While "Wolfram Alpha... seeks to distill scientific facts and perform calculations", ChatGPT and other similar AIs "build statistical models and string together sentences or pictures by calculating probabilities (of what the next word should be, for example). That has led to all kinds of mistakes ... Wolfram is not optimistic that t…

"What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? ... even simple tools can lead to interesting results when they clash with the contents of our minds"So he tries using ChatGPT as a muse. TL:DR; "ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested spe…

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…

Jeff Jarvis is not a fan of Ted Chiang's piece on CgatGPT, although he does admit TC (one of my favourite authors) "makes a clever comparison between lossy compression... and large-language models, which learn from and spit back but do not record the entire web". Indeed, he takes the metaphor further: "what is journalism itself…

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…

The 3rd part of my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts looks at how AI could turbocharge collective intelligence "and finance the resulting ecosystem, providing an alternative to Big Tech AI monopolies".

This piece captures and then explores exactly what I've always thought about the future direction of myhub.ai: imagine what would happen if you had your own personal AI assistant operating across your content - your public posts, private library (including content shared from friends, stuff in your reading queue, etc.) and the wider web, emph…

"Ipop gloop glog bluba droma floom gloope splog slopa" - This sentence means "The happy slime sees the earth under the sky while eating the slime's food" in Glorp. Here's the breakdown of the sentence:ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people... It understands subordinate clauses ... so understa…

Is ChatGPT creator OpenAI "a potential Google slayer. Why look up something on a search engine when ChatGPT can write a whole paragraph explaining the answer?" It's very capable, but "struggles to distinguish between truth and falsehood... often a persuasive liar... a bit like autocomplete on your phone... trained on pretty muc…

"WordPress developer Johnathon Williams ... demonstrated that, with a little bit of expert guidance, ChatGPT can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to extend WordPress... the plugin [written by GPT] ... worked on the first try... the best results from asking ChatGPI to generate entire functions versus specific filters or actions..…

Another piece pointing out that ChatGPT, while "easily the most impressive text-generating demo to date... trained through a mix of crunching billions of text documents and human coaching", should not be trusted."a generative AI is what it eats", and ChatGPT ate countless biases in the content it processed. "No one should …

The claims re: ChatGPT by "fascinated evangelists... [that they] contain “humanity’s scientific knowledge,” are approaching artificial general intelligence ... even consciousness", are simply "a distraction from the actual harm perpetuated by these systems. People get hurt from the very practical ways such models fall short in deplo…

"ChatGPT is not overly reliable... surprising how often ... right, but they can also be plausible and wrong a lot of the time, and downright obviously wrong some of the time... responding with errors of fact, ... responses that may only be true for certain (biased) contexts... wary of providing evidence or citations ... [but] happy to make up…

"I spent a few minutes in conversation with ChatGPT."This was both me kicking ChatGPT's conversational tyres and exploring its limits, both those it admits to and those it does not.Key takeaways from a first reading:Many, but not all, content creators are screwedFor "writers, journalists, copywriters, consultants, and even publ…

ChatGPT... is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically