It's Alive! ... LIFTED is alive!
Update on changes and what's coming next...
Super! It’s April 1st - which means fools are running wild today 😂
And I finally got my 🐣🐥 in a row… and launched the new LIFTED website.
Here’s a couple of things that might matter for you:
Any old URL’s (vPALpioneers.substack etc) will now be broken.
There’s a new About page with video testimonials! (thanks to Jia, Shiren, Andreas, and Janet for contributing 🙌).
There is also a new Leaderboard section, to track your referrals and sharing. Let’s work out some bonuses that would be fun for everyone. I am open to ideas.
There is also a new “Chat” feature I added that should allow us to bring in more of a community feel, in between our workshop/hackathon sessions.
Otherwise, the content is all there but with new colors, a new logo and domain.
Here’s What’s (Potentially) Coming Next…
Even though it has been quiet since mid-March, I haven’t been idle. I am actually working on several potential NEXT workshops. One of my goals is to pick the ones that are SO cool, that others will want to join our little community.
Here are a couple of my ideas that are percolating. Which ones speak to you the most?
In addition to the monthly or quarterly events - I will resume my curation and posting on a weekly basis. Some of the new posts will be public to make the sharing easier. But the best stuff will always be held back for our member community.
Speaking of curation…
This wouldn’t be a good update if I didn’t at least bring a bit of cool stuff to the party.
In the last couple of weeks, Claude (Anthropic AI) has surpassed GPT4 on many of the benchmarks. While it doesn’t have the GPT Store buzz, you should definitely make use of the free platform if you are doing any writing projects and want a more organic/less stilted flow to the writing.
But don’t give up on OpenAI. Not only is the GPT Store buzz getting louder, but the rumor mill says GPT5 is coming late summer/early fall and is considered to be as big a jump as GPT3 (pre ChatGPT) to GPT4. 🤯
If it really is that good… and Sora is coming soon too. Wow, just wow!
Also - have you checked out Google Labs lately?
Made specifically for education, it has a number of free tools (music, images, a notebook functionality) but the one that jumped out at me is the TextFX tool.
While there are lots of cool things that people can do with generative AI, one of the best ways to be a better communicator and influence people is to paint vivid images in the minds of those you care about.
TextFX is like your word-play partner (like a Thesaurus on steroids).
There are 10 different tools for being creative with words
It’s really useful for creating acronyms (we do this all the time in our Studio)
It will fuse words together - great for branding unique ideas
Or maybe you like to play with alliteration…
And similes/metaphors: you could type a word that people know but don’t totally understand, like “dogma” and it would reply with “Dogma is like a straitjacket on the mind, limiting freedom of thought and creativity.”
Pretty cool, right?
There is even a fun video of rapper Lupe Fiasco using the LLM to play with his beats.
All good stuff if you want to create a “word lab” experience for your learners.
That’s all for now. Go Get LIFTED with your own experiments!