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

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.

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 .

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.

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

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

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.

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. 

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