In today’s episode, I discuss what has captured my attention in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly the limitations and decreasing utility of large tech models like GPT-4 and ChatGPT due to increasing restrictions. I share my experience with content censorship and highlight the importance of open-source projects that provide greater ownership and control. I introduce five interesting open-source software tools: llama.cpp, GPT-4 All, meadows music Gen, automatic 1111, and tortoise TTS. These tools offer powerful language engines, local AI applications, music generation, image generation, and voice synthesis. Join me to explore the durability and possibilities of open source in the AI world. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed this video!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
In today’s episode, let’s talk about what I’m paying attention to in artificial intelligence these days, what has gotten my attention and where I’m spending my time, the big, the big tech models, like GPT-4, and ChatGPT, has the interface to it, etc.
These are certainly very capable models, they are very good services they are in GPT-4 is case, sort of a jack of all trades master of none.
But what we’re seeing is increasing restrictions on what these models are capable of doing.
And this can be because of feedback that they’ve received.
This can be because of decisions being made by these companies, but it reduces their utility.
I’ll give you an example.
The other day, I was working on a set of slides.
And I wanted to include an image of a person holding a tape measure, and not being able to correctly measure a window.
And I use the word limp in the description when I was using it with them the dolly system for image generation, and it kept saying this prompt violates our content policy.
I’m like, a person holding a lip tape measure is not exactly shall we say less scabious.
And, and exciting imagery, I It’s a tape measure.
But for whatever reason, the software decided that that particular keyword was not okay, when I removed it, it was able to generate the image.
And I’m like, Okay, I mean, that’s, that’s a bit of a stretch.
And so, between that, and the ownership of of these tools, I’ve really started paying much more attention to open source projects.
And what I mean by ownership is this, we are in a situation now where, as consumers, we’ve been conditioned to not own things, right.
If you have Spotify, you don’t own any of that music, the moment you stop paying your bill, you no longer have access to that.
Whereas say, if you bought a CD back in the 90s, right, from a musician, you bought the CD, and you have this CD, and you had this disc that you held on to and it was yours for as long as you want you owned it.
And when we look around at the spaces, in things like software and content, yeah, we own very, very little.
We don’t own much, you if you have a favorite show on Netflix, if Netflix decides Nope, we don’t want to show that anymore.
Delete, you have no control over it, you don’t own it.
And this is happening with things.
For example, like ChatGPT, you don’t own that you have no control over it doesn’t run locally on your computer.
And as a result, if OpenAI changed his mind about what content is prohibited, and that happens to include content that you’re working with, that becomes a problem.
Open source software software that is open to the community that is typically free, is it solves that problem, because you download the software, sometimes you compile it yourself.
You run it on your computer, and it’s there, it’s a local piece of software on your computer, that doesn’t go away, that doesn’t ask for more money, that doesn’t stop working at the whim of a large corporation.
And it’s it is yours, right? That code is forever.
When we think about AI tools, you know, you’ve seen the posts on LinkedIn or Twitter with people announcing the latest group of tools.
And yeah, there’s like 200 new companies being started every day, in the AI space is the list is endless.
Most of these companies are not going to be around six months or a year, and if you got used to doing business with them, and then they’re just not there anymore.
That’s problem, right? You You’ve become reliant on something and you have to find a solution.
If you’re using open source software, it runs on your software or your hardware on your on your laptop, maybe on your servers at work.
And if the the project comes to an end, that software still keeps running, right? It keeps running until your development environment or your production environment is no longer able to run it back could be years from now.
So that’s why I’m paying so much attention to open source in AI because a it’s where all the innovation is and be your own it.
It’s yours.
It’s on your laptop, it’s on your server, it’s on your desktop, and you can do with it what you want.
Typically, there’s fewer rules or restrictions.
And there’s no waitlists for new features.
You just run the software and, you know, granted you have to have in some cases a pretty beefy computer to do it, but it’s yours.
So the top five pieces of software that I’m looking at lately once called llama dot cpp, this is a, I would call it the probably the most powerful basic large language engine that can use almost any of the major open source large language models.
This is a command line tool.
So it is definitely not user friendly.
But it’s extremely powerful, it’s very fast and very efficient.
The tool that I would recommend everyone take a look at is one called GPT-4.
All so if you go to GPT-4, all ChatGPT, that number for aol.io, you can download a desktop application, and then choose which models you want to use.
This is very low tech, right there’s there’s no technical skill required to install the application.
And that functions like what you’re used to with things like ChatGPT, but it’s running on your computer.
Now, depending on the speed of your computer in the age of stuff, it may not run real fast, but it does run.
And you can use sensitive information with it right when you use ChatGPT.
If you were to paste in, you know, some credit card records or something and ask it to do pattern detection.
You’re giving sensitive information to a third party, which is a big no no in things like finance and health and law.
When you’re running a piece of software like GPT-4, all locally on your computer, you don’t even need the internet for that, right? No data is leaving your computer, no data is going to a third party, you were just using it locally.
So that is a project that I recommend everyone take a look at it sooner or later.
A couple other projects that again, these are more required technical skills, meadows music Gen is fascinating.
This is open source music generation.
And it’s pretty good.
It’s pretty good.
Now it’s an initial model.
And there definitely is some limitations with it.
But it gives you a sense of okay, this is where this is going this is pretty cool that it can with a sufficient enough prompt to generate a decent sounding piece of music.
And of course, being AI generated, you don’t have to worry about things like copyrights, because nothing a machine generated can be copyrighted.
And so you don’t have to worry about taking, dealing with royalties and all that stuff.
Another project I think is interesting is automatic, automatic.
1111 is the name of it now, but this is a web interface to Stable Diffusion, the image generation model again, this is something that either runs in, you can run it in a cloud environment like Google colab.
Or if you’ve got a beefy enough laptop, you can run it right on your machine and generate images.
So if you’ve seen Stable Diffusion imagery, the AI generated art, you can run this locally.
And there are some fine tunes of the Stable Diffusion library that you can use to generate specific kinds of styles.
You can also add in additional tools that will clean up the inevitable doesn’t quite get the faces right on people.
But it’s a pretty cool tool.
And the fifth one that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to is tortoise TTS.
So tortoise is a relatively slow voice generator.
So it can synthesize voices, which again is very useful if you want natural sounding computers to be able to speak now there are paid services like 11 labs that offer basically this technology, but in a in a SaaS base environment.
But again, you don’t own that.
And they have a lot of understandably, a lot of restrictions on what you can and can’t do with it.
If you want to train tortoise on your own voice and have you know, reading out, I don’t know, some fanfiction, you wrote.
And that would violate, you know, say 11 Labs content policy, but it’s your stuff and you want to have your voice doing it.
These tools will let you do it.
So that’s what’s captured my attention lately in the AI world.
Yes, there are a lot of cool companies a lot of cool things happening.
But I’m paying a lot of attention to open source because of its durability.
If I’m going to offer a service or strategic advice to a client, I want to know that that recommendation is going to endure longer than six months, right? Especially for the clients gonna be building something on that architecture.
I want to make sure that it has as a solid foundation and open source software is one of those foundations.
So that’s the show for now.
Thanks for tuning in.
We’ll talk to you next time.
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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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