Probably the most consequential technology that should have been “obvious” but wasn’t:

🌾The moldboard plow. As this excerpt from Mann's 1491 shows, it was a simple idea which China had for nearly 2k years before Europe! It was basically a prerequisite for the Enlightenment. The invention of the moldboard plow in Europe was at least a millennia closer to the invention of the iPhone than it was to the invention of the moldboard plow in China!

I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests

It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone... reddit.com/r/forhire/comm…




Agents are going to open a whole bunch of cans of worms.

You push one button on a nuclear reactor panel against their warnings and all the GPT-4 class LLMs want you to turn yourself in to the feds.

Check out the level of exasperation from Copilot, how GPT-4 & Claude want me to reflect on what I did (& get a lawyer). Gemini was useful.





You may not like it but this is what alignment looks like.

One thing business analysts miss is that many of the people at the AI labs are true believers that they are building AGI, and soon.

You don't have to think that they can do it, but, if you don't take their sincere beliefs into account, a lot of their strategy doesn't make sense. The race for bigger models at the expense of improving existing models, the interlocking alliance deals where companies are funding and cooperating with competitors, the willingness to release models without extensive testing & just take the reputational risk in the short term...

The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

There are no alternative sources known. From Conway’s Material World:

Here is a detailed thread on the mines.

https://twitter.com/wang_seaver/status/1691567135213150673

How can knowing something hurt you? Information can sometimes cause harm (think of the annoyance of seeing spoilers as a tiny example). This paper on information hazards was prescient about many of the issues we face today.

So, a 🧵 on some of the hazards of knowledge... 1/

Ideological hazards: Most people have only a little knowledge about what their ideological belief (whether religious or political) really encompasses. On the web, you can learn that your chosen belief system also includes hazardous elements that you feel you need to adopt. 2/

This is a completely fake video of me. The AI (HeyGen) used 30 seconds of me talking to a webcam and 30 seconds of my voice, and now I have an avatar that I can make say anything. Don't trust your own eyes.

Its not perfect, but a two minute recording would yield better results. Here is a real recording I made at the same webcam with the same background.

I have now run one of the more powerful, open source LLMs (Mistral 7B) directly on my iPhone. No internet needed.

It isn’t very fast but that is already being solved. Consider the implications: almost anything can soon be imbued with local “intelligence”

A lot of possibilities. Pretty easy to do! The best instructions are actually in this LinkedIn post: linkedin.com/pulse/using-ll…

Here is why I am so doubtful about the "talk-to-your-data" use of AI.

This is Google NotebookLM, a cool tool that lets you use AI on data sources. Even though the document search retrieves the right information (it is Google, after all), the LLM answer has subtle hallucinations. Better AIs & techniques will improve this, but it is really important to realize that this model (a very common one I see companies implementing all the time) has significant potential issues

There are so many more effective ways to use AI at work, it doesn’t have to be this one

There has been discussion if GPT-4 has become "lazy" recently. My anecdotal testing suggests it may be true.

I repeated a sequence of old analyses I did with Code Interpreter. GPT-4 still knows what to do, but keeps telling me to do the work. One step is now many & some are odd.

Again, no evidence that GPT-4 is getting dumber in any way, and it may be a temporary issue with the load on the system (like reducing DALL-E3 responses from 4 to 1), but there are definitely behavior changes in terms of how much the system is willing to do without prodding.

It isn't just AI generated text that is starting to bleed over into search results.

The main image if you do a Google search for Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (whose version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow you have probably hear) is a Midjourney creation right from Reddit.


Seriously, don't trust anything you see online anymore. Faking stuff is trivial. You cannot tell the difference. There are no watermarks, and watermarks can be defeated easily. This genie is not going back in the bottle.

Been playing with the various Microsoft Office Copilots.
First take ranking on usefulness:
1. Outlook: Drafting emails with context is a natural fit
2. Word: A lot like using ChatGPT, but well-integrated & easy
3. PowerPoint: creates drafts, but uninspired
4. Excel: Very limited





Excel has some potential, with the ability to write formulas for you, but it seems to struggle with commands and prompts.

The ability to summarize entire conversation threads is a pretty neat Outlook feature.

Do not use AI detectors. They generate false positives and ruin the reputations of students randomly (but hurt non-native speakers more).

If you have them in your school turn them off.

https://twitter.com/rustykitty_/status/1709316764868153537

An easy win for ethical use of AI is to ban AI detectors.

There are lots of other ways to assess student achievement (in class discussions, testing, etc.) that you should rely on instead.

🚨We have a new working paper on AI & work🚨

In pre-registered experiments at BCG, the elite consulting firm, consultants using the GPT-4 AI finished 12.2% more tasks, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly & produced 40% higher quality results. Big gains. 1/ oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and… These effects held for all 18 realistic business tasks we gave them, across all measures of performance.

And AI worked like a leveler: lower performers had the biggest gains. 2/

The most consequential book banning is for a book you probably never heard of: Charles Knowlton’s “Fruits of Philosophy; or, the Private Companion of Young Married People.”

A paper suggests that the trial around this banned book had huge consequences for the world… 1/ The book was written in 1832 by physician Dr Charles Knowlton - and it was the first book by a doctor to lay out the pros & cons of various forms of birth control.

It was quickly banned, and in 1877, two British booksellers were put on trial for selling the “obscene” book. 2/

I deleted a thread trashing Pi, powered by Inflection's LLM.

I can't figure out how to make it useful (& found the personality unbearable), but, since it seems to be (a) built for inane conversation and (b) require new prompting techniques, I'll play around more before judging. And hey LLM makers, maybe you want to include manuals or guides or anything so that users can figure out how to best take advantage of your AIs?

Most other industries want to put their best foot forward...

After 2 months of using Code Interpreter, I have come to believe that prompt-crafting is not the right approach

Instead, you want to "nudge" it to fully use its abilities. Feed it a paper on how to conduct an analysis, and it can do it. Remind it of a Python library to use, etc.

https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1677843137803190273

There has been a lot of academic research on prompt-crafting, I am not sure how well it all holds up when you give AI tools and software. The prompting approach is very different. Much more cooperative because it has the data, and program output, to work from, not just the prompt

I wrote a bit of a guide to ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter, which I have found to be the most useful and powerful mode of AI.

It is, like every product made by OpenAI so far, terribly named. It is less a tool for coders and more a coder who works for you. oneusefulthing.org/p/what-ai-can-… A couple of examples I didn't share in the post

https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1654728917859684358?s=20

Everyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Plus is apparently going to get Code Interpreter in the next week. It is the mode of AI that I find both most promising, interesting, and unnerving.

I wrote a bit about my experiments a couple weeks ago: oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starti… @Grady_Booch Not to be that guy on Twitter but I do actually study innovation. So this seems like a really weird argument. Novel recombination with variation is creativity. Unexpected distal search to solve a problem is creativity. “Searching the latent space” can result in “creative” answers

We know how social networks die. Slowly, and then all at once. Folks start to go, lowering the cost-benefit ratio for remaining members, setting up a cascade where departing users prompt their friends to go, too. Its likelier when there are alternatives.

I hope Twitter holds on.



What might be different this time:
-Meta is launching a competitor. This is the big change.
-Service is definitely degraded, even if you are a subscriber, and especially for power users who put out a lot of content (blue check sorting alone killed most conversations around posts)

Having a little too much fun stressing out Bing/GPT-4 using its new ability to recognize images...

I'm starting to feel a little bad, as it is very earnest in both its attempts to protect me and its cute emojis.