On speaking to AI

Almost every company I talk to, and basically every solution vendor, has been pushing for people to use AI to “talk-to-your-data,” an approach allows the AI to retrieve content from a company’s proprietary databases and then work with the documents and data it retrieves. The problem is that AIs hallucinate, or make up plausible information, all the... See more

talking about A.I. and surrounded by amiable chitchat, I wondered whether, someday soon, conversations with human beings would be deemed lacking if they didn’t exhibit chatbot-like speed and responsiveness. Maybe there are some circles, in tech or elsewhere, where the quality of “the median conversation you can have with a person” is already measur

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tone of voice (and personality?) is the UI of the natural language / AI-agent era, and it's a pretty unexplored spectrum of possibilities at this point.

Artificial intelligence will spur two fundamental changes in our relationship with technology. The first is that voice—already the most natural interface for human interaction—will become a dominant interface. Imagine latency reduced to less than half a second, a stark contrast to the sluggishness of touch-based devices. Even silent voice is on the... See more

Will we become so accustomed to speaking with AIs that we begin to interrupt one another more often, or speak less patiently and more forcefully? I can see us having to remind each other, “Hey, I’m not an AI. Don’t talk to me like that.” There are bound to be social and cultural ripple effects.

Artificial intelligence will spur two fundamental changes in our relationship with technology. The first is that voice—already the most natural interface for human interaction—will become a dominant interface. Imagine latency reduced to less than half a second, a stark contrast to the sluggishness of touch-based devices. Even silent voice is on the... See more

The idea is: learn to prompt chatbots very well = get way better outputs.

Right now, intricate prompting is helpful for some tasks. But over time, we think it’s an overrated skill. Here’s why:

1. As AI models improve, they require less “engineered” prompts. DALL-E 3 is a great example of this (you get top-tier images with < 10-word prompts).

In this c... See more

How can we make interacting with conversational models feel more natural?

Every conversational interface to a language model adopts the same pattern:

A chat history sidebar, with each conversation lasting just a few turns

New sessions always begin in a brand-new thread

Every user query must always elicit exactly one response

None of these assumptions ar... See more