Generative AI
“The fact that these things model language is probably one of the biggest discoveries in history. That you (LLM) can learn language by just predicting the next word … — that’s just shocking to me.”
- Mikhail Belkin, computer scientist at the University of California
It is odd when folks get mad when I say AI is already useful. We are only 18 months into LLMs & there have already been many controlled trials finding LLMs are useful, firms have public case studies with real metrics, etc
Lots of reasons to critique AI, “uselessness” isn’t one.
Ethan Mollickx.comIn a situation like this, there are two general pieces of advice one can give: keep your options open, and pay close attention to what's happening. Then if you can't predict the changes AI will cause, you'll at least be able to react quickly to them.
Paul Grahamx.com“We don’t know what capabilities GPT-5 will have until we train it and test it. It might be a medium-size problem right now, but it will become a really big problem in the future as models become more powerful.”
@emollick Put in the reps. If you aren't hitting the chatGPT cap multiple times a day, you have 0 business reading a research paper
The open area of research is what can we use LLMs for, not how do we build better LLMs
and the papers are outdated anyways
Nick Dobosx.comOver the next year or two, I expect GPT-4 and its successors to become a copilot for the mind: a digital research assistant that will bring to bear the sum total of everything you’ve read, everything you’ve thought, and everything you’ve forgotten every time you touch a keyboard.
It will solve some of the perennial problems in productivity culture:
... See moreDan Shipper • GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind
All three have different personalities and strengths, depending on whether you are coding or writing. Gemini is an excellent explainer but doesn’t let you upload files, GPT-4 has features (namely Code Interpreter and GPTs) that greatly extend what it can do, and Claude is the best writer and seems capable of surprising insight.
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
Ethan Mollick’s comparison of the 3 main LLM models
Writing code from scratch is gone. This was the most exciting part of the profession. Now what remains are debugging/fixing. The same concerns graphical design (original character design in games is gone), writing music (new melodies can be generated by clicking "refresh" and then improved), literature. You never start from scratch anymore. Which
... See moreOne way to think about (LLM) is that about 3 years ago, aliens landed on Earth. They handed over a USB stick and then disappeared. Since then we’ve been poking the thing they gave us with a stick, trying to figure out what it does and how it works.