OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Things we learned out about LLMs in 2024
Simon Willison, Simon Willison's Weblog, 2024/12/31

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Comprehensive overview of the state of large language models (LLM). Here's a sample:

• The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken
• Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop
• LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency
• Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge
• Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life
• Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already
• Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months
• "Agents" still haven't really happened yet

There's more, and all the links point to sections in this one article.

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The Perception Crisis: How Educational Institutions Are Missing AI Reality
Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons: Exploring Human-AI Collaboration, 2024/12/31

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I agree with this assessment: "We're trapped in an outdated mental model of AI - one that sees it as a mere tool for text generation, plagued by hallucinations, struggling with basic reasoning, and 'easily' contained within institutional policies which just need 'tweaking'. This perception persists even as AI has evolved into something far more sophisticated and pervasive."

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A torrent of AI developments at the end of the year
Bryan Alexander, AI, academia, and the Future, 2024/12/31

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Nice summary of the flurry of AI announcements to close out the year 2024. Bryan Alexander describes OpenAI's s Twelve Days of Shipmas, Google's swarm of offerings, Microsft's Vision a spinoff from Copilot, Amazon's family of Nova products, and Meta's Videoseal watermarking tool for AI generated video content. 

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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