AI makes its mark on the Super Bowl ft. Arc Search

✨Welcome to untechnical✨
This is tech content made for the untechnical.

For those who are new here, this weekly newsletter is an easy and approachable way for you to incrementally build your knowledge and skills in all things new tech, AI and automation, while also staying up-to-date with a curated summary of the week’s AI/tech news.

So let’s get into it!

Tech Tip of the Week 🍎 

ANI vs AGI - what’s the difference?

Let’s start by breaking down some acronyms. 

ANI = Artificial Narrow Intelligence

• Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) is a type of artificial intelligence that excels at specific tasks, akin to a specialist. 

• ANI is highly proficient in one area, such as playing chess or recognising speech, but lacks general understanding or capabilities outside its domain. You can think of it like a chess champion with no cooking skills – proficient in its expertise but completely hopeless in other areas!

• ANI represents most AI we encounter today, designed for discrete tasks rather than comprehensive understanding.

AGI = Artificial General Intelligence

• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) mirrors a polymath (i.e. someone who is proficient in diverse tasks like playing chess, cooking, math, and poetry). 

• Unlike ANI, AGI possesses broad capabilities across various domains. 

• In this way AGI aims to replicate human-like intelligence, handling a multitude of tasks akin to a versatile individual. 

• AGI embodies the aspiration for AI that understands and adapts to many different contexts.

Weekly News Digest 🗞

There’s no shortage of news about tech, AI and automation but it’s hard to know what you should tune into. Here, I summarise noteworthy news from the week and why you should care.

1. AI makes its mark on this year’s Super Bowl commercials

What happened? 

• If you could see past all the Swift/Kelce mania (which was 90% of my Tiktok feed this week), you may not be surprised to hear that AI also made its mark on this year’s Super Bowl LVIII with companies choosing to feature AI in the highly coveted Super Bowl commercial slots.

Tell me more:

Click on the hyperlinks to watch the commercials!

• Microsoft featured its AI assistant, Copilot.

• A Google Pixel advertisement emphasised the new AI 'Guided Frame' feature, aiding blind or low vision users in taking photos effortlessly.

• Illumination poked fun at AI video in its promotion of the upcoming “Despicable Me 4” film, with Minions attempting to create AI-generated content. 

• BodyArmor's 'Field of Fake' ad mocked AI-generated content, promoting its 'real sweeteners' over ‘artificial’ sweeteners.

• Etsy showcased its Gift Mode feature, an AI recommendation tool assisting users in curating gift ideas.

2. Researchers unlock the ability of AI to understand and process longer videos

What happened? 

• Researchers at Google DeepMind and the University of Cornell have come up with a clever new way for AI to comprehend what's happening in longer videos, known as MC-ViT.

Tell me more:

• At present, most AI technologies can only handle processing (understanding) short video clips due to complexity and computing constraints (i.e. a lot of computer power is needed to process longer-form video content). 

• But this new method, called MC-ViT, works like a memory bank. It remembers important content from earlier in the video, so the AI can refer back to it later.

• Drawing inspiration from human memory consolidation theories, this approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in tasks like action recognition and question answering while also utilising fewer resources than larger models.

Why is this important/interesting? 

• Enhancing AI's understanding of longer videos is crucial for expanding its usefulness in real-world applications.

• And the best part? This research achieves results using simpler technology, which means it's more accessible and cheaper, so more people can leverage the approach!

Tech Tool Spotlight 💡

Here, I deep-dive into a selected tech tool to show you what’s possible and ways you can apply the tool.

Arc Search

A few weeks ago, I shared a Google search alternative, Perplexity.

This week, there’s another Google search and browser alternative to test run called Arc Search!

And did this product onboarding experience win me over 😍 wow!

Product rundown:

• Arc Search is a new mobile browser and search engine developed by The Browser Company. (Think of it as if Google Chrome and Perplexity had a baby).

• Arc Search is designed to be a fast and uncluttered mobile web browsing experience, which integrates AI technology to streamline the online search process and minimise distractions (like ads, sponsored content etc.)

• For example, the "Browse for Me" feature, scours the web, reads multiple pages, and builds a customised tab for the user, providing a summarized and tailored search result (see image below!)

• The browser also includes features such as ad and tracker blocking, auto-archiving of inactive tabs, and a clean Reader Mode. This also means no more Big Tech selling our data to advertisers!

Playground 🪁

Experimenting with new tech, AI and automation is one of the best ways to learn. But it can be hard to know where to start or what to play around with. Here, I provide an example of what I’ve been playing around with recently to give you some inspiration.

AI Valentine’s Day Card (Image) Generator

If you need a reason to smile this week, look no further than Be my Boo.

…AKA the most fun you will have making an easy Valentine's Day e-card for your loved one(s) 🤣 

This STUNNING picture of myself took < 1 minute to make on my phone and it’s perfection!

Special thanks to one of my lovely and hilarious colleagues who put me onto this tool! 🫶 

Hungry for more?

Every week I wonder if there’s going to be enough to talk about. But I seem to have the opposite problem with so many news items I think you’ll find interesting. If you’re hungry for more information, below is a list of additional news items I’ve come across that you might like to have a squiz at!

Further AI / Tech news links

• Founding member and OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy departs the company → Read more

• AI frenzy puts Nvidia briefly ahead of Amazon in market value → Read more

• The AI chat app being trialled in Australian (New South Wales) schools which makes students work for the answers → Read more

• The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission → Read more

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Feedback 🎯

This newsletter is a two-way street. Learning more about what you’d like to see more/less of and what content is going to support you best is incredibly important.

💬 Do you have any feedback that may help improve future editions of untechnical? Any questions? Or content requests?

Get in touch by replying to this email.

That’s all for this week!

✨ Thanks for tuning in!