Generative AI

Your "AI Chief Of Staff". Sort of assistant agent you talk to 2-3 times a day, it handles everything for you. Then go back to just working on things. "To me, that's the dream of AI and knowledge work - much more so than the AI helping me do the actual work. I don't care about the speed at which I do my tasks. I want to eliminate all the context shi

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 i

4 questions of organizations [about using AI].
- What did you do that was valuable that's no longer valuable?
- What impossible things can you now do that you could not before?
- What can you democratize and bring down market?
- What can you do upmarket so you have new ways of competing?

Ethan Mollick, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenamcgregor/2024/

One 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.

- Simon Williamson

Skills you need in the age of AI: You’ll need critical thinking skills and emotional intelligence. Some technical skills e.g. understand the AI capabilities, some data literacy, cyber threats etc.

But mostly, you’ll need truly human soft skills:
- ability to make complex decisions
- ability to have creative problem solving
All skills that will enable

“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

"There’s really no replacement for spending time with these things, working towards a deeper mental model of the things they are good at and the things they are likely to mess up. Combining with domain knowledge of the thing you are working on is key too, especially as that can help protect you against them making things up!"
- Simon Willison, attem

Meta AI released LLaMA ... and they included a paper which described exactly what it was trained on. It was 5TB of data.

2/3 of it was from Common Crawl. It had content from GitHub, Wikipedia, ArXiv, StackExchange and something called “Books”.

What’s Books? 4.5% of the training data was books. Part of this was Project Gutenberg, which is public dom