The data round-up #2 - May 2023

The dominance of AI in the data discourse is complete.

👋 Hello and welcome to the second issue of my opinionated round-up of things in data, a collection of news from the field, material and resources, plus some old stuff. I’ve recently started more sections to the publication (these monthly round-ups are one of them) - you can control what gets in your inbox on your account page.

If you’re new to Doodling Data, welcome! You may want to check out this recent post about what this is and where it’s going.

AI - our new old friend

Tools, tools and more tools

This month, the discourse about data and tech kept being very dominated by AI news. Ever since the latest releases in the ChatGPT saga, the industry has exploded with clones and bots based on the original that serve a specific purpose: scraping websites, writing blog posts, parsing through documentation, writing novels ...

This post on LinkedIn has a list of many of these new tools based on generative AI. So, just to make sure I understand: this is a list, curated by humans, of AI tools (“to save you time“) - and I thought that it was the AIs that were there to save us time, oh well.

Anyway, notable examples of new products are HuggingChat, a ChatGPT competitor that comes from Hugging Face and all that’s coming from Google. The tech behemoth is indeed fighting back in style for its place in the sun in the AI race, a place that it was losing after having kept the helm for a long time. C Newton on Platformed gives a good overview of what’s been announced at Google I/O:

How Google is making up for lost time

Personally, I’m finding the Bard for Google, the Chrome extension built on BardAI (Google’s AI chatbot) quite useful (when used critically).

AI makes good business

There’s now also a fashion brand fully created via AI, aptly named AIsthetic Apparel (the site is live, you can purchase). This is interesting as it started up as an experiment by Mr João Ferrão dos Santos, a VC investor, who wanted to play around with the idea of setting up a company with little money in little time. ChatGPT has been interrogated for steps to take along the way, Midjourney has been used to generate designs and the result is what you can see if you head to the above link.

The journey is narrated on this Substack:

In other AI news

• The EU is making good progress on AI regulation - see latest press release

• Geoffrey Hinton’s mic drop: he left Google

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Data viz

I did promise I’d talk about the whole world of data here, right? Well, there’s not just AI. This month in dataviz, I really enjoyed this piece on Datawrapper’s blog: a timeline of classical music composers.

I also really liked this work by NPR on melting ice (because of climate change), really impactful.

😉 I promise there’ll be more shared in this area in the next issues!

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Python/coding

• I’ve really enjoyed package I found here, it’s called humanize and it provides a way to present numbers in a human-friendly way, really nice work

• I know we’re going back to AI but there’s a Jupyter extension that promises to bring generative power to your notebooks workflow, e.g. you can use it to help your code-writing. I’ve not tried it yet but looks good

• Finally, if you actually program AI, Mojo is a programming language meant just for that

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And with this, that’s all for this round folks. Catch you soon!