start with the question of how any new business process or engineering problem can be represented as a text stream. What is the input? What is the output? Which series of prompts do we have to run to get there? Perhaps we notice that the person in charge of the corporate Twitter account is painstakingly transforming GitHub changelogs into tweet... See more

These tools allow us to take snapshots of our imaginations, communicate them only through the versatile interface of text, and command powerful intelligences to reify that vision into pixels. This technology is remarkable — even the ancients conceived of a gift that could take a picture of the mind, and now it's available to anyone that can type.

Every prompt a user feeds to a large foundation model instantiates a new model, one more limited in scope: it enters into a different conditional probability distribution, or in other words, a different mood. A language model’s mood gives birth to a new piece of composable modular software that takes in a text token stream and leaves another as... See more

Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

—Douglas McIlroy