Ai

I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy1. On this occasion, I discovered a new use for ChatGPT and LLMs. ChatGPT and I chatted about the themes, especially the correlations and connections between the three short novels that comprise the volume. It was an alienating and revealing experience. For the first time, I am reasoning about a book with a machine, not a person. Because it knows everything about the text and draws on the shared global knowledge, it can give more satisfaction than most people do (also, it’s not easy to find someone around with whom I can talk about all the books I read!) Yes, it is wordy and repetitive, but it can stimulate and enrich my analysis2. ...

Kara Swisher, a dean in digital and classical journalism, has an interesting article in the New York Magazine. As a witness and protagonist she recounts how in the last 30 years digital has eaten away at traditional media and how today, with the advent of AI, there is a risk of it happening all over again. Above all, she reasons why it is essential for journalists not to surrender their weapons and lawmakers to step in and finally harness an industry that always had free reign and no regulation, as it is considered inevitable. ...

Charity Majors1 has a good, long-form article on the Stack Overflow blog. The title is misleading as, while AI’s impact on software engineering and its hiring process (spoiler: you’ll still want to hire junior engineers) is at the heart of the article, there’s so much more in it. It gets exciting in the second part, where she dispenses much from-the-trenches advice on team management and building. Hiring engineers is about composing teams. The smallest unit of software ownership is not the individual, it’s the team. ...

Simon Willison has a new article explaining an important and often ununderstood aspect of LLMs. There’s a remarkable difference between chatting with an LLM, as we users do, and training it. Short version: ChatGPT and other similar tools do not directly learn from and memorize everything that you say to them. Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users. Understanding this is key to working effectively with these models. Every time you hit “new chat” you are effectively wiping the short-term memory of the model, starting again from scratch. This has a number of important consequences. ...

Open AI just released ChatGPT 4o. The launch demo is available on YouTube, and yes, it is impressive. They did not launch v5, though, and 4o is only incremental, not exponential, as v4 has been compared to its predecessor. It may mean we’re at the end of the “exponential growth” phase of LLM models. However, the most critical aspect of this release is not technical, as Ethan Mollick correctly pinpoints in his timely What Open AI Did post: ...

It’s very fast to build something that’s 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at the center of the product, it feels much more difficult to me to nail that remaining 10%. Closing that gap with gen AI feels much more fickle to me than a normal engineering problem. It could be that I’m unfamiliar with it, but I also wonder if some classes of generative AI based products are just doomed to mediocrity as a result. ...

Molly White’s experience with LLMs corresponds more or less with my own, but she is much better at recounting, critiquing, and drawing conclusions than I am. I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs. ...

I spent the day doing remote maintenance on multiple Linux machines via ssh. The revelation is that ChatGPT is the bomb for these tasks: What does that command option do? I am trying to remember. What syntax is to install that peculiar and rarely used package on Debian? I am getting this locale configuration error; what was the fix again? All this stuff is answered much sooner than searching online, no matter the search engine. ...

“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. – John Carmack I’d be tempted to call bullshit on this one, but it’s coming from Carmack, so hey, let me think about it for a minute (it’s not the first time I’ve caught him endorsing AI). ...

Yesterday’s OpenAI launch of Sora is, as is always the case with OpenAI, mind-boggling. Marquees Browniee’s comment is spot-on, so much so as he’s obviously involved in the video-making scene. I don’t think content creators are at risk with Sora, not anytime soon, but, as Marquees repeatedly notes in the video above, just one year ago we thought AI-generated video was a joke. ...