Johann Van Tonder
@jvt
20 years in ecommerce, now CEO of a CRO agency. Probably doing analysis in R or building stuff with AI. Or walking on the beach. Yeah, probably that.
Johann Van Tonder
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)" - Walt Whitman
"We see these examples time and again, that the setting in which you try to do your most smart, creative, cognitive work really matters. And if that setting is the same place that you do shallow work (where you do your taxes and your emails and your zooms) your mind is going to have a hard time getting into the deep work mode. The answer is to have
... See more“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
AI skepticism and
Elon Musk:
“I believe in the physics approach to thinking.
You're always weighing the probabilities that something is true or not true, or that there may be a third explanation.
Be very open to new facts and changing your mind.” https://t.co/PMANNtY8y0
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
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
If we strip everything else away, the reason we need an ability to learn is to help us find and obtain food. We need fuel to learn, and we need learning to find a source of fuel…’ (Ratey & Hagerman, 2009).
I can give it a video of my screen as I use my computer, and it accurately understands what I am doing and what I could do better. This allows the AI to work, for better or worse, as a manager or advisor based on observing the real world.
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
Ethan Mollick explains how Gemini brings us a step closer to the idea of your “AI Chief of Staff” (Cal Newport)
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
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say?
Surprisingly often they don’t know.
Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it?
Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time?
On Writing Well, William Zinsser