Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #394. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
This week I posted the following:
- Transitioning from Turning on Each Other to Turning Towards Each Other – Turning on each other is an all too common pattern in our relationships and social structures. On the contrary, turning towards each other is about seeking understanding over being understood.
- The Role of Education and Research in Confronting Harmful Discourses – Educators and researchers must strive to promote cultural understanding and tolerance by encouraging exposure to diverse viewpoints and working towards rebuilding trust in social systems and institutions.
- The Dark Truth: How Invisible Matter Killed the Dinosaurs – A Review of “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs” – A book review of Dark Matter and Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall.
🚀 Giant leap for machine-kind
OpenAI‘s ChatGPT just got a major upgrade thanks to the new GPT-4o model. The letter “o” in GPT-4o stands for “Omni”, referring to its enhanced multimodal capabilities.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted that the model is “natively multimodal,” which means the model could generate content or understand commands in voice, text, or images. This is a true multimodal AI capable of natively understanding text, image, video and audio with ease. It is also much faster and eventually will be able to talk back to you.
Altman later redefined open by suggesting that open means free (as in cost for most people), and not open as free or freedom. This is an important distinction.
🛩️ Small step for machine
This week was also Google I/O, an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. I watch the event every year with tons of anticipation about what tech and tools the company will share. I have to say that I was thoroughly unimpressed by the announcements this year from Google, as opposed to the OpenAI GPT-4o announcement.
Google’s 2024 Keynote highlighted advancements in AI and Search infrastructure, showcasing the power of generative AI and multi-step reasoning in Google Search. With Google’s AI models (Gemini), they aim to enhance user experience by providing personalized AI Overviews and assisting with tasks like planning and brainstorming. Put simply, you’ll see more AI in your Google Search results, all of their products, and on your Android devices.
Building on their Gemini models, Project Astra explores the future of AI assistants that can process multimodal information, understand the context you’re in, and respond naturally in conversation.
🤓 Learning and Unlearning
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
Gloria Steinem
As I was finalizing the title for this week’s newsletter, I had the title, but thought it might be a bit to cheeky.
Seems like GPT-4o approves of this message.
Thank you for being a part of Digitally Literate. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions. Reach out at hello@digitallyliterate.net or connect on social media.
Cover photo credits.