Fractional Elite Collective

An invite-only community of top tier fractional executives.

Founding Member

Petrinovich Pugh & Company, LLP

Managing the Strategy, Technical Operations, Day to Day Support, and Technical Training for a Mid-Sized (80ish employees) CPA firm in the Heart of the Silicon Valley.

Director of Technology

Providing technology consulting and sales to the small and medium sized businesses of the Silicon Valley for 14 years!  Specializing in outsourced CIO, business continuity, network security, strategic planning, and document management.

Technology Project Manager

Akene Consulting, LLC

Using Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), Akene Consulting, LLC helps cannabis businesses establish and maintain a framework to navigate compliance/regulations, improve oversight and enhance organizational performance. The result is more accurate financial information which can be leveraged to make strategic decisions.  

We perform technology and operational assessments, help establish a culture of change management, and train on process documentation and mapping to establish smooth and lean business operations.

Director of Technology Consulting

Digital Transformation | Fractional CIO | AI | Process Improvement | Hyper Automation

Sean McLean is a Fractional CIO focusing heavily on consulting with companies on the Digital Transformation journey.  

He has two decades of experience in technology strategic consulting, mostly in the small & mid markets.  He supplements corporate leadership teams for a fraction of the price of a full-time IT Director or CIO.  Passionate about innovation and big picture ROI, he assists companies work efficiently with technology vendors and tools.  If you are considering making a big change in the future to help embrace data, automation, or artificial intelligence, talk to Sean.

When considering #AI Language Models, Microsoft is showcasing that size does indeed matter 🤔 😂 #SmallLanguageModels are officially in the mix with #Phi3.

An interesting distinction that led to small language model training success is described in the #MicrosoftNews article in the comments: Quality over Quantity.

▶ "“Instead of training on just raw web data, why don’t you look for data which is of extremely high quality?” asked Sebastien Bubeck, Microsoft vice president of generative AI research who has led the company’s efforts to develop more capable small language models. But where to focus?

Inspired by Eldan’s nightly reading ritual with his daughter, Microsoft researchers decided to create a discrete dataset starting with 3,000 words – including a roughly equal number of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Then they asked a large language model to create a children’s story using one noun, one verb and one adjective from the list – a prompt they repeated millions of times over several days, generating millions of tiny children’s stories."

So taking extra care in the types of data used for training to create smaller trained datasets led to smaller but high quality responses in the model.  

So my big question is, will this be available in CoPilot?  How can end users easily utilize the SLMs?

The answer is still more developer focused: via the Azure AI suite of tools.  The SLM is not going to replace LLMs, but it can be packaged to work on edge devices, that might not need cloud acccess to process answers.  So...this means potential for mobile (#iphone ahoy) device apps and other independent platforms as well as components in larger applications.

Microsoft will still point businesses to Custom Copilots for larger projects, but PHI can be encapsulated for more custom tasks, and as the saying goes, choose the right tool for the job.  

AI is not one size fits all it seems.  What do you think of Small Language Model use cases?

Sean McLean, PMP

Fractional CIO | AI | Digital Transformation | Intelligent Automation

Today OpenAI announced a few big Spring updates: #ChatGPT-4o (omni) now brings model intelligence across voice, text, and vision (audio and video).

They also announced a desktop app version for improved user experience. 

The new features will also be available via the API, so developers are excited today as well.  

Did you watch the video demo with CTO Mira Murati?  

Here is an excellent summary via TechCrunch and Kyle Wiggers in case you missed the video:

Open article: OpenAI debuts GPT-4o 'omni' model now powering ChatGPT | TechCrunch by techcrunch.com • 4 min read

OpenAI debuts GPT-4o 'omni' model now powering ChatGPT | TechCrunch

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