Generative AI
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/
“A more practical answer is that it’s a file. This right here is a large language model, called Vicuna 7B. It’s a 4.2 gigabyte file on my computer. If you open the file, it’s just numbers. These things are giant binary blobs of numbers…”
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
LLMs combine what they “learned” in training with any new context you give them. There are many ways to give the AI additional context, the most common is in the prompt that you provide (“You should act like a marketer and help me respond to a request for proposal”), or any documents you upload to the AI.
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
As more human jobs become assisted, automated, or replaced by artificial intelligence, we must spend our hours where we have a competitive advantage over machines: developing new ideas, expressing old things in new ways, innovating process, and crafting the story that infuses our creations with meaning .
Scott Belsky • Creating in The Era of Creative Confidence
Even if LLMs don’t get smarter (though I suspect they will, and soon) new capabilities and modes of interacting with AIs, like agents and massive context windows, will help LLMs do dramatic new feats.
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
Ethan Mollick
“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.”
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.
Younger workers benefit more from labor-augmenting tech, like AI.
“In other words, workers who were used to doing things a certain way struggled to adapt when complementary technology arrived, while less-experienced workers could harness the power of these new tools.”
Source: Kellogg Insight