Can GenAI help me find the right gift for a GenZ?

Earlier this month, Perplexity, the search engine that uses LLMs to answer search queries, launched a shopping assistant. You enter the type of product you are looking for (e.g., Gift ideas for a male in his early 20s, who likes X and Y. My budget is Z). Then, you get recommendations, with links to where … Continue reading Can GenAI help me find the right gift for a GenZ?

LLMs need to be more kale

A couple of weeks ago, Gary Marcus’s newsletter flagged a company (Inqwire) that had a statement on their frontpage, stating that they do not use LLMs*, and adding that they do not pretend to be using humans when they use chatbots. Inqwire’s positioning is the complete opposite of pseudo-AI, in which companies sell certain services (e.g., … Continue reading LLMs need to be more kale

Thoughts on the privacy threats and personalisation opportunities of qualitative inference with large language models

I have come across the paper entitled “Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models”, authored by Robin Staab, Mark Vero, Mislav Balunović and Martin Vechev. Staab and his team investigated “whether current LLMs could violate individuals' privacy by inferring personal attributes from text”. Using prompts and techniques that, to me, seem quite … Continue reading Thoughts on the privacy threats and personalisation opportunities of qualitative inference with large language models

What if AI was your customer? Some thoughts on LLMs as medical patients

Some time ago I read a paper by Ming-Hui Huang and Roland T. Rust where they introduced the idea of AI as a customer. In the paper appropriately titled “AI as customer”, which was published in the Journal of Service Management, Huang and Rust present the idea that AI, in addition to being used to … Continue reading What if AI was your customer? Some thoughts on LLMs as medical patients

ChatGPT and university education – the opportunity, the challenge and the breakthrough

Image created using Dall-E Like it or not, ChatGPT and other forms of generative conversational AI are here to stay. Last weekend, John Naughton, writing in the Guardian, compared ChatGPT to Excel*, noting that “[Excel] went from being an intriguing but useful augmentation of human capabilities to being a mundane accessory”. It would never occur to current … Continue reading ChatGPT and university education – the opportunity, the challenge and the breakthrough