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RESHARE! Thanks to Paddy Dhanda for having Mark Pesce on his Podcast Superpowers school - we're happy to be sharing here! 🎧 Follow Superpowers School Podcast on: 👉 Apple 👉 Spotify 👉 YouTube 👉 Newsletter In this exclusive interview, Mark Pesce shares his journey of writing his new book published by the BCS, "Getting Started with ChatGPT and AI Chatbots." He was inspired by the realisation that billions of Windows users would soon need guidance on how to use powerful AI tools following Microsoft’s launch of co-pilot. The book aims to provide "rules of the road" for AI newcomers, avoiding technical jargon. Mark also discusses generative AI tools and the importance of understanding different AI models like Claude and Google Bard. 👉🏽 AI's rapid evolution requires a balance between innovation and ethical regulation. 👉🏽 Understanding various AI models and their uses is crucial for effective application. 👉🏽 Proper prompt engineering can significantly improve AI's performance and output. 👉🏽 While AI presents concerns for privacy and job security, it also offers opportunities for enhancing productivity and focusing on uniquely human skills. 👉🏽 The future of AI should be approached with cautious optimism, focusing on its potential to augment human capabilities. 🎁 You can purchase the book 👉🏽 https://rebrand.ly/3b93tly The book is illustrated by Grant Wright 🎁 You can purchase the book 👉🏽 https://rebrand.ly/3b93tly Share Mark Pesce (Author) Across a more than forty years in technology, Mark Pesce has been deeply involved in some of the major transitions points in the modern history of computing. After prototyping the SecurID card - the first 2FA device - in 1983, Pesce went on to develop firmware for X.25 networks, a forerunner of today’s Internet. At Shiva Corporation he developed software for a series of wide-area networking products praised for their ease of use and reliability. Inspired by Ted Nelson’s hypermedia system, Project Xanadu, and William Gibson’s ‘cyberspace’, Pesce invented core elements of a consumer-priced networked VR system, reducing the cost of sensing an object’s orientation by a thousand-fold with his ‘sourceless orientation sensor’ (US Patent 5526022A). After collaborating with Sega on Virtua VR, Pesce, working with visionary engineer Tony Parisi, blended real-time 3D with the World Wide Web to create the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). With VRML, Pesce and Parisi laid the foundations for today’s metaverse, culminating with its adoption as MPEG-4 Interactive Profile (ISO/IEC 14496) in 1998. Pesce wrote VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace - his first book - in 1995, followed by VRML: Flying through the Web in 1997. In 2000, Ballantine Books published The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination. In that book, three children’s toys - the Furby, LEGO Mindstorms and Sony’s Playstation 2 - act as entry points in an exploration of how interactive devices shape a child’s imagination. Appointed in 1997 as Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, Pesce founded the School’s program in Interactive media. In 2003, Pesce moved to Sydney to found the program in New and Emerging Media at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, guiding postgraduates through a transition to digital production, distribution, and promotion. Shortly after arriving in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation featured Pesce on their long-running hit series The New Inventors. Every Wednesday evening, Pesce celebrated the best Australian inventions and their inventors. A sought-after commentator, he writes a multiple award-winning column for The Register, and another for COSMOS Magazine. Pesce analyzed the impacts of media-sharing and social networks in two books: Hyperpolitics: Power on a Connected Planet (2009), and The Next Billion Seconds (2011). Pesce’s 2021 book, Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech’s Next Big Thing, critiques the design of augmented reality systems, questioning whether these devices truly serve their users - or simply stream valuable data back to their manufacturers. Pesce holds an appointment as Honorary Associate in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney. 🎁 You can purchase the book 👉🏽 HERE ⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower to help you thrive in the age of AI. ★ BUY ME A COFFEE ★ ☕️ If you enjoy the podcast, then you can donate a small amount here as a token of your appreciation: Buy Paddy a Coffee Transcription: [00:01:04] Paddy Dhanda: Isaac Newton once said, what we know is a drop. What we don't know is an ocean. As each day goes by. AI is expanding our job of knowledge exponentially. Just a year ago on November the 30th, 2022. Chat GPT burst onto the scene. Setting the digital world ablaze. Up until this moment. TikTok has been the fastest growing up, which had taken nine months to reach a hundred million users. . But chat GPT surpassed this milestone in just two months. The rise of this technology has sparked debates on data rights, misinformation, and ethical dilemmas. On the flip side, it has democratized knowledge, streamlined global communication and revolutionized productivity in the business world. The AI genie has truly been let out of the bottle. The EU is busy, developing the AI act to try and safeguard the future of humanity. Interview with Mark Pesce: AI Expert and Author [00:02:08] Paddy Dhanda: So for today's episode, I'm joined by Mark Pesce. He speaks exclusively about his new book. Getting started with ChatGPT and AI chat bots: An introduction to generative AI tools. Mark is a technology visionary with over 40 years of experience. He began his career by inventing the secure ID card in 1983. Uh, pioneering step in two factor authentication. He co-created the virtual reality modelling language. Forming the foundation of today's metaverse. He's also an accomplished author and commentator for the register. And cosmos magazine. And for a techie. He's one of the most engaging speakers I've ever had the privilege of speaking with. This episode was made possible by the amazing people at the British computing societies publishing group who have just become an official collaborator of the podcast. So, thank you so much. The Inspiration Behind Mark's New Book [00:03:14] Paddy Dhanda: So Mark, you've written this book and I'm really curious to know what inspired you to write it. [00:03:20] Mark Pesce: So the back story here is that Ian Borthwick, who's the publisher at BCS Books, had reached out to me, I don't know, probably the beginning of April, because I write a column for the Register, and the Register is published out of the UK. It is the oldest and crankiest website for news and IT. It's basically designed to be read by middle aged, cranky IT managers. And it's very... Not so much brutal, but how about honest with its opinions and free with its opinions. And I love being a columnist for it because I get to talk about a bunch of stuff. And he wrote to me and said, Mark, we really enjoy your columns. Should you be interested in doing a book for us? It's like maybe I did a book a couple of years ago. Wasn't necessarily interested in doing another one. It's like, well, maybe a book about AI and like, No. And the reason I said no is because it was all moving too fast. This was sort of April, right? Chat GPT was a couple of months old. There was a lot going on. Nothing was really static. And I was fending him off gently in emails. May came, and I was working in May at a great big client event. I do a lot of public speaking. And I'd just finished the last one of these. And these were overnight events. I would travel, go do the event, come back the next day. And I woke up. And I woke up, it's the 27th of May here in Sydney. And overnight in America, Microsoft had had a huge event. It's called their Develop event. And Satya Nadella had gotten on stage, the CEO of Microsoft, and announced Windows Copilot. And I'm sitting in bed, reading my feeds, as I do before I get out of bed in the morning, literally 6 o'clock in the morning, and I see this. And I find Ian's email, and I'm like, can you take a call? And the reason I did that was because I realized that about a billion people were about to get access to a really powerful AI chatbot, and none of them had been taught how to use it. The Impact of AI and Chatbots [00:05:11] Mark Pesce: And I thought that the best thing that I could do was to at least give people some basic rules of the road. [00:05:18] Paddy Dhanda: And if I think back to this time last year, I mean, as we're recording this episode, GPT is turning one. And if I think over that time, just how the world has changed and what has happened in terms of the development of AI, it's incredible. It's exponential. And initially I was thinking, well, maybe this AI stuff is aimed at a certain demographic. It's going to help. A certain, industry, but when you were thinking about writing this book, like, who are you aiming it at? I want to write a book that's for everyone who could be touching a computer with this in it, because Microsoft last month made the decision to roll it into Windows 10 as well. [00:05:59] Mark Pesce: A billion and a half people are running either Windows 10 or Windows 11 in the world. So that's a lot of people who need to know the rules of the road. And that's like, it doesn't need to be really dense and technical. In fact, there's an argument for not doing that because all of those technical details Are all changing very rapidly right now, but the rules of the road won't change. So if we teach people how to get started right, then we've set them up and then everything can change. You can get new technology, you can get a better chat GPT, or you can use Claude or whatever you might be using as an AI chat bot. You know, the rules of the road, you're going to do things right. [00:06:37] Paddy Dhanda: Got it. So there seems to be this gateway that's opened and the flood is coming. Everyone's going to be impacted in some [00:06:45] Mark Pesce: It's not coming. It's fully here. So chat GPT is about to turn one and depending on how you count it between chat GPT and Google Bard and Microsoft copilot About 2 billion people already have access to what I laughingly call weapons grade AI. And I only half laughingly, because it's really, really powerful AI. And Meta is busily integrating it into Facebook Messenger and Instagram and WhatsApp. And that's another 3 billion people. So, somewhere around 3, 3. 5 billion people on smartphone and on PC. Have access to these technologies as a part of their daily lives. Now, no one had them just a year ago. [00:07:31] Paddy Dhanda: You've actually used. Understanding Generative AI Tools [00:07:33] Paddy Dhanda: chat GPT in the name of the title of the book, and then you've also used the word generative AI tools. What's the thinking behind that? Because as somebody who doesn't know anything about AI, I'm associating chat GPT with AI. Like it feels like that's the only thing out there, but I know in your book, as I was reading it, you said something that really hit home to me, which was don't just trust one, like look across and compare and contrast. And that was a really useful insight because I think for a lot of us we just assume ChatGPT is the one to go for, unless you've got a particular allegiance to maybe Google or, you know, some other organization. So, first of all, why did you choose to include ChatGPT in the title? And then secondly, what do we mean by generative AI? [00:08:20] Mark Pesce: Yeah. So we, we put chat GPT in the title because that tells everyone, because the other thing that's different a year later is everyone knows what. chat GPT is whether or not they've used it and a lot of people have, everyone knows what it is. So rather than just saying AI chat bot and people might go, well, I don't know exactly know what that is. You say chat GPT, people know exactly what you're talking about, but we have basically big four, right? So we have open AI's chat GPT. We have Microsoft co pilot, which is. Basically, ChatGPT, but with Microsoft clothing on it. It's got some differences underneath, but it's basically the same. You have Google Bard, and then you have Claude, which is from a company called Anthropic. So, Anthropic was a company that broke off of OpenAI a couple of years ago. So, you can think of it as very similar, but also completely different. In other words, the way they built their engine is completely different than ChatGPT. When we talk about whether you know whether an AI chatbot is lying to you or not, whether it's making something up, which is an important point that I stress in the book, I always say that one of the best things you can do is if you're asking a question to ChatGPT, go and ask the same question to Claude if you don't trust it. Because they were trained differently. And this goes back to the idea of what is actually underneath the hood, which you asked about what's actually going on here. Because chat GPT is a website, but underneath that website is an engine that's called a language model, all right? And so, there's kind of one, maybe two language models GPT called GPT 4 and GPT 3. Now, without getting into all the technical details, let me tell you how they make a language model. Basically, you feed the entirety of the internet into a computer. And I am not exaggerating. You basically take everything that you can gather online and feed it into a computer, and then you start asking the computer questions, such as, what's the capital of Finland, which is something I make a lot of in the book. The poor Finns are going to wonder why, but it's just a good question to ask. And the first time you ask a language model this question, it's just going to spew some characters at you. So it's... going to be nonsense. And you'll say, no, that's wrong. The capital of Finland is Helsinki. And then you ask the question again, it will still just spew noise at you. And you'll do this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of time, but eventually Helsinki will start to appear in among all the noise. And eventually it'll just say Helsinki like, okay, good. You've got that one fact. Let's go to the next fact on the list. And you do this for millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of facts. And if that sounds exhausting, it takes computers who do this 18 months at the speed that computers work to train ChatGPT. Probably somewhere around a thousand trillion of those question and answer go around. Something like that was involved in training ChatGPT. takes 18 months. But at the end of it, you can ask it a question. And what it will do is because it's been taught an answer, in a sense, it knows what answers, not so much are right or wrong, but what are the most likely answers to a question. It will be able to now generate the likely response. And this is where we call it generative AI, because what it's doing is it's using everything that it's been trained on to generate its response. That kind of response can be a single word, such as Helsinki, or it can be five paragraphs, a stolen talking about the beautiful nature in Finland. So it just sort of depends on the nature of the question that you put to the chatbot. [00:11:54] Paddy Dhanda: I really love that Finland example in the book actually because it showed just the variation in responses you can get just from a very simple question and was almost like each of these different examp…
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