🧙🏼 OpenAI Academy

Also: Humans won’t run out of things to do

Author

Dario Chincha
September 24, 2024

Howdy, wizards.

Apparently OpenAI is testing an “Auto” option in ChatGPT which automatically routes queries to the best suited model e.g. GPT-4o, o1-preview, o1-mini, etc.. I honestly wouldn’t mind if this became the new default (assuming it works well) – yay to less clicking around!

Let me take you through the important news in AI today.

DARIO’S PICKS

OpenAI just announced the OpenAI Academy; starting with low- and middle-income countries, it’s an initiative to invest in developers and organizations leveraging AI. The Academy will provide training, community building, incubators and an initial $1 million in distributed API credits. The goal is to empower local AI talent to tackle critical challenges and drive economic growth in their communities.

The Academy builds on previous support for projects like KOBI, which uses AI to help students with dyslexia learn to read, and I-Stem, enhancing access for blind and low-vision communities in India.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ This could help foster AI innovation in economies where developer communities are underdeveloped and operating costs (like API fees) are substantial hurdles. And, what’s in it for OpenAI? They attract developers, strengthening their ecosystem and building loyalty—a crucial part of their long-term strategy to secure a sustainable market lead.

PS some important specifics like how to apply and which countries are eligible initially are still TBA.

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DARIO’S PICKS

OpenAI’s CEO published a blog post today on his vision and predictions for the future. He goes into just how transformative AI as a technology is and is going to be, and claims “The Intelligence Age” is imminent.

Here’s the points I found most interesting:

  • We could have superintelligence in “a few thousand days”.

  • The Intelligence Age will entail massive prosperity, and the path there is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

  • In 15 words, he explains how we arrived at this point in history “deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”

  • The reason we need to drive down the cost of compute is to make AI available to everyone and avoid it becoming a scarce resource over which wars will be fought and only the rich have access to.

  • Jobs will change more slowly than people think. We (humans) won’t run out of things to do, even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today.

❝

I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The visions of the upside of AI are beautifully put here. There’s a metaphor in there about us going from sand to superintelligence which is epic.

Keep in mind though that Sam Altman is extremely progress-focused and, as CEO of OpenAI, has more than a few commercial pressures. He makes no mention of existential risks etc in this post—even though researchers he respects, like Ilya Sutskever, are deeply concerned about these things. My two cents: you can be excited about the future, and also don’t drink the Kool-aid.

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You can also read our reviews of SciSpace and Memo on whatplugin.ai/reviews.

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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