• Reading: 

  • MIT Sloan How Gen AI can boost highly skilled workers productivity is an interesting look into the different ways people treat AI to help with their productivity.

  • McKinsey's What is retrieval-augemented generation (RAG)? will give you a good intro to RAG and help prepare you for this week's challenge. 

  • Today, Anthropic published its Economic Index which looks into the impact and range of AI applications on work.  This is a really interesting read.  

• Videos/demos to watch: 

  • Option #1: AI Essentials Use AI tools to boost productivity a great breakdown from Google with nice examples.

  • Option #2: How to make ChatGPT into your personal assistant is a 10-video featuring examples of how you can use ChatGPT (but we’d prefer you to use Berkeley approved AI tools such as our CBORG AI tools or Gemini) to help you manage your time as a personal assistant.

  • Option #3: 5 AI for Work Tips and Tricks, a 15 minute video with great examples of basic ways we can use AI such as answering emails faster, data analysis, extracting text from a photo of a whiteboard, and more.

• Listen:

  • This Odd Lots episode interviews Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, who talks about how companies are spending money on AI.  if you're interested in the enterprise applications of AI and what's happening right now, this is a good listen. 

  • This Masters of Scale episode is mostly about Return to Office in corporate settings, but if you skip ahead to "How AI will continue to impact the workplace" you'll hear some really interesting insights from Harvard professor Frances Frei about how AI is transforming work - and could transform meeting productivity specifically.

Try It:  Use Gemini in sheets to create a new table from scratch.   For example, in a blank sheet you could try "Create a table to manage incoming user concerns and responses."

Gemini for Google Workspace has been rolling out to all LBL Staff over the last two weeks.  If you don't have it yet, you will soon.   Read about it here.   We'll have a webinar later in BLAM! devoted just to these features. 

New! - We've got reasoning models!   We've got locally hosted Deep Seek plus OpenAI's -o1 and -3mini are both available now in CBorg.   Check out the power of reasoning models (but use them judiciously for harder problems - they're expensive!).

This week's challenge centers around productivity using retrieval augmented generation or RAG.   Upload a complex document to a model in CBorg or to Gemini and ask the model questions about what you've uploaded.   How does it do in providing you with accurate answers?   You can choose any document you want to work on - if you're stuck, try using a policy from the RPM.   You can export any RPM policy as a PDF by going to a policy, clicking the 3 dots in the upper right, and selecting Export to PDF or Word.   Then attach it to Cborg or Gemini and ask away. 

Share how it did - the good and hte bad - in the BLAM Week 3 101 Chat Thread (Don't forget to read about how to use the BLAM Chat Rooms first).   

While you're there, peruse other people's submissions and upvote them by adding reactions.   

Click Here to Subscribe to the BLAM Calendar to see the latest information about all the events planned for the next six weeks.  

NOTE: All past webinar recordings are available here.

Tuesday February 11th 2-3pm - For Coders, join Tim Fong as he walks you through how to create a multi file project with LBL Omni Engineer. Webinar.   Recording here.

Wednesday February 12th Noon-1 Join Andrew Schmeder Science IT Consultant, who do a walk through of CBORG, Berkeley Lab’s AI tools, and demonstrations on how AI can boost productivity through project planning, task refinement, research, and simplifying complex technical topics. Recording here.

Wednesday February 12th 11AM to Noon Coders Office Hours - Stop by and get answers to your questions about developing with LLMs.

What is RAG? from IBM goes into more depth about how RAGs work and where they offer the most value.  

This week, we're shining the spotlight on AI Video generation.   Check out Marques Brownlee's review of OpenAI's Sora video generation model for an introduction to the current state of the art.   Or if you've only got a minute and just want to be disturbed by the AI video scene, may we suggest watching Ramsay Unleashed: Mexico.  You've been warned.  

Last week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Deep Research.  We don't have access to it yet at LBL, but it's definitely worth reading about how it works and what's different about it.

The Verge covers its capabilities here.   

And OpenAI explains this launch on its blog. 

Try creating a Gem to automate a specific part of your work.   Go to gemini.google.com and click Gem Manager.

This week, we've got an end to end automation process using scripting in Google sheets.   But instead of you needing to learn scripting, we'll let Gemini do the heavy lifting.  Click here to get started. 

Continue with  Google's cloudskillsboost site gives you several course options including "Integrate Generative AI Into Your Data Workflow" which starts with "Gemini for Data Scientists and Analysts".

NYT asks "Should You Still Learn to Code in an AI World?"

and

MIT Technology Review reviews The Second Wave of AI Coding Agents

DLAB's Python GPT Fundamentals class gets you hands on with GPT in Python.  Register now for next week's course. 

This week's coder webinar will teach you how to get setup to build larger software projects with AI.   Your challenge is to apply what you learn there to a larger project of your own.