From Wildfires to Workflow Tools: A Practitioner's Guide
NVIDIA's $3000 Personal Supercomputer Arrives as Apple's AI News Feature Stumbles
The LA wildfires have been front of mind as many of my friends have been affected by it, and many have lost homes in the most devastating ways. My heart and prayers go out to all. Loss and pain hit home when it’s the city you live in. Off to an evacuation center to see how to help.
Meanwhile, this is the sky when I walked Luka this morning.
LA Wildfires and Grok
As I was trying to learn more information about the spread of the fires, about specific homes and addresses, and the latest news, I found myself going to Grok on xAI and receiving pretty incredible information gleaned from the X posts from people on the ground. The prompting pulled very micro detail and organized it in a useful way. I also downloaded the new xAI Grok app to test it out.
Mis/Dis
There were several posts saying the Hollywood sign was on fire. This was AI-generated, and it was not real. Before you share and forward, just wait a beat. Look for a second source. Ask yourself questions. Misinformation/disinformation is rampant in scenarios like this. Tips are here to educate yourself on how to handle content coming your way.
Go to Spotify. Search: Embedded with Zain Verjee
News Roundup
This is a truly exciting development. For real. Close to an iphone moment. Nvidia has developed a personal AI supercomupter called Digits. This is a desktop system, which can run on a standard power outlet, that can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. The Grace Blackwell Superchip promises to be 4x faster at AI training and 30x faster at operation than current chips. It will start at 3000 USD. Think of it looking like a mac mini.
Apple's AI Gets Too Creative With the News
Apple's new AI news summary feature is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. It's been caught fabricating stories, from prematurely declaring sports victories to inventing personal stories about celebrities. How Apple Intelligence works is that it takes genuine media story notifications, from the BBC app in this case, and gives a single summary. Mischaracterising news alerts is not acceptable. The BBC flagged this in December, but Apple responded this past Monday with a vague promise of updates "in coming weeks."
Examples of muck ups: This AI declared Luke Littler's victory in darts before he'd even played, made up a story about Rafael Nadal, and fabricated details about a UnitedHealthcare CEO murder case. All this while running on the latest iPhone models (iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max with iOS 18.1+).
Apple's response has been surprisingly casual, basically "it's just beta testing" and "the feature is optional." But when you're one of the world's most trusted tech platforms, that's not really good enough. The BBC, Reporters Without Borders, and the National Union of Journalists are all calling for a complete withdrawal.
Apple says they'll add clearer labels for AI summaries, but critics argue that's like putting a band-aid on a broken arm.
AI is moving into our personal space. Apple, Google, and Samsung are all racing to launch AI tools for daily tasks. Microsoft has developed (but hasn't released) something called "Recall" that takes regular snapshots of your desktop. Recall lets Copilot+ PC users search through their computer activity using everyday language. If you opt in, it periodically captures screenshots of your work, creating a searchable visual history. This means you can easily find anything you've previously viewed on your computer, whether it was in an app, website, image, or document, just by describing what you're looking for in natural language.
The big question: How do we balance all this innovation with privacy concerns? As AI becomes more personally integrated into our lives, that's something we'll all need to think about.
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Election Interference and Information Integrity Handbook: A Newsroom Blueprint
We will be working on Africa data sets and Africa-focused storytelling this year. Stay tuned. Last year we experimented with Wanja. Sadly, we did not receive grants for building Wanja out that we had applied for, so we stopped for now. We will keep pushing and find other ways to build this Africa muscle up. The idea is for you to chat with curated data sets that will help you understand the authentic African perspectives.
Agent 1-2-3 testing
After all the talk, and my talk, about AI agents. I decided I will work with one. I subscribed to Replit. There are others like Cursor or Windsurf. My first one was an agent to help me track, analyze, and select stocks. That ended up in a weird loop and hung. I decided to go simpler, so I created a daily motivator site. A daily quote and inspiration for the day.
Closer to the end of the very impressive (but long) process, the agent started to ask me very technical questions about deploying and port 5000. So I was stuck. I realized that it’s taking me close to what I want to create, but to get it over the line, I actually do need to know some coding basics. I’ll look for something to teach me and let you know what I decide.
Agents out there are experimental, it seems. There’s lots of buzz and hype. I’m not sure how much we, the average person and professional, will be using them. It looks like they need to get significantly better at ‘no code.’ It’s important for us to be aware, but it could be more of a distraction at this moment. Unless your a coder or engineer, it seems no-code platforms are on a lag.
Advice from Mustafa Suleyman, Deep Mind
I listened to a good interview this morning by Allie Miller, who interviewed Mustafa Sulaiman of DeepMind. His advice to small businesses and professionals for this year was:
Focus on the tools released last year
Focus on synthesis and retrieval
Focus on good queries
Pressmate
This is a press release made easy tool for any comms teams to keep the messaging and write quality releases that resonate with media. We are just optimising the flow of creation of Pressmate based on your feedback. Stay tuned for more demos coming up. We are looking at building Pressmate as an agent, your interactive assistant that will guide you to the release best positioned for your messaging success. My co-founder Thomas is a product guy who also can build and code his ideas. So we have an advantage here.
We are working on strong prompting language, extracting my own knowledge as a former journalist and comms specialist and integrating it in our process, and offering a better way to do it than ChatGPT or Claude.
My own tools and workflow
Things are changing fast. We’ve got to be flexible, experiment, test tools on questions and actions, and judge what works and what does not. In my field of communications, I’ve set myself up with:
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