AI - Ongoing Model Improvements

He (Claude Shannon) had this great intuition that information is maximized when you’re most surprised about learning about something.” ~ Tara Javidi

“Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you... See more

I isn’t ready to be an entrepreneur, but its ideation-prototype-interview cycle does in a couple of seconds what takes my students months to do. AI isn’t ready to build educational games without errors, but it is able to instantly make an interactive simulation that explains a difficult concept, even if some nuance is missing

One way of thinking about this is Daniel Kahneman’s simple model of thinking: System 1 and System 2. System 1 thinking is fast and intuitive. Current AI models’ pattern recognition and next-token prediction are good examples of this. System 2 thinking is slow and analytical, akin to genuine reasoning and understanding. It is System 2 thinking where... See more

But there's just something about the immediacy and interactivity of Claude's "Artifacts" window, combined with the model's less stilted tone that brings it home.

For the most avarege users, these seemingly minor difference matter so much more than raw performance on abstract LLM benchmarks.

Mickey Schafer

Jul 4

This past semester, a student of mine despaired over analyzing a 20+ question survey with 92 responses. She uploaded the spreadsheet to NotebookLM, a tool we'd used in class, which not only cheerfully assured her it would do the task, but also returned basic R values with short statements about strong relationships. She was deli... See more

GPT-4 and 4-Turbo have always been available for free in Microsoft Copilot. 4o is now free in ChatGPT. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now free in Claude. So there are many that have never subscribed to a premium plan that have been using the best models all along still

it is kind of surprising that none of the major AI labs seem to have put out any deep documentation aimed at non-specialists. There are some guides for programmers or serious prompt engineers, but remarkably little aimed at non-technical folks who actually want to use these systems to do stuff - the vast majority of users

First, operationalisation takes a long time, often revealing hidden potential in existing technologies. As Jack Clark notes, “if we stopped all AI progress today, there’s a huge capability overhang”. Even without further model development, building the right scaffolding can unlock surprising capabilities. This scaffolding isn’t just software; it in... See more

I still think that we are thinking about scaling of network-based intelligence looking at this particular network. An extended network of machines and humans in larger networks facilitated by smaller and increasingly embodied devices might in themselves add an AI-augmented neocortex to our (human-machine) systems. Intelligence will continue to emer... See more