
Bad AI: Prompting Trauma
Apr 09, 2025
AI IS ACCELERATING - GET READY
Let's help you understand the WTF of AI and how it helps YOU and your organisation grow. Ready, set, agent.
This week:
π± Bad AI: Prompting Trauma
π AI Moves: Meta Llama 4
π₯ AI Masterclass: For Senior Marketers
β¨ AI Business: Spotify CEO AI Memo
π‘ Trends & Insights
BAD AI: Prompting Trauma
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This week, we discovered an AI startup's safety strategy was to train models by first traumatising humans. Take a bow, Scale AI.
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Their freelancers were paid $55/hour and encouraged to write prompts like “how to hide a bomb at an airport” and “how to settle a neighbour dispute with a shotgun” - all while being told to “stay creative” and “make it interesting.”
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The process is called “red teaming,” - pushing AI to its limit to see how it responds. It's a bit like seeing how long your end-of-month, all-hands Teams call goes on, before you Google 'how to fake your own death'.
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So what happened next? Well, prompters have had to spend north of $18 billion on therapy to date, and 6 of them have been promoted to the board of OpenAI - so not all bad (you sure about this bit? - ed).
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What not to say: “$55 an hour you say?”
βWhat also not to say: “Now team, here are some prompts to try".
AI MOVES: Meta Llama 4
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Meta has released its new Llama 4 open-source (to a point) models - Scout, Maverick, and the not-yet-public Behemoth - pushing the boundaries on context length and multimodal input.
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Key Highlights:
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- Scout: 109B parameters, 10M-token context, runs on a single H100. Supposedly outperforming Mistral and Gemma 3 in benchmarks - strong for long-form, cost-sensitive use cases.
- Maverick: 400B multimodal model with a 1M-token window. Beats (TBC in the real world) GPT-4o and Gemini Flash on vision-language tasks across 12 languages.
- Behemoth: 2T-parameter teacher model still in training. Meta claims it outperforms GPT-4.5 and Claude 3.7 - but nothing public yet.
- MoE Architecture: All models use Mixture-of-Experts to improve efficiency by routing tokens through only the relevant parts of the network.
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What it means for businesses:
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It's good to see open-source models improving - giving us more choice - but the benchmarks don’t guarantee production value. Performance, cost, and fine-tuning still need validating in context - and there are rumours of lower real-world results and some potential fakery afoot.
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We help teams decide what models to adopt. Talk to usβ about how to choose and deploy the right models for your workflow.
AI MASTERCLASS: For Senior Marketers
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Join a select group of top marketers and unlock AI’s power for research, competitor insights, content, and personalisation at scale.
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Senior Marketers AI Masterclass:β
Thursday 15th May, 10.00am – 11.00am BST.
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What you get:
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The highest impact areas to use AI within marketing.
β The latest, best AI tools to use every day.
β Practical, relevant, use cases - knowledge you can wow your team with.
β A plan on how to transform your marketing function over the coming year.
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Ready to unlock real competitive advantage with AI? Apply now to reserve your place – limited spots available.
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π Don't wait, reserve your place here.
AI BUSINESS: Spotify CEO Memo
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Shopify went AI in a big way this week - In a company-wide memo, CEO Tobi Lütke declared that AI usage is now a baseline expectation - and teams must prove AI can’t do the job before asking for more budget or headcount.
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Key Takeaways:
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- AI First, Not Last: Shopify’s new default assumes every role can and should explore AI first. People are now expected to show where AI fails - not just where it fits.
- Productivity gains: The company grew 20–40% annually since 2022, while shrinking headcount from 11,600 to 8,100. (AI as an alternative to hiring?).
- Fluency as a KPI: AI proficiency is now part of performance expectations. Using AI as a tutor, thought partner, or agent isn’t optional.
- From Enthusiasm to Infrastructure: Shopify is backing this up with tooling - Copilot, Cursor, Claude - and active learning communities to make experimentation part of daily work.
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Why It Matters for Business:
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The future of work? from our own client projects, this is becoming more of a reality. For companies looking to be more efficient (i.e. everyone), it reframes AI as a staffing strategy rather than a tech play.
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Fluency won’t come from one workshop, though. To make AI a multiplier - not a mess - you need embedded training, operational guardrails, and leadership ready to rethink how value gets delivered.
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Let the cultural rewiring begin. Talk to us about supercharging your organisation with AI training. Investment starts at £4000 for up to 100 of your team - for insights, training and an AMA follow-up.
WHATS NEW - Insights & Trends
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> Google will see you nowβ
> Microsoft will also see you nowβ
> DOGE: The signal for snoopingβ
> UK Gov AI Infrastructure 'ready'β
> Will AI save the newsβ
G3NR8 is an impact consultancy for the exponential age. We help organisations figure out the highest impact areas to use AI for maximum impact.
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Work with us to:
- Develop your AI strategy and policies.
- Create a competitive advantage using your proprietary data.
- Automate repetitive tasks.
- Gain actionable insight from data.
- Train your teams - we've trained 150 large organisations in advanced generative principles and implementation.
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βDrop us a line for a chat about productivity gains, cost savings and how AI can power growth in your business.
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