Claudia

The fates of the fringe appointees who come up for a confirmation vote will reveal one of the most important new power centers in Washington, and perhaps one of the few checks on Trump II: the lame duck caucus.

In a long-context world, maybe the organizations that benefit from AI will not be the ones with the most powerful models, but rather the ones with the most artfully curated contexts.

We know from endless studies of social psychology that diverse groups—with different forms of expertise, different pools of knowledge, different cultural backgrounds—tend to make better decisions than homogeneous groups. In a small-context world, you can get some of that diversity from a language model, in that its training data draws from a vast a... See more

Seeking advice from an AI grounded in the entire archive of an expert’s career could create an entirely new revenue stream for anybody who makes a living sharing their expertise through existing platforms like books or the lecture circuit. In other words, the AI is not a replacement for your hard-earned expertise; it’s a new distribution medium.

a world where you can use AI to draw upon the compiled wisdom of an expert that you trust—that is a world we are living in right now, thanks to the emergence of long context models. This should be good news, professionally speaking, for people who do indeed possess wisdom that other people consider valuable.

An advanced model capable of holding in focus all that information would have a profound familiarity with all the words and ideas that have shaped my personal mindset. Certainly its ability to provide accurate and properly-cited answers to questions about my worldview (or my intellectual worldview, at least) would exceed that of any other human.

Authors actually have an unexpected superpower in the age of AI: they can accurately assess a model’s mastery of a 400-page book better than any collection of human or software raters, which turns out to be a remarkably valuable way of testing the model’s overall sophistication.

When you put an entire book inside the context window of a model, you are not just giving the model a collection of isolated facts and ideas that can be retrieved through your queries. Because the model can “focus” on the entire text, it is capable of answering questions about crucial narrative elements or chains of cause-and-effect that can only b... See more

In conversation with a stranger, Molaison would initially not display any cognitive impairments, but after just a few turns in the exchange, Molaison would lose the thread, and eventually require a re-introduction to the person he had been talking to.

What you’ve just experienced is an interactive adventure based on the text of my latest history book, The Infernal Machine. At its core, the game relies on three elements: the original text from my book; a large language model (in this case, Gemini Pro 1.5); and a 400-word prompt that I wrote giving the model instructions on how to host the game, b... See more