provocations

It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go.

But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before.

I roll my eyes when people demand we build AI to “augment and not replace” us. This is a platitude, wishful thinking; it is not a reality most workers can choose. If the tech is good and cheap enough to replace us, it will. Economic incentives are a hell of a drug.

People are intrigued by LLMs’ ability to generate new text, change styles, and generally chat. While impressive, turning text written in one style into text written in your own voice (or into legaleze) is essentially taking unstructured data and turning it into more unstructured data. I’m surprised about the lack of attention to doing the exact... See more

There’s a lot of hype around AI, and in particular, Large Language Models (LLMs). To be blunt, a lot of that hype is just some demo bullshit that would fall over the instant anyone tried to use it for a real task that their job depends on. The reality is far less glamorous: it’s hard to build a real product backed by an LLM .