Deepfakes with Ace++
I haven’t created any Gen AI deepfakes of myself since I last used Stable Diffusion in 2022. This week, I tried out the latest imaging framework called Ace++, created by researchers from Alibaba. You just need to upload a good…
Ian Tan
Personal Renewal by John Gardner
I read this speech by John W. Gardner here and decided I needed to archive it on my site so there’s another backup of it. It’s such a great speech it should not be lost to the world. “Personal Renewal”…
The Duolingo Handbook
I wrote to all my students at NTU yesterday: “(This is not coursework, but very useful info). If you are thinking about your career and how to succeed in your future jobs, please read Duolingo’s just-released handbook. I am certain that…
Claude gets more powerful
Claude AI, a favorite LLM among writers and coders, seems to have received a quiet upgrade under the hood. A few days ago, I fed a one-hour audio transcript into Claude and asked it to clean it up by arranging…
Why everyone needs to learn to love Excel
My classmate was downright frustrated with the Excel exercise that we were asked to work on during my weekend class. It wasn’t easy for me either. We were building a financial benchmarking analysis dashboard and I was trying to figure…
Google Guardrails
There’s a reason why Google Gemini remains unpopular as an LLM chatbot- its restrictive guardrails make it frustrating to use. Yesterday, I was preparing a workshop demo on how to incorporate web searches into prompts. I used a simple prompt:…
Plaud Note hands-on
One of the best uses of Generative AI is in audio transcription. These days, you can record the audio from a meeting or lecture, and use Gen AI to first convert it to text, and then summarise or adapt the…
ChatGPT o3-mini
Another day, another new ChatGPT model from OpenAI. This time, it’s called “o3-mini”. This is a faster and cheaper version of “o1-mini”, which itself was a mini version of “o1”. Yeah, I know, the word soup is driving me crazy…
Understanding how things work
Singapore households spent $1.8 billion SGD on tuition in 2023, according to our government. There are about 1.4m households in Singapore. Do the math! Now, I’m not against the idea of tuition; I had Chinese tuition in primary school because…
Go try DeepSeek
I test every new LLM engine with the FIPP test (Flatter Ian Pretty Please test). DeepSeek, the new ChatGPT competitor, is able to retrieve salient info about me like a champ. Intriguing! I’m going to do more tests and it…