LLMs and the next User Interaction paradigm: from “What you see is what you get” to “Do what I mean”

I’ve started thinking to LLMs as a next UI paradigm. Instead of focusing on the idea of creating an “Artificial General Intelligence”, which is akin to the idea of “autonomous driving”. By now we understand that “autonomous driving” will not materialize, except for limited, well defined scenarios. The world is too complex. As many persons think, we’re not going to have an artificial general intelligence (as they are salami); LLMs are going to assist humans, a sort of “digital interns”, in some limited, well defined scenarios. But think to user Interaction: creating a formula in a spreadsheet is complicated, you…

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Nvidia’s Stock Market Value Rose $276 Billion in a Day. Here’s How It Got There in Five Charts.

I am old enough to remember the bursting of the 2000 bubble. 1999: Yahoo! was making tons of money selling advertising on its Web “yellow pages.” Many entrepreneurs wanted to rush for the internet advertising bonanza. They made companies, even well-funded ones, to participate in the new gold rush of selling online advertising. To make themselves known, they advertised themselves. Where ? obviously on the most popular destination: Yahoo! whose revenues were growing. And other companies were starting, etc. etc. Then many of these new players ran out of money and started to fold. And Yahoo!  revenues decliend, and doubts…

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Piracy Shield verrà allargato: ecco quando e come (un commento)

Source: Libero.it Durante una trasmissione televisiva su Sky TG24 Massimiliano Capitanio, commissario AGCOM, e Federico Bagnoli Rossi, presidente Fapav (Federazione per la Tutela delle Industrie dei Contenuti Audiovisivi e Multimediali), hanno fatto il punto sui primi giorni di operato di Piracy Shield. Entrambi promuovono a pieni voti la piattaforma, bollando come fake news ogni notizia relativa a eventuali “vittime del fuoco amico“. Nei giorni scorsi, infatti, è circolata la notizia che alcune piattaforme legali di distribuzione di contenuti sarebbero state bloccate per sbaglio da Piracy Shield. “Sono notizie assolutamente fasulle e infondate – afferma Capitanio – dall’avvio della piattaforma nessun…

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Google’s “pricing knobs” (aka. “il manopolone”)

Italiano sotto. (italian below) If you haven’t already done so, and if you are interested in court reporting (which is sometimes better than Grisham), you can read the exhibits of the Google antitrust trial. The first slide is featured in this document and in an opinion by Prof. Michael Whinston. It shows a slide from an internal Google document that says they “need a knob” to raise prices as needed. The knob to manipulate prices upward would then actually be done. Reading other files reveals that while Google said it did not intervene in auctions to raise prices, then it…

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VC in Italy: searching for the next unicorn

In Europe (and Italy specifically), there is a widespread idea that a startup should be a company that seeks immediate profitability, and most business plans (do we really need them?) show EBITDA-positive paths after funding. These are indeed companies, built to grow and remain independent or to be acquired by more established players in their markets. However, they won’t grow fast, they won’t become multi-billion dollar companies, and they do not really deserve VC money. Nor they can command VC-like valuations. VCs are willing to offer you a pre-money of 10x to 20x your revenues (not your profits, but your…

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LLM zeitgeist

I receive this from my friend Enrico who authorized me to post it: Personally, after 6 months of intensive experimentation on Open AI embeddings and ChatGpt api , I find the answers are quite predictable and very sensitive to how the question is posed. By operating carefully and methodically on prompt grounding and prompt engineering, a good deal of the magic that seems to appear on first attempts fades away. These are still excellent and useful tools, but even RAG is not exempt from “hallucinations” even if they occur on a smaller scale and are less egregious. On articles texts,…

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Ho bisogno di un consiglio… I need some advice

devo trovare una alternativa a tinyletter (che chiude) per mandare la mia mailing list. deve essere semplice avere la possibilita’ di iscrizione da questo blog (wordpress) poter ricevere via mail la mail da mandare (io mando una mail a un indirizzo segreto e il sistema la gira alla mailing list) consigli ? grazieee… I need to find an alternative to tinyletter (which is shutting down) to send my mailing list. it should be simple have the ability to subscribe from this blog (wordpress) be able to receive by email the email to send (I send an email to a secret…

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Automatically generated news, back in 2012

In 2012 I was chief digital officer of 24 Ore publishing group. I launched an initiative called 24labs to test new technologies and ideas. We run an experiment to automatically generate audio/video news. The idea went as follows: starting from an online search on free news sites to identify topics correlating articles; pass those articles to a summary generator (we were using a canadian software that was designed for spanish, adapted to italian, given its similar sentences’ structure); pass the text to Loquendo’s speech synthesys ad enrich with an avatar using as background thumbnails of graphcs found in those same…

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LLMs are Digital Interns (Gli LLM sono stagisti digitali)

(Versione in italiano sotto) IMHO it’s hard for LLMs SAAS to become sustainably interesting for corporates, given the issues they raise about copyright, security, privacy. (then there’s a cost issue; I wrote here how one could determine if their adoption is economically sound) Furthermore, they are intrinsically error prone: the same characteristics that make them adaptable are those that generate output artifacts (“hallucinations” in AI metaphorical lingo). People professionally using them to provide answers will need to revise and correct the outputs. (Lawyers and doctors have already experienced this very clearly) The consequence is that it seems unlikely they will…

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