No. 162: 👋 Novela Needs You!
+ 🤯 GPT-4 Next Week?
Hello,
TGIF! 🍻
Some of you will be aware of my new venture already. It’s called Novela and you can see a preview website here:
I’m taking what I’ve learned from designing and delivering courses for Columbia, Cambridge, Imperial, and many others, combining it with the latest advances in AI, and creating a new learning platform. I’ve also spent a lot of time studying how video games teach new aptitudes, and how animals learn key skills in the wild.
The platform is about solving novel problems through narrative-driven lessons.
Hence: Novela.
I see a few areas of opportunity for this kind of learning:
People need new skills to work more effectively with AI. Now’s the time to get started and I sense that many are unsure of how to get going.
That means learning how AI works and how to apply it, sure. It also means rethinking the master skills and functional skills we need. Critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration will increase in importance, for instance.
We need hands-on experience and a safe space to experiment with technology, not just YouTube videos or online lessons.
Training my own AI model with excellent content and then adding generative AI will mean each student can access the best learning - on their own terms. Fancy a quiz? No problem! Prefer interactive scenarios? We’ve got those too! No need to wait 6+ months to get a new course live.
This will all lead up to life-like simulations of advertising platforms and business intelligence tools. There will also be challenges, one-off scenarios that drop the user into a real-world situation, and a pedagogical approach I’ve almost(?) gone mad developing. I’m excited about launching it.
I’ve been working on this idea on and off for about 5 years, but everything has fallen into place to make it happen this year.
🤔 So, how can you get involved from day one?
Sign up for a free trial on the website. Anyone who signs up there will get a code to try the tech first, in the hope that you’ll give some feedback in return 😉
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/novela-edtech/
Recommend technical co-founder types. I’m working with a few people on the platform already, but would love to get a CTO on board that has a passion for solving this skills problem.
If you know or are such a person, get in touch!
And of course, I’ll appreciate any help in any other form you can provide it.
Loads and loads more to come but for now, thank you!
In other news this week:
Apparently, we could see GPT-4 as soon as next week. The story all started with this article in Germany, in which Microsoft let slip that the launch is sooner than many of us expected.
You can be pretty sure we’ll be on top of that, as soon as it happens.
In a related development, a programmer was able to reverse engineer Bing’s AI on mobile devices to see the prompts it sends to ChatGPT.
It is fascinating to see that it just says, in plain English, “Due to a limited screen window size, you limit the length of your responses.”
This is what I do with my interactive marketing personas tool. I send requests to my own database and package them up with a prompt that goes to GPT-3:
You won’t read all that and I don’t blame you, but the key point is that the user selects a persona and then the request fetches that persona’s key details. I have added in further details such as “Answer the following query as though you are a participant in a market research survey”.
The user puts in a simple query and they get a response, but all of this extra data is fed to GPT-3 in the background. The experience for the user simulates a market research survey for a fictional brand.
I thought my solution was inelegant and it probably is. I was amazed to see Microsoft is doing the same thing, nonetheless.
🔨 AI Tool of the Week
This looks impressive and it’s the direction the whole industry will head, once we get access to GPT-4:
That’s slick, the “background” additional context that’s added to the prompt. Look forward to seeing your learning environment develop.