An Interview With Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman about the Democratization of AI

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

The big shift also seems to be you can generate remarkably similar results with much smaller amounts of inputs or much dirtier input just harvesting stuff across the Internet, instead of putting in super highly-structured data. 

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

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 

alt tag under image HTML.

The thing that Copilot gave us that we, again, only realized in retrospect was this randomized psychological reward.  It’s like a slot machine where the ongoing cost of using it at any given moment is not very high, but then periodically you hit this jackpot where it generates a whole function for you and you’re utterly delighted .

Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the Internet and the ability for pretty much anyone to just go,  at relatively low cost, scrape the data they need off the Internet and train on it is a big democratizing force. Now, that said, there is a norm in the community that if you have a algorithmic breakthrough, you publish your research,  but

That was the big change. People had to wake up to the fact that it could be democratized. That’s why Stable Diffusion might end up amounting to nothing, but it will be one of the greatest products ever just because it will have changed so many people’s minds about what was possible.

First, there will be amazing bolt-on uses of AI for existing products that really make those products much better and can just be added as features. They don’t change the workflow that much, but they already add a lot of value. I think Copilot is one of those, but there will also be , I think, new things that don’t fit neatly into an existing produ

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

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