The recent reveal of OpenAI’s Sora model which generates videos from text made headlines around the world. And understandably so, because it’s truly something amazing. But I was not too surprised with the announcement. I wrote about the emergence of text-to-video generative AI on my blog 16 months ago! See here: AI Video Generation (Text-To-Video Translation). So, I knew that it was just a matter of time before one of the big players released something of such beautiful calibre. What did surprise me, however, was something that seemingly went under the radar just 2 weeks ago: an announcement f ..read more

Last month (Dec 2023) Google presented their response to ChatGPT called Gemini to much fanfare. The race for superior generative AI models is certainly heating up. There’s a ridiculous amount of money to be made here. But have a quick look at their demonstration video, if you haven’t done so already: It would seem as though Gemini is reacting to the video sequences we are shown on the left side of the video, right? Surely!? Nope! That video was faked. It turns out that Gemini was only shown still images accompanied by prompts. It’s all in the fine-print, folks. In the video description on the ..read more

Last week I gave a presentation to senior government representatives from the Philippines showing them how ChatGPT can be used to increase productivity in their respective departments. They were all amazed at ChatGPT’s capabilities. And rightly so because ChatGPT is something special. It’s a real game-changer. However, ChatGPT (and AI for that matter) is over-hyped. The media and IT companies talk about it as if it’s something that, if not now then in the near future, will completely surpass humans in terms of intelligence. ChatGPT is certainly better than humans at some tasks but people forge ..read more

I’m in the middle of preparing a talk at university on the topic of how government departments can leverage the power of Internet of Things (IoT) to improve the services they provide to society. I found that it was difficult to locate real-world examples of IoT being used by such departments so I thought I’d compile this short (but sweet) list of the use cases that I managed to find for my presentation. A quick definition before I proceed: Internet of Things is the connecting of objects or devices or sensors to each other and the internet (or other machines) in order to collect data about the ..read more

Last month (Nov 2023) Google’s AI research group, DeepMind, published an academic paper entitled “Levels of AGI: Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI” in which they set out to define artificial general intelligence (AGI). A big step and a big call by Google, no doubt about that. I welcome their paper, however. I think it’s a good one. In this post I’m going to present a summary of what Google has released and then my commentaries. The post will be broken down into the corresponding sections of the publication. 1. Introduction 2. Defining AGI: Case Studies 3. Defining AGI: Six Princip ..read more

I was sitting with a good mate of mine in a cafe one early morning during my recent trip to the USA doing some reading, enjoying pretty mediocre coffee, and just basically shooting the breeze. Him also being interested in IT the topic of conversation somehow ventured onto AI and during our deliberations he sent me a few images and memes to laugh at and consider. I would like to share three of them with you now because they’re about a subject that I’m pretty passionate about: how AI is over-hyped. Indeed, I’ve already written a few posts on this topic (e.g. the aptly titled post Artificial Inte ..read more

This post has been inspired by questions I’ve been seeing appearing on Quora and Reddit recently regarding AI and programming. They all sound more or less like this: In this age of advanced AI, is it still worth learning to code computer programs? People have been seeing the incredible abilities of chatbots such as ChatGPT to generate computer code that they’re starting to ask whether computer programming may not become obsolete for humans in the near future. This is a seemingly legitimate concern for those outside of computer science and for those unacquainted with the art of software engin ..read more

I recently stumbled upon another interesting academic publication entitled “The Political Biases of ChatGPT” (Rozado, David. 2023. Social Sciences 12, no. 3: 148.) that was published in March of this year. In this paper the sole author, David Rozado, an Associate Professor from New Zealand, subjected OpenAI’s ChatGPT to 15 different political orientation tests to ascertain whether there were any political biases exhibited by the famous chatbot. His results were quite interesting so I thought I’d present them here and discuss their implications. To begin with, I’m no political expert ..read more

AI is over-hyped. I’ve written about this before and plenty of cool-headed AI experts have called for calm in this respect too. The word, however, is not being heeded. Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in maintaining the hype, keeps spewing out his usual bile. And then we have the media. Ah, the media. The eternal fighters for truth. The last bastion against the lies and greed of corporations and politicians. The sole remaining beacon of goodness in a world of darkness. NOT. The media need a story to sell papers and generate clicks. It’s a big business. Hence, they also have a vested intere ..read more

I was rewatching “Bourne Identity” the other day. I love that film so much! Heck, the scene at the end is one of my favourites. Jason Bourne grabs a dead guy, jumps off the top floor landing, and while falling shoots a guy square in the middle of the forehead. He then breaks his fall on the dead body he took down with him and walks away the coolest guy on the block. That has to be one of the best scenes of all time in the action genre. Scene from Super Troopers But there’s one scene in the film that always makes me throw up a little in my mouth. It’s the old “Just enhance it!” scene (minute 31 ..read more