AB #003: I fooled around and fell in love, singularity on the edge of a cliff, level up on AI with me
AB #003: I fooled around and fell in love, singularity on the edge of a cliff, level up on AI with me
Good luck if you're going back to work this week and getting back into school/nanny runs with the little ones.
In today’s bento…
🍿 Approaching singularity with ChatGPT Custom Instructions
🏞️ Dining in the French Riviera
🙌🏽 An industrial designer’s journey back home
🤓 How to look smarter next time someone brings up GenAI
🩺 My Product+Career Clinic is open!
🙋🏽♂️ I’m back on the market and #opentowork
🍿 I fooled around and fell in love…
With ChatGPT Custom Instructions
This week, I wanted to share a couple of thoughts about crafting singularity using AI.
Having tried a number of GenAI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Pi) for text generation, completion and summarisation, I’m always on the lookout for the next iteration which will get me closer to the grail → replicating my tone of voice reliably.
I find that while GenAI tools help me with brainstorming ideas for content, they are still quite poor at making a significant change in my workflow (possibly because I’m not investing enough time into optimising) or offering off-the-shelf responses that meet my personal standards.
But this latest addition changes things…
A month ago, ChatGPT introduced Custom Instructions, a significant improvement in persona modelling and response customisation.
Basically, you can tell ChatGPT who you are and how to respond so that the response sounds more like you.
Let’s dive in with an example…
Here’s the prompt I used. 😆
Here’s the response.
👆🏽 View in browser (animated GIF here)
If you can’t tell, the response with Custom Instructions turned ON is way closer to what I would typically want to see or write on this topic. It’s still far from ideal, but this is a huge leap forward.
The way this works is that the instructions you provide tell GPT to focus only on a subset of the information in the model to produce a response closer to the parameters you define.
Here’s an example of how Custom Instructions work.
These are the instructions behind the post generated above.
While this is not perfect, it provides a lot more latitude and pertinence for people who’re looking to leverage ChatGPT mainly through the UI.
One challenge I find is that there is a discoverability challenge in terms of the types of parameters and value that would be impactful to use in custom instructions. The fact it’s free-form text means you can just blab on about your life, not really knowing that it has significant impact on the processing of prompts and quality of responses.
That’s not all tho…
One week ago, Hugging Face made big announcements. More below…
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🤗 Then came HuggingChat
Hugging Face (GitHub for AI) announced their latest funding round $235million Series D at $4.5 billion valuation.
To celebrate their fundraising, their CTO just announced that they had launched a chat interface.
Why should you care: unlike ChatGPT on browser, this chat interface allows you to choose which underlying model you want to use.
Not sure how long this will stay ON and for free.
But it’s definitely a great FREE alternative to ChatGPT.
🏞️ Worthy Eateries
While we’re exploring singularity, here’s a singular experience from the French Riviera.
Last summer, we had lunch at Ceto (Maybourne Riviera) with some good friends. The hotel is located on a cliff between Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and Monaco. The previous Vista Palace was redesigned and delivered in 2021 by Wilmotte & Associés (Station F, Lutetia, Grand Palais Ephémère).
Ceto’s menu is signed by Mauro Colagreco, famous 3⭐️ chef from Mirazur - the world’s best restaurant 2019 (50Best).
The service is 5⭐️ from the moment you step in front of the hotel to the moment you leave. Pretty standard, you might say for a 5-star luxury hotel, but execution and attention to detail is not always a given.
We were a party of 8 (5 adults and 3 kids) and the staff were super attentive to our needs and to the kids.
There is something quite beautiful about walking into a place like this and witnessing a ballet of hotel staff reshuffling everything, so you can have the best dining experience.
Before trying out the food, I was sceptical because it is quite common for extraordinary chefs to sign menus for other establishments where execution will eventually disappoint.
I’m happy to day this was not the case here.
Having dined at Mirazur previously — a story for another day ✨ — I found the food at Ceto to be incredibly flavourful, balanced and perfectly put together.
🌞 Check out Ceto at The Maybourne Riviera. Highly recommend.
🍦 Humans of Product
Each bento features a human I came to know.
I want to build a community where product people can really connect and help each other. ✨
Meet Benoît
Like many others in my network, we connected through Rémi Guyot.
Hello, I am Benoit !
This is the story of how I moved from surgery knives to growing basil in a unicorn.
Let’s rewind a bit, 📼
I always dreamt of experiencing different cultures, peoples and know-hows, far, far away. So when I was given the opportunity to go finish my design studies in China with a specialization in cross-cultural design… I jumped on it ! 🌏😀
Like this, what was supposed to be a year and a half turned into eight wonderful years of my life, which went like a blink of an eye.
Working in healthcare innovation, I travelled all around the country, visiting hospitals, interviewing and observing extraordinary people helping and saving others. I looked for product and services innovation opportunities to improve their work, and then we would develop them.
I can tell you that finding yourself, as a designer, in a surgery room of a hospital in China to observe a lung surgery is a pretty unique experience. 🙂
But Asia is far from home, and family is precious, so my partner and I decided to go back to Europe and move to Berlin for new adventures. I said goodbye to surgery knives, clamps, forceps and other instruments… And I said hello to seeds, plants, leafy greens and startup! 🌱
Deeply concerned about our climate, I joined as an early employee called Infarm, with the vision to increase cities food autonomy with a network of modular vertical farms. From a small startup, we went all the way to a global scale-up 🦄.
And what a crazy ride that was! For 6 years I had the chance to build a team of 12 amazing UX, industrial and strategic designers to create an ecosystem of hardware, software and services which would scale in 10 countries ! 🌿🚀
How can we help each other? ⭐️
I am looking for my next adventure… in France 🥐 After 13 years living abroad and while we love Berlin, we think going back to France could be a great step to grow as a family :)
I love bringing design into unexpected fields, and empowering teams to turn innovative and meaningful ideas into reality. So If you have a project in Healthcare, Agtech/ FoodTech, climate or IOT ecosystem, I am happy to give a hand, provide feedback, consult or join 🙂.
🖼️ Check out my portfolio here
🩺 Product Clinic
I’m opening weekly 30-minute slots for people who need help with a specific situation they’re faced with.
Fill in this short form and I’ll get back to you.
Depending on how this goes, I might not have time for everyone straight away, but will get back to you in any case.
That’s how I grow, too. 💫
🤓 AI jargon-buster
September means back to work and your busy schedule of afterwork drinks and dinner parties. Here’s your cheat sheet to look smarter next time someone brings up GenAI or ChatGPT.
Transformer
A machine learning model designed to understand and process sequences of data, like words in a sentence or stock prices over time. The goal is to make sense of information in a way that computers can act upon, be it translating a language, generating text, or more.
In product management, transformers are revolutionising the way we gather customer feedback. Rather than manually sifting through customer reviews, transformers can quickly summarise sentiments and detect trends, helping product managers make data-driven decisions faster.So, next time you hear "transformer" in the context of AI, think of it as a super-smart model that understands the "context" in sequences, helping machines make better sense of human languages, stock markets, or virtually any other type of sequential data.
Token
In the context of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), a "token" is a chunk of text that usually contains an average of around 4 to 5 characters. The model reads and processes these tokens one at a time to understand language.Context window
In simple terms, a "context window" in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) is like the model's short-term memory. It's the limited number of tokens the model can look at simultaneously to make sense of what it's currently reading.
🍄 Congrats, you’re all levelled-up now!
🙋🏽♂️ I’m back on the market
👨🏽💻 I’m available for part-time contracting roles as a Product Coach/Advisor, Head of Product Excellence or Fractional Product Leader, until the end of 2023 at least.
P.S. Don’t you think “For All Mankind” is pretty well written?!
Peace out! ✌🏽