Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Almost Timely News: ๐Ÿ—ž๏ธ Next Generation AI Models (2024-09-15)

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Christopher S Penn
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Almost Timely News

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Almost Timely News: ๐Ÿ—ž๏ธ Next Generation AI Models (2024-09-15)
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What’s On My Mind: Next Generation AI Models

At the start and end of the 2024 Marketing AI Conference (MAICON), Paul Roetzer and team asked these ten questions:

  • How will the next generation of Al models affect you, your team and your company?
  • How will generative Al model advancements impact creative work, and creativity?
  • How will consumer information consumption and buying behaviors change?
  • How will consumer changes impact search, advertising, publishing, etc.?
  • How will Al-related copyright and IP issues affect marketers?
  • How will Al impact marketing strategies and budgets?
  • How will Al impact marketing technology stacks?
  • How will marketing jobs change?
  • How will Al impact agencies?
  • How will Al impact brands?

Each of these questions is practically a book unto itself, so over the next few pieces of content, weโ€™ll tackle some of them. Every person will and should have their own answers to these questions – your answers should vary from mine based on how you use AI.

So letโ€™s dig (I should start using delve unironically) into the first big one:

How will the next generation of Al models affect you, your team and your company?

Part 1: What is a Next Generation AI Model?

The first big part of the question we have to tackle is what constitutes a next generation model. What exactly does this mean?

Todayโ€™s models fall under two fundamental architectures: transformers and diffusers. Transformers predict the next token in a sequence based on all the previous tokens. Diffusers essentially compare noise to images they’ve already seen and chip away at the noise until they arrive at a blend of whatever the prompt is.

After the release of OpenAI o1, many people are talking about the next generation of models as reasoning models, in alignment with the march towards artificial general intelligence, the ability for AI to be smarter than people at any given task. That’s certainly one dimension of next generation models, but not the only one.

What is reasoning, and why do we care? Today’s models, when naively prompted, do not do anything more than they’re told to do. Give them a simple prompt, they generate a simple answer. New models like o1 have a certain type of reasoning, known as chain of thought (aka “think things through step by step”) built it, as a way to get generally better results out of AI that require thought.

An interesting side effect of “reasoning” pointed out by my friend Ruby King is that reasoning is only applicable to some tasks. Others have noted, for example, that o1 is producing better reasoning but less creative writing. This makes logical sense; reasoning is all about finding logical steps to solve a problem. Logic inherently involves some level of probability.

Creativity, in many ways, involves the antithesis of probability. What makes something creative is often something low probability. A piece of music that is made entirely of high probability notes is boring and uninteresting. A piece of music that has surprises in it – key changes, tempo changes, things that are less common – is more interesting.

That’s one dimension of a next generation model – foundation models may split into different types of cognitive tasks. Some models may have more creative outputs at the expense of logic, and others may have the reverse.

But that’s only one dimension. Other next generation models may ford significant gaps in today’s model capabilities. For example, transformers and diffusion models don’t work well together. If you’ve ever tried to make a slide deck with generative AI, you know what a frustrating and ultimately fruitless task that is.

Why? Because transformer models – predicting the next word, effectively – are fundamentally different than diffusion models, which predict what pixels should be nearby based on words in the prompt. The net result is that you either get slide decks that are all words, or you get clip art slides that are trite and meaningless.

On top of that, creating a slide deck is both art and science, both reasoning – creating a logical flow of a presentation – and creative, creating surprises along the way.

Today’s models may be multimodal, but they have exceptional difficulty crossing multiple boundaries at the same time. Future models, next generation models, should be able to do this more fluently, but for today, easily creating a logical AND creative slide deck is out of reach for many models and tools.

Next generation models will also have substantially larger working memories. Already, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro has a working memory of up to 2 million tokens, or 1.5 million words. They’ve extended that window experimentally to 10 million tokens, or about 7.5 million words. Once models get that large, they start to take on even greater capabilities and draw even more connections within data.

Finally, next generation models will be taking in multiple different data types. Right now, transformers models handle tokens, and mostly text. Diffusers handle mostly images. But we’re seeing the advent of models that have sensory inputs – vision, audio, spatial awareness, tactile awareness, olfactory sensors. As more sensory data makes its way into model training, expect models to have greater capabilities that rely on sensory knowledge.

Part 2: How Will We Use Next Generation Capabilities?

So we have several different dimensions of next generation models, from reasoning vs. creativity, true multimodal, and sensory data. How will we use these capabilities?

Every time we add new capabilities, we can infer several things. First, we’ll use those new capabilities at an increasing rate, proportional to how we think the models will do. People leapt to use models like GPT-3.5-Turbo back in the day, even when it was clear it had substantial limitations. Today, we use models like GPT-4omni or Gemini 1.5 at much greater capacities because of the models capabilities.

This in turns mean that we’ll turn over more tasks to machines based on those capabilities. Suppose, for example, we have models that have true olfactory understanding. A perfect use case for such a model would be detecting things like spoiled food, gas leaks, etc. Anything that a person could smell, a model that has olfactory data could also smell. What does that change? How will we use it differently?

Smell and taste, for example, are highly correlated. Today, language models are capable of processing enormous amounts of text data. It’s trivial to write a book review with a language model. Could we have a model with olfactory data provide food reviews? Yes.

The potential of splitting foundation models into reasoning versus creative has already happened in the open models world; many people have done fine-tunes of open models like Llama 3.1 to make them more creative writers (less reasoning) or better coders (less improbability). Foundation models following suit is a logical thing.

The big change will be overcoming boundaries between model types. There are experiments in labs now on “transfusion” models that blur the line between transformer (words) and diffuser (images). How well these perform compared to their pure progenitors remains to be seen, but early research suggests strong capabilities.

Part 3: What are the Second Order Effects of Next Generation Models?

Now, let’s dig into those second order effects. For those unfamiliar, a second order effect is a consequence, often unforeseen, of a major change. For example, a second order effect of the mobile phone was that the offline world became part of the online world, a hybridization we see today. Go to a restaurant and scan a code to download the latest menu, or order something in an app that arrives at your front door.

Job loss is one such second order effect of generative AI. We see this in professions like software development, which has had massive declines in hiring demand over the last two years. This happens in part because AI is so empowering to developers, it increases their productivity 2x-5x easily. What happens when you have an employee who does the work of five people? You don’t hire four more people.

What this means for you and me is that we have to continue identifying what value we provide that a machine cannot. The biggest, easiest win is our ability to build meaningful relationships with each other.

New job creation is also a second order effect. A colleague of mine who has a PhD in a relatively arcane field has been working for an AI company writing text just for AI. Their work is never made public, never released, never consumed by another human. Instead, it helps this company make a bespoke fine-tune with data that no one else has.

Election tampering and disinformation are second order effects, and as models become more capable, the ability to do bad things with them increases at exactly the same rate as the ability to do good things.

As I often say in my keynotes, paraphrasing the Captain America movie: AI is an amplifier. It makes the good into better and the bad into worse. Every capability we add to AI amplifies what we can do with the tools, for good or ill.

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ICYMI: In Case You Missed it

Besides the recently updated Generative AI for Marketers course I’m relentlessly flogging, this week, I had some fun messing around with mics and talking about generative AI with disinformation. Check out the new Youtube video.

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Events I’ll Be At

Here are the public events where I’m speaking and attending. Say hi if you’re at an event also:

  • Lab Products Association, Philadelphia, September 2024
  • INBOUND, Boston, September 2024
  • MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, November 2024
  • Social Media Marketing World, San Diego, April 2025
  • Content Jam, Chicago, April 2025

There are also private events that aren’t open to the public.

If you’re an event organizer, let me help your event shine. Visit my speaking page for more details.

Can’t be at an event? Stop by my private Slack group instead, Analytics for Marketers.

Required Disclosures

Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.

Advertisements in this newsletter have paid to be promoted, and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.

My company, Trust Insights, maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Talkwalker, MarketingProfs, MarketMuse, Agorapulse, Hubspot, Informa, Demandbase, The Marketing AI Institute, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which Trust Insights may receive indirect financial benefit, and thus I may receive indirect financial benefit from them as well.

Thank You

Thanks for subscribing and reading this far. I appreciate it. As always, thank you for your support, your attention, and your kindness.

See you next week,

Christopher S. Penn

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.

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