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Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 1 – What is Machine Learning?)
A friend of mine asked me to explain to him what’s going on with all this AI stuff. What should they know about it? etc. This person is very smart but not technical in all the ways we computer people like to use that word so I wanted to try to create an explanation which…
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LLMs w/o Supervision
It’s pretty amazing what these LLMs can do in a role as an assistant to a human user. As long as a human is there to check the results, we will see more and more places where LLMs and systems built on top of them will improve the productivity of users. What’s harder to think…
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Good Process
Every functioning software development team or organization has a process. It might be formal or informal, functional or dysfunctional, chaotic or stable, but their is some way to describe how things get done. I don’t think there is any one best process, but I do think there’s some markers of what makes a good one.…
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AGI and SuperIntelligence
How should we think about the timeline for AI and the prospects for Super Intelligence
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Asking GPT4 about Tolstoy
I’ve been thinking about this conception of LLMs as a lossy compression of the internet. Ted Chiang talks about this here. Karpathy also mentions it in his latest video. What does this loss look like? It doesn’t always seem like the “loss” part matters. Maybe its even good. Maybe sometimes what you want is some…
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New Karpathy Video
I am a big fan of Karpathy’s style of explaining things so I was very happy to see this video drop. Honestly, Its not my favorite of his but it covers a lot of good topics. I enjoyed the second half more than the first but its still a good starter video for people who…
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Latency, UX and LLMs
Latency is well understood to be detrimental to the user experience. No one likes to wait. But there are multiple ways this affects the UX In some cases the latency of interaction can change our relationship to the entire process. We see this a lot in software development where the turnaround time from making a…
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GenAI and Human Creativity
A friend shared this pretty impassioned defense of the idea that ChatGPT is bad for humanity because lowers the value of creativity which is important to the “Very Soul of the World” I am not going to try to pick apart the argument. It is a reasonable one. I do want to try to think…
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AI Safety
I am all for making AI better and more aligned with things which are good for people. I don’t really like the term AI Safety though because it seems to encompass a lot of different things which need their own proper attention. Stuff like: These are all important but they range in practicality from Already…
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OpenAI Playgrounds
I knew about these but I hadn’t really been using them much until someone really showed me how cool they are for “playing around” with GPT. Its obvious when you say like that but I am often not very smart. When doing experiments with the chat interface I often want to try out different paths…
“You know what truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah – ain’t it the truth?”