Claude: “Give me hard original writing prompts for an MFA program” yields some really clever (and near impossible) prompts.

A few more. (Literal prompt: “give me some more”)

It is amazing how the industry came together to invent a universal USB-C connector and then decided to instead make it all a giant mess. Remember to research your cable as well.

I don’t know if LLMs can reason in theory, but they seem to “reason” in practice.

Ask Claude a Fermi problem: How many telephone poles are there in Manhattan? (Guess: 440. Actual: 0). On Staten Island? (Guess 19000-2859. Actual: 27,137) Queens? (Guess: 51-85k. Actual: 103k)



It doesn’t seem to have the number handy, but, even if it did, next token prediction should mean it reasons forward, not backward from a conclusion.

Reminders about how to stay sane on Twitter:
1) You don't have to weigh in on anything you don't want to (or don't know anything about)
2) You should block more
3) You don't need to share your real life
4) Delete a lot of drafts
5) You can delete tweets people take the wrong way 6) Don't be a jerk. Think twice before quote-tweeting to dunk on people
7) Emotional contagion online has support in the academic literature. You don't need to keep the chain of bad feelings going
8) Twitter people do not represent real-life views, don't take it too seriously

Write me a corporate memo covering the following points, integrating them together in a good way:
-Forgive me for the murder I committed
-We will hit quarterly steel crumpet goals
-The fish people are here to evaluate our offer. Make sure to speak to them only in fish. Include some fish people sayings
-Do not touch the vortex in the break room. Explain why. -We have pivoted from a NFT company to an artisanal pickle shop. Give details about their similarities.
-Anyone not acknowledging Pluto is a planet will be fired. There will be a series of tests. The legal and PR teams have asked you to walk everything back (even though everything that happened was real, and everyone knows its real), each point for a different reason, write that memo make the excuses elaborate and obviously transparent and over-the-top.

So how is Runway AI able to model fluid dynamics reasonably well?

The prompt: "A highly detailed portrait of a marble eagle with honey oozing down. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."

It isn't perfect (the viscosity seems to change a bit, etc), but why does it work at all? This is going to be one of those posts where the reactions are divided between "this isn't anywhere as good as you could get with a physics model of fluid over a surface" & people who say "wait, how does a text-to-image model have anything like consistent physics for new scenes"

Civilization VII was announced today.

The Civ series is sort of like Ender’s Game, but for management rather than murdering aliens. Business school students who were good at Civ V also turn out to be better planners, organizers, and problem-solvers, in this small experiment. Other games work as effective tests of fluid intelligence:
⌨️Performance in MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota correlates with intelligence
🎮Performance in FPSs like Battlefield, Destiny, and (likely) Fortnite don't show the same pattern

AI detection in school is a losing game.

AI detectors have high flaw positives & teacher intuition seems to work even worse: “Here we show in two experimental studies that novice and experienced teachers could not identify texts generated by ChatGPT among student-written texts.” Paper: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

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.