knowldge tools aren't what they seem

Software tools and courses can aid intellectual advancement and productivity at certain margins, for some people, but we should be more explicit about what exactly they can help, how they can help, and whom they can help.

So: GPT-3 is incredibly powerful, but it’s only as good as its training data. And GPT-3 achieves its power through the vastness of its training data-set. Such data-sets are cannot be hand-picked for some sensitive, subtle value. They are most likely to be built around simple, easy-to-capture targets. And such targets are likely to drive us towards ... See more

t is by now a familiar, even banal reality that AIs can suss out the ineffable essence of collections of artwork. The Rembrandtiness of Rembrandt, the Mozartiness of Mozart: These are weak passwords that have been cracked. Given enough data from the output of certain classes of learnable systems, an AI can reliably model the internal generative mec

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