Tag: AI

Tech Insight: New AI That Generates 3-D Models From Text

Posted on by Paul Stradling

The Shap-E AI system from OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT) and available for open-source download, can create 3D models from text.

What Is It? 

According to the Cornell University researchers behind the system, Shap-E is “a conditional generative model for 3D assets” which, unlike other 3D generative models “generates the parameters of implicit functions that can be rendered as both textured meshes and neural radiance fields” rather than producing a single output representation. In short, Shap-E is a big step forward in simplifying the generation of 3D models that can generate “complex and diverse 3D assets” in seconds (when trained on a large dataset of paired 3D and text data).

Trained In Two Stages 

OpenAI says that Shap-E works so well (and better than the previous Point-E models) because it is trained in two stages: first, the encoder that deterministically maps 3D assets into the parameters of an implicit function is trained and second, we train a conditional diffusion model on outputs of the encoder.

Faster & Better 

When compared to Point-E, which is an explicit generative model over point clouds, the new Shap-E converges faster and reaches comparable or better sample quality despite modelling a higher-dimensional, multi-representation output space.

Examples 

Examples of the text-conditional models created by Shap-E and the simple prompts used to create them can be seen at the foot of this page. For example, the first model was created simply by using the text prompt “a chair that looks like an avocado.”

Where & How? 

Shap-E can be downloaded free here https://github.com/openai/shap-e/ and accessed on Microsoft Paint 3D.

Challenge 

Even though Shap-E simplifies 3D model making, some tech commentators have reported that getting the new model installed and running can be complicated and take some time, and that a lot of system resources are required to use it.

3D Printing 

There are also developments in the 3D printing world, e.g., with advanced models like the Chinese Artillery 3D Sidewinder. Today’s advanced, large 3D printers are moving more into the production technology stage from one-off manufacturing and prototyping, and additive manufacturing (constructing a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model) could soon be fed by models created by AI models that use text or even speech to create items.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

The Shap-E represents a big step forward in speeding up and simplifying the making of 3D models and making it more accessible to all kinds of businesses. Being able to quickly visualise a concept or idea and chop and change it with just words, and to create a model that can be used to make a 3D printed item is used in many industries and fields for making prototypes, components, end products, reconstructed fossils, or artefacts (and much more) could deliver huge benefits to many businesses. Although Shap-E, as shown by the example models, is still at an early (but still impressive) stage, linking things like AI text (or speech) model generators to 3D printers could dramatically speed up, cut costs, and simplify areas of manufacturing that would have proved much more challenging before.

For the moment, having a free 3D model generator for general usage that works on simple text inputs makes 3D modelling more accessible to any business and will help with creativity and conceptualising, and we have yet to see its true value and range. Reports indicate that it may be a little challenging to install but as it’s from OpenAI it comes with a good pedigree and once up and working, it may prove a useful tool for many businesses, as well as being fun!

Tech News : ChatGPT Banned At Apple

Posted on by Paul Stradling

Apple has reportedly banned the internal use of ChatGPT and other chatbots plus AI writers like Bard, Copilot and GitHub to prevent the sharing of sensitive company information.

Internal Document Seen 

The ban came to light following a report by the The Wall Street Journal, which said it had seen internal documents informing Apple employees of the ban.

Why? 

The main reasons for the extra secrecy measures from Apple are that:

– There are rumours that Apple is either working on its own generative AI or is making secret technical improvements to Siri to help it compete with Google and Amazon’s digital assistants.

– Confidential data fed into AI chatbots is often used to further train them and can, therefore, be revealed if someone asks the chatbot similar questions. Also, possible bugs in chatbots, such as the one (discovered in March) in an open-source library, can lead to sensitive information being revealed. This fear of revealing company secrets and possible security issues is why many tech companies and banks (such as Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank) have all banned internal usage of ChatGPT. Other companies, such as Samsung, have imposed a character count and other limitations on the use of AI chatbots for the same reason.

What Does ChatGPT Say? 

Users of ChatGPT are warned upon login anyway that ‘conversations may be reviewed by our AI trainers.’

Also, last month, addressing fears of ChatGPT having the potential to reveal commercially sensitive information, OpenAI announced that it has introduced the ability to turn off the chat history in ChatGPT and that conversations started when chat history is disabled won’t be used to train and improve its models, and won’t appear in the history sidebar.

OpenAI also said that when chat history is disabled, it will retain new conversations for 30 days and review them only when needed to monitor for abuse, before permanently deleting them.

Working On A New Business Version

In the same announcement, OpenAI said it’s working on a new ChatGPT Business subscription for professionals who need more control over their data as well as enterprises seeking to manage their end users. This business version will follow its API’s data usage policies, so that end users’ data won’t be used to train OpenAI’s models by default.

Call For Regulation of AI 

Recently, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, told the US Senate judiciary committee that he supported the use of regulatory intervention by governments to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

It has been known for months that, due to how they are trained (and the possible bugs in this relatively new technology), ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have the potential to reveal sensitive information that’s been inputted by users. This is why many big companies have moved to close this risk-loophole by simply banning the internal use of ChatGPT. OpenAI has been relatively transparent about the way its AI chatbot is trained and the possible risks and its CEO has himself publicly supported regulation of AI as the technology moves forward at an alarming pace. Also, as highlighted above, OpenAI has introduced measures around control of ChatGPT history by users and promised a business version that gives users more control over their data. For businesses that are particularly concerned about privacy and security issues in the use of chatbots for work, the safest guidance for now may simply be to ban the use of an AI chatbot or introduce controls on what can be inputted and how.

Tech News : AI Contributes To 55,000 BT Jobs Cuts

Posted on by Paul Stradling

BT has announced that the completion of its fibre roll-out, 5G rollout, adapting to new technologies like AI, plus general cost cutting are key reasons why it will be axing up to 55,000 jobs, primarily in the UK, by the end of the decade.

40 Per Cent Of The Workforce 

The massive 40 per cent cut in BT’s workforce will lead to a significantly reduced cost base by the end of the 2020s and, according to boss Philip Jansen, make the new BT Group “a leaner business with a brighter future.”

Drivers Of Job Cuts 

The main drivers and numbers of the job cuts are reported to be:

– The completion of the most labour-intensive stage of BT’s next-generation full-fibre and 5G network expansion, which will mean 15,000 job cuts as fewer engineers will be required.

– The digitising of BT’s business and the wider adoption of AI, e.g. for call handling and network diagnostics, which will result in the loss of 10,000 jobs.

– The above-mentioned changes leading to fewer maintenance staff being required, which will result in another 10,000 jobs being cut.

– Cuts in the number of contractors (mainly abroad) which will mean the loss of 30,000 jobs.

– General re-structuring and cost-cutting as part of a rolling programme, meaning a loss of 5,000 jobs.

Vodafone  

BT’s job cuts announcement follows Vodafone’s decision to cut 11,000 jobs (around 12 per cent of its 90,000 global workforce) over three years.

Unions Expected It

The Communications and Workers Union (CWU) said that the BT job cuts were no surprise due to the introduction of new technologies and the completion of infrastructure projects.

Share Value Affected 

BT’s profits had dropped 12 per cent to £1.7 billion for the year ending in April and the company’s shares also fell more than 7 per cent after the job cuts announcement. Analysts suggest that the job cut announcements may be aimed at convincing investors of the promised cost savings.

AI Opportunities

With ChatGPT’s massive impact on the business world, much has been made around the part it will play in replacing some of the BT jobs. BT’s Boss Philip Jansen admitted that he sees “huge opportunities” to use AI in the business, e.g. to improve customer service and that an AI tool like ChatGPT “gives us confidence we can go even further”. However, he also says that, although adapting to new technologies, he doesn’t want to make customers “feel like they are dealing with robots”. 

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

As the unions pointed out, job losses at BT were expected anyway due to the introduction of new technologies across BT and the completion of the fibre infrastructure replacing the copper old network (resulting in in less labour costs). The arrival and enormous impact of ChatGPT (and now Bard), CoPilot, and others, however, have brought with them the kind of automation that has long been thought could lead to job losses, which appears to be the case here for around 10,000 BT workers. This could now become a growing trend as other big companies start to bring the cost and time saving benefits of AI into more parts of their business. As many commentators have noted, however, AI can also create new opportunities and new types of jobs and we are still very much at the beginning of the journey with generative AI, and regulation is likely to be an important step in making sure that the rapid growth of AI usage is safe and beneficial.

AI Update – Part 1: Handy AI Resources For Your Business

Posted on by Paul Stradling

In this article, we look at 22 handy AI sites that could help save time, make life easier and boost your business.

1. Pictory – https://pictory.ai/ 

Pictory offers a way to automatically create short, sharable branded, sales videos from your long form content. No technical skills or software download are required; it can use AI to extract content from your Zoom, Teams, and webinar recordings, plus it automatically adds captions to your videos. It’s one of many new AI video generating tools.

2. Jasper – https://www.jasper.ai/

This business-focused language model says that it uses features from a cross-section of the best models and infuses them with recent search data, the user’s brand voice, and optimisation tools like SEO and grammar. Jasper can be used to generate text content (like ChatGPT – although much less powerful, it preceded ChatGPT on the market so we’ve included it here), plus it offers art generation, has a template library, language translation and more. It’s quite a comprehensive AI solution.

3. HitPaw – See Google Play Store

HitPaw is a one-click, AI-assisted image enhancer that can instantly make pictures less blurry, remove noise of pictures, and enlarge and upscale images without any quality loss. This sort of thing used to take a long time with programs like Photoshop.

4. Fireflies – https://fireflies.ai/

Fireflies uses AI to instantly produce transcripts of your meetings across several different video-conferencing apps, diallers, and audio files. It captures video and audio, generates the transcripts in minutes, integrates with apps like Google Meet, Zoom, Teams and more, and enables fast search, and analysis of voice conversations. It’s one of several new AI-enabled transcript tools that can save businesses a lot of time.

5. Acrolinx – https://www.acrolinx.com/

An AI-powered software platform that’s designed to improve the quality and effectiveness of enterprise (human and AI) content. It’s probably best for bigger companies and agencies and it’s used by some major players and offers a way to make any content published as effective as possible in terms of marketing. Quite an comprehensive product, it needs to be fully explored to be understood.

6. Beautiful AI – https://www.beautiful.ai/

This is an AI-powered tool to easily create high quality presentations. It has some impressive looking smart templates, plus the slides are automatically created and adapted as the user adds the content.

7. TinyWow – https://tinywow.com/

This site seems have it all and offers a handy toolbox which you can keep coming back to as their list of features just gets bigger and bigger. From text generation to image/videos manipulation and file manipulation, it’s difficult to overstate how handy this resource is and – incredibly – you can use most of it for free without needing to pay for the premium services.

8. 1-Click Summarizer (See google Play Store)

The 1-Click Summarizer and web toolbar by (Skim AI), is available as a Chrome extension and offers a fast and easy way to process and summarise news, research, and useful PDFs. For example, if you’re looking at a news article or long PDF online it will summarise all the main points with one click (a real time-saver).

9. Timehero – https://www.timehero.com/

TimeHero is personal project and task management software that connects to your Gmail and other project management software and automatically generates tasks based on due dates and other details. A fast and useful project and time management tool.

10. Warmest AI – https://www.warmest.ai/

Warmest AI makes replying to emails super easy and fast. When you receive an email, it works out how you would answer an email (based on previous emails you’ve sent) and puts that in a draft ready to simply be approved by you and sent.

11. Zenefits – https://www.zenefits.com/

Zenefits offers an AI-powered way to streamline your workflow by automatically connecting HR, Benefits, Payroll and Scheduling, together in one complete HR management platform.

12. Textio – https://textio.com/

Textio offers a way for businesses to always use the right language in job ads and more. It’s a tool that eliminates bias in job posts, sourcing mail, and employer brand content and helps managers to identify and remove biased, ineffective feedback, enabling equitable employee development opportunities.

13. DomainWheel – https://domainwheel.com/

This is an AI-powered (free) tool for simply generating domain name suggestions for your website. You just need to enter a keyword or phrase and DomainWheel will instantly provide domain name ideas. It’s no surprise that you can also register them there.

14. Grammarly – https://www.grammarly.com/

This is a highly popular, AI-powered digital writing assistant that helps you write well-structured content that’s free of plagiarism, and it eliminates grammar errors. It runs in the background on most platforms.

15. Gong – https://www.gong.io/

Gong offers a fast and intelligent way for businesses to understand and analyse sales conversations and customer interactions to increase revenue efficiency and improve decision-making. It says it can turn “bottom performers into A-players”.

16. Brandmark.io – https://brandmark.io/

This AI tool helps you generate brand logos. You can try out assorted designs and even upload the logo and see how it ranks on several measures.

17. Talk To Books – https://books.google.com/talktobooks/

Talk To Books is an interesting (and slightly leftfield) Google creativity tool which allows you to browse passages from books using experimental AI, explore ideas and discover books by getting quotes that respond to your queries.

18. Deep Nostalgia – https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia

This tool is quite unique in that it offers a way to animate the faces of family members from their old photos. Take a look, you’ll be surprised.

19. Magic Eraser – https://magicstudio.com/magiceraser

This AI tool offers a fast, online way to remove unwanted objects from a photo. Just upload the photo, mark the area you want removed, the AI tool will remove it, and you can download the updated version of the photo.

20. Home Styler – https://www.homestyler.com/

If you need to create a floor plan, this (free to try) online interior design platform lets you do it in 3D and says it is “An easy and timesaving online interior design tool for both professionals and amateurs”.

21. OutGrow – https://outgrow.co/

“Boost Your Marketing With Quizzes, Calculators And Forms” as they say on their website. Makes adding clever, engaging ‘stuff’ like these a breeze.

22. TypingMind – https://www.typingmind.com/

Despite its awesome power, the user-interface for ChatGPT is still pretty terrible. This handy resource means you can do so much more with ChatGPT with just a few keystrokes.

There are hundreds of AI sites appearing all over the place – this is just a small selection. We’ll be revisiting this list soon.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

AI has been around for a long time yet because interest the generative AI tool ChatGPT has been so intense since it was released just a few month ago, there has been a resurgence in the interest around AI overall. There are lots of other useful, innovative, timesaving, and value-adding AI based tools out there to boost your business or personal life and this list is just a smattering of ones that you may not have heard about.

AI can now help with so many different aspects of businesses to help improve efficiency and create competitive advantages. Trying out just a few of the options highlighted in this article, or others found in your own searches could help you to discover a new tool that could quickly and easily boost your business and this entire field of AI is exploding so scheduling regular reviews will be essential.

AI Update – Part 2: 20 Helpful ChatGPT Prompts

Posted on by Paul Stradling

Using the right prompts is the way to quickly get the best responses from ChatGPT and here are 20 helpful ChatGTP prompts that you may want to try.

20 Productive Prompts 

Here are 20 top prompts you can copy and paste into ChatGPT, just adding a few details to get some helpful and productive responses for your business.

1. Simplifying complex topics 
To help you quickly understand and digest complex topics, try the following prompt: Hey ChatGPT. I want to learn about [insert topic here]. Explain [insert the specific topic] in simple terms. Explain to me like I’m 12 years old.

2. Creating a marketing plan 
To generate a marketing plan outline try using:  Please act as an advertiser and create a campaign to promote a product or service of your choice. You will choose a target audience, develop key messages and slogans, select the media channels for promotion, and decide on any additional activities needed to reach your goals. My first suggestion request is, “I need help creating an advertising campaign for [put the description of your service or product here].”

3. Make ChatGTP learn your writing style 
To create content outputs that have more personality because they’re in your writing style, try this to teach ChatGPT your style: [Insert a copy of your text]. Prompt – Write about [insert text topic] as the above author would write.

4. Get ready-made blog post ideas
To make ChatGPT think of the blog post titles (as well as getting it to write the posts after) try: List [number] ideas for blog posts about [topic].

5. Write more engaging marketing emails 
To enlist help in making your marketing email copy more engaging, try the prompt: Write marketing copy to make my marketing emails more engaging. The copy must be about our [product, service, or company].

6. Write a YouTube video script
ChatGTP can take the work out of writing a script for a YouTube video. Try the prompt: Write a YouTube video script about [product, blog, company].

7. Social media marketing help 
You can get a social media marketing boost by using prompts like:
Write 5 tweets to generate interest in [product, company, or service], or Write a promotional LinkedIn post about [product or service] or Write 3-second Facebook Ad copy about [product or service].

8. Take the work out of press release writing 
Provide ChatGPT with some facts about your event and ask to write a press release about it with the following prompt: Write a press release about our upcoming event. Include the event’s date, time, location, and purpose.

9. Improving a CV
If you’d like to shorten your CV and improve its impact, paste it into ChatGPT and use the prompt: Can you edit and improve my CV and make it a two-page document?

10. Writing better long copy
To produce quality long copy about something, try the prompt: Act as a copywriter. Write long-form copy for [your subject] promoting [put what you’d like promoted here].

11. Event help
If you’ve got to make a poster for an event, try this prompt to get some helpful tips: How can I create an eye-catching poster design for an upcoming event?

12. Business promotional ideas 
If you just need a few ideas about how to promote your business in your area, try something like: Suggest inexpensive ways I can promote my [business type here] business without using social media.

13. Create your meeting agenda 
To take the work out of writing a meeting agenda, try the prompt: I want to create an agenda for a meeting about [your meeting info] with my team. Can you give me some examples of what should be included?

14. Improve email open rates
You can get help to create more effective emails by using a prompt like: Analyse these below metrics to improve email open rates for a [business type] brand [paste metrics].

15. Easy product descriptions
Take the work out of product descriptions by pasting in a few product facts and using the prompt: Write a product description for my [product or service or company].

16. Testing online adverts to get best version 
There are lots of prompts for help with Google Ads, and here’s a useful one for testing ads: Create two Google Ads in an RSA format (using multiple headlines and descriptions) for an A/B test for [your product here].

17. Improving your targeting
ChatGPT can also reveals ways to improve your targeting. For example, describe your target audience and try the prompt: What marketing tactics should I leverage to reach my target audience?

18. Get creative for TikTok
If you’d like to know how to make an impact with your product/service on TikTok, try the prompt: Generate [number] of viral TikTok ideas about [company, product, or service].

19. Retaining customers
In tough economic times, it’s more important than ever to keep your customers happy. Try the prompt: List the different ways we can implement a customer loyalty program to increase sales and retain customers.

20. Generate more prompts of your own
You can even ask ChatGPT to generate prompts for you. For example, try the prompt: Generate 10 chatbot prompts related to our [product].

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

There’s a reason why ‘Prompt Engineer’ is now a top tech job and why there are so many prompt libraries online. Designing the right prompts that appeal to the way ChatGPT’s LLM works are a way to get more complete and better-quality responses from ChatGPT. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that are more contextually appropriate and helpful and choosing the right prompts means that businesses can save time, get valuable insights, and ultimately give themselves a better chance of increasing sales and revenue by being able to use and act upon better information.