An Interview With Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman about the Democratization of AI
by Ben Thompson
![Thumbnail of An Interview With Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman about the Democratization of AI](https://i0.wp.com/stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/cropped-android-chrome-512x512-1.png?fit=512%2C512&ssl=1)
added by sari · updated 2y ago
by Ben Thompson
added by sari · updated 2y ago
people want to anthropomorphize everything and they want to put everything in human terms. The whole point of a computer is it just operates utterly and completely different than humans do. At the end of the day, it’s still calculating ones and zeros. So everything has to be distilled to that and it just does it at tremendously fast speed, un
... See moresari added 2y ago
Not always. The thing I would always say with those models is that they alternate between spooky and kooky. So half the time or some fraction of the time, they’re so good, it’s spooky like, “How did it figure that out? It’s incredible. It’s reading my mind,” or “It knows this code better than I do.” Then sometimes it’s kooky, it’s just so wro
... See moresari added 2y ago
I’m optimistic because it felt like AI was going to do nothing but be the Consumer Internet, it was just going to serve you stuff. This idea where actually normal people with normal jobs in their normal life can be more productive and can do more things and they’re not gated by “Will OpenAI give you permission to do it?”. No. Literally, anyone can
... See moresari added 2y ago
it is generally the case that most large companies, certainly most large enterprise companies, don’t innovate on UX and UI. Why they fail to do so I find is a fascinating question, but why is Figma possible? Why is Stripe possible? That’s because large companies, for whatever reason, don’t build great interfaces
sari added 2y ago
he question that we were trying to answer was, “How do you take a model which is actually pretty frequently wrong and still make that useful”? So you need to develop a UI which allows the user to get a sense and intuition themselves for when to pay attention to the suggestions and when not to, and to be able to automatically notice, “Oh, this is pr
... See moresari added 2y ago
So it’s interesting where there’s this tension between the more creative something is, the more allowance there is for error, which is good for AI. On the other hand, where AI is arguably the most useful and impactful is places where it’s just regurgitating stuff, but then the accuracy is a question. There’s a bit of a tension there.
sari added 2y ago
One of the views, famously, in the stories of progress, is how many people view the Manhattan Project as this massive moment of scientific discovery, and we did a lot of things at once, and we managed to make the nuclear bomb. But there’s another view of the Manhattan Project, which is that we assembled a lot of things that were on the shelf and ju
... See moresari added 2y ago
I think the real discovery is the fact that we have the Internet and that it might go down in history as the only way we could’ve made AI is we digitized the world.
sari added 2y ago
Yup and I think one of the more interesting things about Stable Diffusion, this thing that we’re now seeing, where computers can generate art given a piece of text, is I don’t think it would be possible had in 1992 or 1993, Tim Berners-Lee not put the
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sari added 2y ago