Innovating with AI - The military adopts Claude AI 💪

Hey there,

I hope life, work and the world of AI are treating you well! We're back with 3 big things in AI.

By the way, all the news items in today's email were shared first in our private Slack workspace for AI Consultancy Project and AI Incubator students. 🙂

#1 – 'A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness'

We've seen a lot of early studies about doctors using AI as a partner in diagnosing illnesses and reading X-rays and other test results. The most recent study claims that ChatGPT alone (without a human in the loop) actually did an even better job at diagnosing certain issues than ChatGPT with a human partner.

The rub is that humans have a lot of biases and sometimes may go against the "good judgement" of the AI for questionable reasons. I think it goes without saying that we won't see pure-AI doctors any time soon, but any advancements in faster and more accurate diagnoses are going to be huge for lifespans and health outcomes in the long-term.

In fact, you could say it's a pretty safe bet that one of the biggest legacies of AI will actually be improved healthcare – something far more impactful for humanity than faster office automations.

And, of course, I will never miss an opportunity to post a photo of the Star Trek Voyager AI hologram doctor. 🤓 🖖

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#2 – Sloppy AI is making job hunting even worse

My software development firm is hiring a new senior web developer and we've just been amazed how many applicants are sending us stuff that's obviously (and nonsensically) generated by AI.

On that note, one of my team members shared this post about AI slop in job apps from Kent Dodds. However, the thing is that spewing out a million resumés never worked, even before AI. The human connection was always what mattered, and the advent of AI is just another reminder of that. We teach the art of human connection to our AI Consultancy Project students, and good job-hunt mentors have been teaching it for decades.

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#3 - Anthropic and Palantir are hooking the Department of Defense up to AI

We've talked a lot about how The Chip War is going to be a big element of geopolitics and security in the coming decades – basically the TL;DR is that China and the United States will be trying to keep one another from getting too far ahead in chipmaking (and thus having a big advantage in things like AI-powered strategy and drones).

On that note, Anthropic (creator of the Claude language model, which is currently equal to or better than GPT-4) is working with several cloud and infrastructure companies to give the Department of Defense better and more secure access to its AI models. We can assume a lot more of this is happening without press releases, but to me, a few interesting things jump out about this story:

• Anthropic's brand is all about safety and guardrails, which at least some people will think is at odds with what the DoD does. My view is that working with the DoD is a good thing, and I'd rather see companies be "all-American" than "neutral," but I suspect there will be at least some opposition to Anthropic getting more involved in military AI.
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• Since the DoD is using AI in a big way, it's pretty hard for any corporation or government entity to not do the same – another sign of mainstream adoption and the removal of resistance to new technology throughout the economy, which is of course good for AI early adopters and consultants.

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🦃 If you're in the U.S., have a great Thanksgiving! Please note that my team and I are mostly out of the office this week for the holiday.

That's all for today!

As always, if you have any questions or topic ideas for next week, just reply.

Have a great day,

– Rob Howard
Founder of Innovating with AI