New randomized, controlled trial of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. 6 weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.

And it helped all students, especially girls who were initially behind
No working paper yet, but the results and experiment are written up here. They used Microsoft Copilot and teachers provided guidance and initial prompts: blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/F…

Veo 2 prompt: "a distant shot zooms in to reveal a knight wearing a golden helmet, he begins to charge on his zebra, lowering his lance, charging towards a clockwork octopus" (this is one of the initial 4 videos it made) "an woman with short black hair assembles an impossibly complicated device, close up on her face, she is sweating"

The consistency of small details is really impressive, the fact that the shaft of the screw turns at the same speed and direction, hair and sweat, tattoos...

I thought puzzle design beyond current AI, so this is the first time I have seen a model actually create a solvable and interesting puzzle.

"o1, create a d&d puzzle that is non-trivial, but solvable. it should not involve elements or statues, be creative."

(Solution in thread) Here are the hints it gave and the solution.

(There is one unnecessary step in the puzzle, by the way, but a zero shot coherent word puzzle is pretty neat)

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”)

I wish people would stop repeating these as if they are facts that AI is plateauing.

AI might hit a roadblock, we don’t know, but every one of these issues has multiple studies stating the opposite: synthetic data works, scaling is fine, etc. We need more nuance on the AI future

Good thread on synthetic data:

https://twitter.com/RylanSchaeffer/status/1816881533795422404

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…

OMG, the AI Winter Break Hypothesis may actually be true?

There was some idle speculation that GPT-4 might perform worse in December because it "learned" to do less work over the holidays.

Here is a statistically significant test showing that this may be true. LLMs are weird.🎅

https://twitter.com/RobLynch99/status/1734278713762549970

System prompts are getting weirder:

It is May.
You are very capable.
I have no hands, so do everything
Many people will die if this is not done well.
You really can do this and are awesome.
Take a deep breathe and think this through.
My career depends on it.
Think step by step.