 12th. At O’Reilly, we’re not just building training materials about AI. We’re also using it to build new kinds of learning experiences. One of the ways we are putting AI to work is our update to Answers. Answers is a generative AI-powered feature that aims to answer questions in the flow of learning. It’s in every book, on-demand course, and video, and will eventually be available across our entire learning platform. To see it, click the “Answers” icon (the last item in the list at the right side of the screen ..read more

We previously shared our insights on the tactics we have honed while operating LLM applications. Tactics are granular: they are the specific actions employed to achieve specific objectives. We also shared our perspective on operations: the higher-level processes in place to support tactical work to achieve objectives. But where do those objectives come from? That is the domain of strategy. Strategy answers the “what” and “why” questions behind the “how” of tactics and operations. We provide our opinionated takes, such as “no GPUs before PMF” and “focus on the ..read more

May was a month of announcements: between Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI, there was much ado about—well, very little, in fact. It’s always seemed to me that big announcements steal attention that might otherwise go to projects that are less flashy but more deserving. (Or maybe I’m just becoming jaded.) That’s not to say that nothing interesting happened. We’re seeing continued interest in small language models—small enough to run on cell phones (which have more processing power than the supercomputers of a few decades ago). We’ve wondered whether new programming languages make sense in t ..read more

Read Part I of this series here and stay tuned for Part III. To hear directly from the authors on this topic, sign up for the upcoming virtual event on June 20th, and learn more from the Generative AI Success Stories Superstream on June 12th. A possibly apocryphal quote attributed to many leaders reads: “Amateurs talk strategy and tactics. Professionals talk operations.” Where the tactical perspective sees a thicket of sui generis problems, the operational perspective sees a pattern of organizational dysfunction to repair. Where the strategic perspective sees an opportuni ..read more

To hear directly from the authors on this topic, sign up for the upcoming virtual event on June 20th. It’s an exciting time to build with large language models (LLMs). Over the past year, LLMs have become “good enough” for real-world applications. The pace of improvements in LLMs, coupled with a parade of demos on social media, will fuel an estimated $200B investment in AI by 2025. LLMs are also broadly accessible, allowing everyone, not just ML engineers and scientists, to build intelligence into their products. While the barrier to entry for building AI products has been lowered, creating ..read more

This article originally appeared in Business Age. In commentary supplied to Business Age, I shot my mouth off saying that passwords are a poor solution for authenticating users–but none of the alternatives are very good, either. The choices available to us are at best poor.  So now I’m the victim of a follow-up question What do I use? Unfortunately, “what do I use” isn’t really a choice I get to make–more often than not, you’re stuck with the choices of the people who built the sites you use. So the best you can do is make sure you have a good password. A good password is a long string o ..read more

Marketing teams have been using machine learning for more than a decade. In the early days of Big Data, it was common to hear people say that marketing was Data’s killer app. As data science has evolved into artificial intelligence, people in marketing and sales have discovered a variety of ways of using data to make them more productive: helping to find the right audiences in their ad targeting, predicting just the right time to land an email in a recipient’s inbox to maximize the chances of getting an open, and even to personalize their company’s web experience or advertising to make it most ..read more

In the past month, we saw a blizzard of new language models. It’s almost hard to consider this news, though Microsoft’s open (but maybe not open source) Phi-3 is certainly worth a look. We’ve also seen promising work on reducing the resources required to do inference. While this may lead to larger models, it should also lead to reduced power use for small and mid-sized models. AI Microsoft’s Phi-3-mini is yet another freely available language model. It is small enough to run locally on phones and laptops. Its performance is similar to GPT-3.5 and Mixtral 8x7B. Google’s Infini-Attention i ..read more

Why is it that Google, a company once known for its distinctive “Do no evil” guideline, is now facing the same charges of “surveillance capitalism” as Facebook, a company that never made such claims? Why is it now subject to the same kind of antitrust complaints faced by Microsoft, once the “evil empire” of the previous generation of computing? Why is it that Amazon, which has positioned itself as “the most customer-centric company on the planet,” now lards its search results with advertisements, placing them ahead of the customer-centric results chosen by the company’s organic search algorith ..read more

We’ve been very lucky. A couple of weeks ago, a supply-chain attack against the Linux xz Utils package, which includes the liblzma compression library, was discovered just weeks before the compromised version of the library would have been incorporated into the most widely used Linux distributions. The attack inserted a backdoor into sshd that would have given threat actors remote shell access on any infected system. The details of the attack have been thoroughly discussed online. If you want a blow-by-blow exposition, here are two chronologies. ArsTechnica, Bruce Schneier, and other sources h ..read more