The vibes when I joined AI in ~2008: - workshops w 50 ppl musing on whether deep learning will ever work - papers w cute toy problems - fun poster sessions - this experiment I ran in MATLAB - high-level panels on paths to AI - neuroscience guest lectures Today is *not* the same.
GPT is a new kind of computer architecture that runs on text. Yes it can talk to us, but also to much of our existing software infrastructure. First via apps on top of APIs, now inside ChatGPT via plugins. What a time right now...https://t.co/HjeUCv3XE7
Software 2.0 Neural networks are not just another classifier, they represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in how we develop software. They are Software 2.0......... The “classical stack” of Software 1.0 is what we’re all familiar with — it is written in languages such as Python, C++, etc. It consists of explicit instructions to the computer written by a programmer. By writing each line of code, the programmer identifies a specific point in program space with some desirable behavior. .......... In contrast, Software 2.0 is written in much more abstract, human unfriendly language, such as the weights of a neural network. No human is involved in writing this code because there are a lot of weights (typical networks might have millions), and coding directly in weights is kind of hard (I tried). .........
Software (1.0) is eating the world, and now AI (Software 2.0) is eating software.
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My parents were visiting me once and as I was leaving for work I saw my mom sitting on the couch in the living room just looking forward. I’m like “mom what are you doing?”, “sitting”, she shrugged. Like not reading, listening, planning, or even meditating. Mind blown.
1 hour and 5 diagrams later I optimized 100 lines of code that ran in 13 seconds to 20 lines of heavily vectorized code that runs in 0.02 seconds, and this might just be the best day of my life, so far.
While playing around with hooking up GPT-4 to the Internet, I asked it about myself… and had an absolute WTF moment before realizing that I wrote a very special secret message to Bing when Sydney came out and then forgot all about it. Indirect prompt injection is gonna be WILD pic.twitter.com/5Rh1RdMdcV
Blueberries have joined green beans in this year’s Dirty Dozen list Blueberries, beloved by nutritionists for their anti-inflammatory properties, have joined fiber-rich green beans in this year’s Dirty Dozen of nonorganic produce with the most pesticides ....... 251 different pesticides. ...... strawberries and spinach continued to hold the top two spots ........ followed by three greens — kale, collard and mustard. ........ next were peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, grapes, bell and hot peppers, and cherries ......... A total of 210 pesticides were found on the 12 foods ........... Kale, collard and mustard greens contained the largest number of different pesticides — 103 types — followed by hot and bell peppers at 101. ......... traces of pesticides long since banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. .........
Clean 15
........... Nearly 65% of the foods on the list had no detectable levels of pesticide. ....... Avocados .... sweet corn in second place. Pineapple, onions and papaya, frozen sweet peas, asparagus, honeydew melon, kiwi, cabbage, mushrooms, mangoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and carrots .......... Being exposed to a variety of foods without pesticides is especially important during pregnancy and throughout childhood .......... “Exposure in childhood has been linked to attention and learning problems, as well as cancer.” ........ If exposed over an extended time to smaller amounts, people may “feel tired or weak, irritable, depressed, or forgetful.” ........ avoid most pesticides by choosing to eat organic versions of the most contaminated crops. ......... While organic foods are not more nutritious, the majority have little to no pesticide residue ........ “If a person switches to an organic diet, the levels of pesticides in their urine rapidly decrease” ........ If organic isn’t available or too pricey, “I would definitely recommend peeling and washing thoroughly with water” .
The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors....... “Despite trying to expect surprises, I’m surprised at the things these models can do,” said Ethan Dyer, a computer scientist at Google Research who helped organize the test. ........ these models supposedly have one directive: to accept a string of text as input and predict what comes next, over and over, based purely on statistics .......... Computer scientists anticipated that scaling up would boost performance on known tasks, but they didn’t expect the models to suddenly handle so many new, unpredictable ones. .......... LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. ............. multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. .......... for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.) ............... dozens of emergent behaviors ........... Biologists, physicists, ecologists and other scientists use the term “emergent” to describe self-organizing, collective behaviors that appear when a large collection of things acts as one. Combinations of lifeless atoms give rise to living cells; water molecules create waves; murmurations of starlings swoop through the sky in changing but identifiable patterns; cells make muscles move and hearts beat. Critically, emergent abilities show up in systems that involve lots of individual parts. But researchers have only recently been able to document these abilities in LLMs as those models have grown to enormous sizes. ................ Language models have been around for decades ............ transformers can process big bodies of text in parallel. .......... Transformers enabled a rapid scaling up of the complexity of language models by increasing the number of parameters in the model, as well as other factors. ........ models improve in accuracy and ability as they scale up. .......... With the advent of models like GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters — or Google’s PaLM, which can be scaled up to 540 billion — users began describing more and more emergent behaviors. ......... One DeepMind engineer even reported being able to convince ChatGPT that it was a Linux terminal and getting it to run some simple mathematical code to compute the first 10 prime numbers. Remarkably, it could finish the task faster than the same code running on a real Linux machine. ................
Many of these emergent behaviors illustrate “zero-shot” or “few-shot” learning, which describes an LLM’s ability to solve problems it has never — or rarely — seen before.
............. Showing that GPT-3 could solve problems without any explicit training data in a zero-shot setting, he said, “led me to drop what I was doing and get more involved.” .............. difficult and diverse tasks to chart the outer limits of what an LLM could do. This effort was called the Beyond the Imitation Game Benchmark (BIG-bench) project, riffing on the name of Alan Turing’s “imitation game,” a test for whether a computer could respond to questions in a convincingly human way. (This would later become known as the Turing test.) The group was especially interested in examples where LLMs suddenly attained new abilities that had been completely absent before. ............... these sharp transitions ........ for about 5% of the tasks, the researchers found what they called “breakthroughs” — rapid, dramatic jumps in performance at some threshold scale. That threshold varied based on the task and model. ........... Some unexpected abilities could be coaxed out of smaller models with fewer parameters — or trained on smaller data sets — if the data was of sufficiently high quality. ......... how a query was worded influenced the accuracy of the model’s response .......... a model prompted to explain itself (a capacity called chain-of-thought reasoning) could correctly solve a math word problem, while the same model without that prompt could not. ............. using chain-of-thought prompts could elicit emergent behaviors not identified in the BIG-bench study ......... larger models truly do gain new abilities spontaneously. .......... Large LLMs may simply be learning heuristics that are out of reach for those with fewer parameters or lower-quality data........... how LLMs work at all. “Since we don’t know how they work under the hood, we can’t say which of those things is happening.” .......... They are notorious liars. “We’re increasingly relying on these models to do basic work,” Ganguli said, “but I do not just trust these. I check their work.” ........... Emergence leads to unpredictability, and unpredictability — which seems to increase with scaling — makes it difficult for researchers to anticipate the consequences of widespread use. ............... social bias emerges with enormous numbers of parameters. “Larger models abruptly become more biased.” ................. When the researchers simply told the model not to rely on stereotypes or social biases — literally by typing in those instructions — the model was less biased in its predictions and responses. .......... a new “moral self-correction” mode, in which the user prompts the program to be helpful, honest and harmless. .
Move Over, Metaverse. Here’s Something Meaner.Who’s really in charge of our online behavior? No one, David Auerbach argues in “Meganets.” ......... “Just one word. Are you listening?” Mr. Maguire said to Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate” (1967). “Plastics.” ........ Twenty-five years later a puckish French horn player warned me, a literature major who didn’t yet have an email address, that the future lay in something called “hyperlinks.” .............. his definition of “meganet” is in essence a big blob of mortal and computing power, a “human-machine behemoth” controlled by no one ............... If the internet is the fictional doctor and scientist Bruce Banner, furtive and a little troubled but basically benign, meganets are Incredible Hulks, snarling and uncontainable. ........... “That world may not be ‘The Matrix,’ but all the connecting tissue is already there.” ........ “Meganets” made me feel deeply queasy about the amount of time I spend on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and Twitter. Not Facebook, never Facebook — “a fount of misinformation,” as Auerbach calls it, “a petri dish in which false facts and crazy theories grow, mutate and metastasize” — except for the burner account I use occasionally to see what exes are up to. ............. a middle-aged mermaid thrashing about in the great online ocean as data floated around me, multiplying like plankton........... “Reality bites,” we naïvely thought, but here “reality forks,” with blockchain doubling back on itself like a caterpillar. “No Rousseau-esque ‘General Will’ emerges from the bugs and forks,” is the takeaway............ Aadhaar, India’s national identification program: “a unified, government-sanctioned meganet” ........ a virtual pandemic called Corrupted Blood that spread through the video game World of Warcraft in 2005, arguing that “the distance between Corrupted Blood and a global financial meltdown is smaller than you think” ............. “We search for where the power really lies, when it does not lie anywhere — or else it lies everywhere at once, which is no more helpful.” .......... “If Big Brother can’t be stopped, we should focus on throwing sand in his eyes rather than futilely trying to kill him.” ........ Take my Wi-Fi — please! .
Meet the Editor Behind a Slew of Best Sellers Jennifer Hershey is the guiding hand who helped shape “Daisy Jones & the Six,” “Mad Honey” and many other chart-topping regulars. ....... how much more nuanced and honest this book is because of you.” ........ She’s the publisher and editor in chief of Ballantine Books ....... “Sometimes we gather as a whole team — the publicity person, the marketing person, the publisher, the editor, all the people who worked on the book — and we call the author together. There’s so much joy in that moment, and definitely a lot of tears. It’s not even so much the hitting the list but what it symbolizes: that an author’s work is reaching people, that their voice is being heard and that readers out in the world are connecting to their words.” .
Netherlands and Japan Said to Join U.S. in Curbing Chip Technology Sent to China A new agreement is expected to expand the reach of U.S. technology restrictions on China issued last year. ........ sweeping restrictions issued unilaterally by the Biden administration in October on the kinds of semiconductor technology that can be shared with China. .
We’ve added initial support for ChatGPT plugins — a protocol for developers to build tools for ChatGPT, with safety as a core design principle. Deploying iteratively (starting with a small number of users & developers) to learn from contact with reality: https://t.co/ySek2oevodpic.twitter.com/S61MTpddOV
....... applies just as well to other current “large language models” [LLMs] as to ChatGPT. ........ what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.” .......... when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again “given the text so far, what should the next word be?”—and each time adding a word ........ it’s adding a “token”, which could be just a part of a word, which is why it can sometimes “make up new words” ....... there’s randomness here means that if we use the same prompt multiple times, we’re likely to get different essays each time ........ a simpler GPT-2 system, which has the nice feature that it’s small enough to be able to run on a standard desktop computer. ......... ChatGPT always picks its next word based on probabilities ........ There are about 40,000 reasonably commonly used words in English. ........ here’s the problem: there just isn’t even close to enough English text that’s ever been written to be able to deduce those probabilities. ......... In a crawl of the web there might be a few hundred billion words; in books that have been digitized there might be another hundred billion words. But with 40,000 common words, even the number of possible 2-grams is already 1.6 billion—and the number of possible 3-grams is 60 trillion. So there’s no way we can estimate the probabilities even for all of these from text that’s out there. And by the time we get to “essay fragments” of 20 words, the number of possibilities is larger than the number of particles in the universe, so in a sense they could never all be written down. .
Ukraine war: why China’s peace road map is the only one on the table State information campaigns are driving escalation, as are increased losses on both sides ...... Normalisation will require neutral arbiters who highlight common ground, such as that offered by trade in key commodities. Currently, China is the sole remaining neutral superpower ....... War is always a tragedy. Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine shows no signs of winding down. On the contrary, it is stuck in an escalatory spiral. Nato is supplying Ukraine with increasingly powerful weapons, including tanks, and Russia is not idly waiting for a Ukrainian offensive. ........... China offered an “off-ramp” in its peace proposal .......... early attempts at a settlement in March and April last year failed. ........
Beijing offered the only peace road map on the table
........ the risks of continuing down this path for China and Asia. ......... the information campaign that began in February 2022 makes normalisation a distant prospect. As most Western institutions – from governments to business and even academia – raced to break away from Russia, the prospect of finding common ground has been significantly reduced. ......... With streets and social media covered in Ukrainian flags, the political will needed to “explain away” the conflict becomes unattainable. Escalation remains the politically acceptable option and thus sets the direction. ........ Zelensky is pushing for increased military aid daily, using channels ranging from daily video statements to trying to address the Oscars. .......... Moscow’s open information campaign has relied mostly on RT and Sputnik, which enjoy growing reach in Africa and Latin America. Messaging via state media has also been intense domestically, positioning the conflict as an increasingly existential struggle. ............ As the level of sacrifice from both sides grows, peace becomes a more distant prospect. Just as in roulette,
it’s easier to go “double or nothing” than to quit with a loss
. ........... Nato leaders are sending heavier weapons in the hope that tanks, planes or missiles will eventually snap the front line. Russia has responded in kind with long-range weaponry. ........ there are no magic weapons – more guns just cost more lives. Ukrainian soldiers have spoken of mounting losses. Russian losses are growing too but simple military arithmetic remains in Russia’s favour. ......... The risk of further escalation is of earth-shattering proportions – ............ neutral arbiters that provide common ground. Russian and US foreign ministers met in India, not in Munich. ....... trade in key commodities like grain creates some common ground which can be a starting point for interaction. Beijing stressed the importance of keeping supply chains open, avoiding unilateral restrictions, and facilitating grain exports. ........ Trade difficulties in 2022 created inflation that had a global impact just as recovery from Covid-19 was under way. Further escalation will guarantee more macroeconomic shocks. ........... the world continues to slide down a slippery slope. Despite ongoing conventional support, the front line is stable, and sentiment in Russia mirrors Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement last year that the army is “cracking [Nato weapons] like nuts”. ........ China is a neutral peacemaker. Russia is willing to seek compromise in line with Beijing’s proposals. The vector of development has been set, now the ball is in the West’s court. ........ Oleg Yanovsky is a lecturer in the Department of Political Theory at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). .
AI Could Make More Work for Us, Instead of Simplifying Our Lives the introduction of automated processes that aim to simplify work—and free people’s time—can also make that work more complex, generating new tasks that many workers might perceive as mundane. ........ scientists were not released from repetitive, manual, or boring tasks as one might expect. Instead, the use of robotic platforms amplified and diversified the kinds of tasks researchers had to perform. ....... With automated methods, the possibilities are amplified. ....... had the effect of boosting the volume of data that needed checking, standardizing, and sharing. ........ Scientific work is often judged on output such as peer-reviewed publications and grants. However, the time taken to clean, troubleshoot, and supervise automated systems competes with the tasks traditionally rewarded in science. These less valued tasks may also be largely invisible—particularly because managers are the ones who would be unaware of mundane work due to not spending as much time in the lab. ........ challenges the assumption that everyone involved or affected by digitalization becomes more productive or has more free time when parts of their workflow are automated. ....... We also need to consider how to design and manage these processes so that technology can more positively add to human capabilities. .
OpenAI Says GPT-4 Is Better in Nearly Every Way. What Matters More Is Millions Will Use It In 2020, artificial intelligence company OpenAI stunned the tech world with its GPT-3 machine learning algorithm. After ingesting a broad slice of the internet, GPT-3 could generate writing that was hard to distinguish from text authored by a person, do basic math, write code, and even whip up simple web pages. ......... when it was founded as a nonprofit. (OpenAI reorganized as a capped-profit company in 2019.) ........ (Earlier this year, the free version of ChatGPT hit 100 million users faster than any app in history.) ........ It’s easy to imagine GPT-5 and other future models slotting into the ecosystem being built now as simply, and invisibly, as a smartphone operating system that upgrades overnight. ....... Chatbots in search, for example, may not outperform older approaches until they’ve proven to be far more reliable than they are today. And the cost of running generative AI, particularly at scale, is daunting. Can companies keep expenses under control, and will users find products compelling enough to vindicate the cost? ....... Indeed, companies are appending disclaimers warning users not to rely on them too much—like keeping your hands on the steering wheel of that Tesla. ....... millions of people may soon begin churning out presentation slides, emails, and websites in a jiffy, as the new crop of AI sidekicks arrives in force. .
People in tech keep saying they are overwhelmed with all that’s happening in AI right now. I don’t recall a time in the last 20 years when people have had a similar sentiment. AI advancements today feel very different than anything else we’ve seen in recent times.
Fear of China - a paranoia no less - has made the White House and US State Department support regimes undermining democracy in Southasia. They go quiet on the judgement against Rahul Gandhi and invite Pushpa Kamal Dahal to a 'Summit for Democracy'. https://t.co/uX6aWG9cPi
Poor children and adolescents across the U.S. are participating far less in sports and fitness activities than their more affluent peers. The divide has followed spending cuts at some public schools and a rise in privatized youth sports. https://t.co/11ANQKAjGR
Beyond excited that @OpenAI ChatGPT is launching plugins today -- and to share @zapier is a launch partner! Via Zapier, ChatGPT can now interact with over 5,000 apps like Google Sheets, MS Teams, Salesforce, Gmail, and thousands more https://t.co/fizkD4rfMf
Beyond excited that @OpenAI ChatGPT is launching plugins today -- and to share @zapier is a launch partner! Via Zapier, ChatGPT can now interact with over 5,000 apps like Google Sheets, MS Teams, Salesforce, Gmail, and thousands more https://t.co/fizkD4rfMf
Jessica and Carolynn Levy have just launched a new podcast called The Social Radars. You get to be a fly on the wall as they talk to successful startup founders. It's really interesting. I've already learned a bunch of stuff I didn't know.https://t.co/4mmNOWyTAO
~Similar parameter sizing to GPT3 family and still transformer arch. I bet GPT-4 is not an "order of magnitude increase" on parameter count (unlike GPT2/3). Huge efficiency gains on GPT3.5. Pachoki's work? -- https://t.co/pjmkk21W2ghttps://t.co/oMxPl4nACJ
Agree. Hard to know how "close" we are but it's inspiring such complex LLM behavior emerges at parameter sizes <<< human synapse count. And very worth much a broad search IMO https://t.co/D8m3HHYSfk
“I think the introduction of plugins to ChatGPT is a threat to the App Store. It creates a new platform with new monetization methods.”
........ OpenAI, he said, is offering a web browsing plugin and a code execution plugin..... The first plugins have already been created by companies including Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, OpenTable and Zapier. ......... According to Expedia, their new plugin simplifies trip planning for ChatGPT users. “Until now, ChatGPT could identify what to do and where to stay, but it couldn’t help travelers shop and book” ...... Now, once a traveler enables the Expedia plugin, they can bring a trip itinerary created through a conversation with ChatGPT “to life” with information powered by Expedia’s travel data including real-time availability and pricing of flights, hotels, vacation rentals, activities and car rentals. When ready to book, they’ll be sent to Expedia, where they can log in to see options personalized to what they prefer, as well as member discounts, loyalty rewards and more. .......... This is similar to how Apple’s App Store revolutionized the mobile industry by allowing third-party apps to flourish on its devices. ChatGPT’s plugin feature could potentially open up new possibilities and markets for AI chat in the future.
I am anxiously awaiting an AI driven in-ear translator. I have been filming in Ukraine for 7months. It would be a real game changer to not have to use a human translator and be able to connect with people one on one.
My Struggle Session at Stanford Law SchoolA dean voices pride that students are being taught to stage tantrums rather than make a reasoned case........ Stanford Law School’s website touts its “collegial culture” in which “collaboration and the open exchange of ideas are essential to life and learning.” Then there’s the culture I experienced when I visited Stanford last week. I had been invited by the student chapter of the Federalist Society to discuss the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on which I’ve served since 2018. I’ve spoken at law schools across the country, and I was glad to accept this invitation. One of my first clerks graduated from Stanford. I have friends on the faculty. I gave a talk there a few years ago and found it a warm and engaging place, but not this time. .......... When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people.” Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and fliers declaring “You should be ASHAMED,” with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror-movie font. This didn’t seem “collegial.” Walking to the building where I would deliver my talk, I could hear loud chanting a good 50 yards away, reminiscent of a tent revival in its intensity. Some 100 students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling. As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed: “We hope your daughters get raped!”
Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze? ........ Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments. Judge Duncan answered in turn. Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue. ........ Students involved in the protest had previously requested that the event be canceled or moved to Zoom. In my role as Stanford Law School’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, I supported the administration’s decision not to cancel the event or move it to video, as it would censor or limit the free speech of Judge Duncan and the students who invited him. Instead, the administration and I welcomed Judge Duncan to speak while supporting the right of students to protest within the bounds of university policy.
Stanford Law Rediscovers Free Speech The dean instructs student hecklers on the First Amendment. ....... Stanford Law School disgraced itself two weeks ago when its diversity administrator let students heckle and shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan. The school is now trying to salvage its reputation, and it’s making some progress....... In a letter to the university community on Wednesday, Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez issued a defense of free speech on campus and laid out the school’s expectations for civil discourse and legal professionalism.
Statement from Jenny Martinez As we consider the role of respectful treatment of members of our community, I want to be clear that the hate mail and appalling invective that have been directed at some of our students and law school administrators in the wake of March 9 are of great concern to me. All actionable threats that come to our attention will be investigated and addressed as the law permits. .
ChatGPT plugins We’ve implemented initial support for plugins in ChatGPT. Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services. .......
The Age of AI has begun Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet. ........ In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. ........ The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface—the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows. ....... The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make it capable of answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for. (I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology.) If you can do that, I said, then you’ll have made a true breakthrough.........
I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.
........ The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it. ........ Globally, the worst inequity is in health ........ In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math. ....... Climate change is another issue where I’m convinced AI can make the world more equitable.
The injustice of climate change is that the people who are suffering the most—the world’s poorest—are also the ones who did the least to contribute to the problem.
............ it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more. AIs also make factual mistakes and experience hallucinations. ......... AGI doesn’t exist yet—there is a robust debate going on in the computing industry about how to create it, and whether it can even be created at all. ........ and they will get better very fast. ....... the early days of the personal computing revolution, when the software industry was so small that most of us could fit onstage at a conference. Today it is a global industry. ........... Soon the pre-AI period will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt rather than tapping on a screen.......... AI will enhance your work—for example by helping with writing emails and managing your inbox. ....... Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English. (And not just English—AIs will understand languages from around the world. In India earlier this year, I met with developers who are working on AIs that will understand many of the languages spoken there.) ......... a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do. ....... When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home. ........ The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example. ........ The AI models used in poor countries will need to be trained on different diseases than in rich countries. They will need to work in different languages and factor in different challenges, such as patients who live very far from clinics or can’t afford to stop working if they get sick. ........ AIs will dramatically accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs. The amount of data in biology is very large, and it’s hard for humans to keep track of all the ways that complex biological systems work. .
6 attributes of excellence Tony Xu, co-founder of DoorDash, looks for when hiring:
1. People who love operating at the lowest level of detail
2. People who have a very strong bias for action
3. People who are able to hold two opposing ideas at the same time
Starting this month, I’ll be posting videos there, including highlights from the Possible podcast, conversations about AI, and original new content on technology and our future.
Confirmed: the new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4 Interview with OpenAI’s Greg Brockman: GPT-4 isn’t perfect, but neither are you GPT-4 improves upon its predecessor, GPT-3, in key ways, for example giving more factually true statements and allowing developers to prescribe its style and behavior more easily. It’s also multimodal in the sense that it can understand images, allowing it to caption and even explain in detail the contents of a photo. ......... Like GPT-3, the model “hallucinates” facts and makes basic reasoning errors. In one example on OpenAI’s own blog, GPT-4 describes Elvis Presley as the “son of an actor.” (Neither of his parents were actors.) ....... On the AP Calculus BC exam, GPT-4 scores a 4 out of 5 while GPT-3 scores a 1. (GPT-3.5, the intermediate model between GPT-3 and GPT-4, also scores a 4.) And in a simulated bar exam, GPT-4 passes with a score around the top 10% of test takers; GPT-3.5’s score hovered around the bottom 10%. ........ GPT-4 can take a prompt of both images and text to perform some action (e.g. an image of giraffes in the Serengeti with the prompt “How many giraffes are shown here?”). ........ in internal tests, it was 82% less likely to respond to requests for content disallowed by OpenAI’s usage policy and 40% more likely to produce “factual” responses than GPT-3.5. ......... Bing Chat, Microsoft’s chatbot powered by GPT-4, has been shown to be highly susceptible to jailbreaking. Using carefully tailored inputs, users have been able to get the bot to profess love, threaten harm, defend the Holocaust and invent conspiracy theories. ........... OpenAI is testing a version of GPT-4 that can “remember” roughly 50 pages of content, or five times as much as the vanilla GPT-4 can hold in its “memory” and eight times as much as GPT-3........ “Previously, the model didn’t have any knowledge of who you are, what you’re interested in and so on,” Brockman said. “Having that kind of history [with the larger context window] is definitely going to make it more able … it’ll turbocharge what people can do.”
How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable. But they were hampered by clunky design and miscalculations, leaving room for chatbots to rise. ....... People have used ChatGPT to handle complex tasks like coding software, drafting business proposals and writing fiction. ........ large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web ........... Google engineers spent years experimenting with its assistant to mimic what Alexa could do, including designing smart speakers and voice-controlled tablet screens to control home accessories like thermostats and light switches. The company later integrated ads into those home products, which did not become a major source of revenue. ........ Many of the big tech companies are now racing to come up with responses to ChatGPT.
Trump and DeSantis Could Both Lose (Seven of the 10 fastest growing states have Republican governors while eight of the 10 fastest shrinking states have Democratic governors.) ........ Gov. Brian Kemp, for example, is making Georgia a hub for green manufacturing, attracting immense investments in electric vehicle technologies. In his inaugural address he vowed to make Georgia “the electric mobility capital of America.” As Alexander Burns noted in Politico, Kemp doesn’t sell this as climate change activism; it’s jobs and prosperity. ....... The Donald Trump/Tucker Carlson orbit is rife with indignation and fury. ........ The Florida governor should be the ultimate optimistic, businesslike conservative. His state is growing faster than any other in the country. But instead, he’s running as a dour, humorless culture war populist — presumably because that’s what he is. .
China’s Answer to ChatGPT Gets an Artificial Debut and Disappoints The promised “live” demonstration of the bot had, in fact, been recorded. Shares of Baidu, the company behind the technology, tumbled in Hong Kong......... Halfway through a demonstration that had been marketed as live, in which Ernie summarized a science fiction novel and analyzed a Chinese idiom, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, said the presentation had been prerecorded “to save time.” ......... Baidu’s shares plunged 10 percent in Hong Kong, a striking contrast to the rally this year that was fueled by the company’s announcement that it has had a rival to ChatGPT in the works since 2019. ........ As Washington has moved to contain competition from China, it has cut Beijing off from high-end computing chips — a key ingredient in technologies like ChatGPT and Ernie. ....... “China is incredibly good at scaling an existing invention, but it is not very good at making breakthroughs” ........
The country ... lacks the diversity of thought and free expression of ideas that help nurture out-of-the-box thinking.
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The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Just Changed Capitalism Now, in light of the bank failures of the last few days and the F.D.I.C.’s extension of coverage, why will any depositor worry about risk? Having bailed out depositors of two banks in full, how will the government refuse others? ....... In 1933, an estimated 4,000 banks failed ........ Banks like Lehman had too much leverage, and they were overexposed to a very weak and widely held asset, mortgage securities. ......... The mismatch between the cost of their money and the (lower) rate that their mortgages earned sank the industry. ....... The first plank of capitalism is that it entails risk ...... In the case of Signature, which was exposed to the crypto industry, the rescue probably bailed out gamblers on speculative assets. ........ Most likely, banks will pass along the rescue costs in the form of higher fees to consumers. ........ Strictly speaking, President Biden’s assurance that taxpayers are not on the line was accurate. However, in the sense that banking customers are a pretty big group, the “public” will be affected. ........ The regulators clearly failed to monitor S.V.B.’s unhealthy mismatch of assets and liabilities. Their job will be more difficult in the future, as risk taking on deposits has effectively become socialized. What if a bank opts to attract more funds by raising its interest rate on deposits? Can the regulators permit it? Wait a second, this is what all banks do. .
10 Ways GPT-4 Is Impressive but Still Flawed OpenAI has upgraded the technology that powers its online chatbot in notable ways. It’s more accurate, but it still makes things up.......... It is an expert on an array of subjects, even wowing doctors with its medical advice. It can describe images, and it’s close to telling jokes that are almost funny. ....... the system could describe an image from the Hubble Space Telescope in painstaking detail. The description went on for paragraphs. ........ it can exhibit this kind of expertise across many areas, from computer programming to accounting. ........ It can also score a 1,300 (out of 1,600) on the SAT and a five (out of five) on Advanced Placement high school exams in biology, calculus, macroeconomics, psychology, statistics and history .......... Though the new bot seemed to reason about things that have already happened, it was less adept when asked to form hypotheses about the future. It seemed to draw on what others have said instead of creating new guesses. ......... The new bot still makes stuff up. Called “hallucination,” the problem haunts all the leading chatbots. Because the systems do not have an understanding of what is true and what is not, they may generate text that is completely false. .
After watching a man on TikTok explain that I don't need to pay back my debt because it belongs to the debt collectors and not me, I've decided to mortgage 10 properties and max out all my credit cards.
Mike West has literally written the book on People Analytics.
LinkedIn: Mike West I spend days helping executives solve profound organization problems, with people data....... People analytics is the systematic application of behavioral science & statistics to management to achieve probabilistic business advantages. I use data to identify where resource investments will have the most impact, get everyone on the same, and produce decisive action. ........ First @Google to develop people analytics for employee benefits. Google's first global employee survey, HR metrics dashboard & exit prediction model. First, to connect them. Many of these projects spawn have been reported in the news. Google is the first to win the Fortune Best Company to Work 7+ times.
A Call & Offer to People Analytics & Data Science Professionals Sometimes the people I'm close with tell me my emotions about my work scare them. Why do I care so much? For me, it is a total madness. When you see it, you can't unsee it. ....... Right now, I'm interested in people all around the world that build things that work with data and code. You know the type; they use Github. They read Packt. They figure things out on their own. ....... they didn't study behavioral science and just don't know what they don't know. ........ What I want to do is get very practical about how to offer entry into very rigorous and practical behavioral science methods that can be ported more readily into data science. ........ That's the book I want to write. I want to learn more in writing this book than I know. I want to go places I haven't gone before. ........ improving the intersection of behavioral science and data science who are willing to be earlier reviewers of deep but rough draft chapters on an ambitious book project. .
A new, humanistic organization-centered congruence philosophy of people analytics With trepidation, I would like to share with the world an emerging personal philosophy of people analytics. ....... Is anything in this philosophy just flat wrong? ...... As you read more of my writing, I will share my uncertainties, failures, insecurities, and emotions. I do so to a fault. ....... I have worked at the intersection of behavioral science, HR strategy, systems, and statistics, what we now call people analytics, for approximately twenty years. ........ People are a messy and cantankerous species. We have our line of sight, we have our blinds spots, we have our tools of choice, and for heaven's sake, if it looks anything like a nail we are going to bang the life out of it with our hammer to get it to go down into the wood. Meanwhile, somebody else is trying to wrench the damn thing off. I personally just wanted to hang my stethoscope from that nail so I’m not pleased when it is gone. ........... I went on to do this new type of work with data in HR, and in many cases start that practice, at PetSmart, Google, Children’s Health in Dallas, and eventually in my own consulting company. ........... the Kevin Bacon of people analytics, but a lot less attractive, and fun ........ I have worked for organizations that stubbornly refuse to change. I have picked fights and walked away. I don’t encourage picking fights, but if you want to do anything meaningful in the world, I’m sorry but you are going to have to. ........ It turns out that figuring out what I want to say to the world about all this has been a substantially difficult and precarious journey in itself. I think my honesty has helped some people. I’m sure my honesty has ticked some other people off. ......... I painstakingly tried to synthesize the most profound things I have learned, into a specific practical approach that I thought would benefit the widest possible audience ....... starting with sound philosophy, then going deep in a few small places that I thought could produce big results with very little money for the widest audience. ........... The 4S Framework, The Triple-A Model, Activation, CAMS Constraint Theory, Net Activated Value (NAV). ........ The 4S framework I see taking on life. ....... The other ideas remain simply theories. Foreign, if not even bizarre, to most the people in my field. People don’t take up a leadership responsibility in people analytics and whip out the Triple-A Model playbook. ......... For my own part, after a year without income, I had to figure out how to go make money again, and then the thoughts and conversations trail off. That is unfortunate. And I’m sorry. ......... I still have a hard time picking up my own book, because in my mind I know it is incomplete, and needs a new life and different wardrobe. .
Some meandering thoughts on the evolution of performance management at Google, with implications for humanity Universally people despise formal evaluation processes. Yet, it is challenging to run a company at scale without one. Indeed, you can't run differentiated pay based on a characteristic of an individual without a recorded measure. At least not defensibly. So you either go for even pay parity by clear objective criteria or have a performance mgt system with a rating. Suppose you want to use subjective individual pay differentials. In that case, technically, you have to have an evaluative position of some type (call it a rating or not, it's a rating), and if you do have a rating, it should be written down, and it should be made transparent. This is for ethical, legal, social, and frankly, just if you want what you are doing with pay differentials to work. Hiding things about other people in dark corners of metal file cabinets doesn't work. It doesn't. Just don't do it. It is crass. ............ We were super special. If we wore our company t-shirts in public, girls would swoon, and people would stop us to ask questions, or they might whisper things to their friends when we walked by. There was an actual time like that. So soon we forget. ........ As the official "Retention Czar" at this company, more often than not, I presented to a stupefied executive team, who only had one question for me. "Wait, I don't understand. Why isn't this zero?" "I really want to know, Mike, why would anyone want to leave? Please tell." These "outliers" were so unexpected that they were extraordinarily interesting. They were obsessed. Obsessed. .......... Inevitably, the people who were leaving at that time were going because they were bored. They wanted to do something new. They were bored with life. Certainly bored with money. Also smart enough to be annoyed by any attempts to manipulate them with something so banal as money. .
Human Error Implies a Human Equation When I hear error my ears perk up. I want to find the equation. ....... Since I work as a sort of mathematical consultant in the "Human Area", I am keen to identify and test human equations. ........ In an organization human error implies a breakdown somewhere in: People, Processes, Partnerships, Programs and Policies. Like it or hate it, these P's are how large organizations run "at scale". ...... The money invested was put in people, the rest of the money invested was directed by those people. So you can't ignore the energy is people. ....... Speaking of rocket science, it is not a secret that "human error" is also what caused the space shuttle challenger to blow up with humans on board, while being watched by nearly every school child in America. ....... The reality is that an error of this scale can get as far as it did it suggests many people in error - importantly a failure to understand how to build an effective organization. ........ The P related variables precede all profits (past innovations), all innovation (future profits), and all sources of destruction (wasted value). Examine any great success or any great failure carefully and you will always see it. Error is caused by a lack of awareness and responsiveness to something, which until instructed otherwise, is not the machines jobs to identify. Humans are responsible for identifying customer changes, competition changes, constraint changes, constraints and other conditions. That's what humans are designed for. It is what we are good at. ........ You aimed for the moon and hurtled into outer space. Total and utter fail. ........ but there is an equation. We ignored it and we shipped. ....... What caused de-activation in this, or any case, can be found through a simple recursive exploration of four variables, which can be measured on team by team basis, compared, related to outcomes, and trended. It consists of looking for the presence or absence of four simultaneous minimum conditions: a.) alignment on customer value, b.) motivation, c.) capability, and d.) support. You cannot actually spot the error with this equation, but you can spot unactivated human sensors, whose job it is. Unactivated human sensors is what produces all business failures.
An Anti-Valentine from Peter Drucker to HR Plus ca change. A french exclamation used to express resigned acknowledgment of the fundamental immutability of human nature and institutions. ....... He wrote, “the constant worry of all personal administrators is their inability to prove that they are making a contribution to the enterprise. Their preoccupation is with the search for a gimmick that will impress their management associates. Their persistent complaint is that they lack status.” ......... He added a joke that personal management has been described as “an amalgamation of all those things that do not deal with the work of people and that are not management.” ....... But the two most important features, the organization of work, and the organization of people that do work, he said, were generally avoided. ....... the personnel role assumed that people did not want to work ....... gimmicks. Family-friendly policies, 360 degree assessment, employee assistance programs, mentoring, and benchmarking are just few the process in vogue. ......... Human Resources was about sweating the most valuable assets of the company. It still is. ........ The alphabet was impractical unless letters resembled into pronounceable words that had their own sounds. ....... He decided that planning - a vital part of management - did not need to be carried out by some designated manager. It could be achieved by workers themselves if they were given the necessary information. ......... The railroad managers did not need an HR assistant to explain to them the theory of empowerment. They simply sat down with employees and listened to their ideas. “We have overwhelming evidence that there is actually better planning if the man who does the work first responsibly participates in the planning” ........ Drucker's writings was illuminating but subversive. Personnel management, he said was “insolvent,” Personnel preferring to ignore “the frozen assets” of scientific management and human relations in favor of “techniques and gadgets”. Perhaps he bruised too many egos, not only those in personnel management, but also those in general management. After all, he had written that “many workers of tomorrow may have to be able to do more planning than a good many people who call themselves managers today are capable of.” .
Making Sense of HR Metrics 50 general hires in a time period of modest growth represent one thing, 50 sales producing hires in a time period of rapid market expansion and conquest represent something else entirely. .
Developing a successful workforce requires more than a gut check. Data can help guide your decisions on everything from where to seat a team to optimizing production processes to engaging with your employees in ways that ring true to them.
People analytics is the study of your number one business asset—your people—and this book shows you how to collect data, analyze that data, and then apply your findings to create a happier and more engaged workforce.
Start a people analytics project Work with qualitative data Collect data via communications Find the right tools and approach for analyzing data.
If your organization is ready to better understand why high performers leave, why one department has more personnel issues than another, and why employees violate, People Analytics For Dummies makes it easier.
People Analytics For Dummies Mike West was the founder of People Analytics at Merck, PetSmart, Google, Children's Health Dallas and VMWare before starting his own firm, PeopleAnalyst, LLC. He brings unique perspective to the field and motivation to help smaller organizations stand up to and outmaneuver giants, like Google, by using data to find more focus, agility and speed in People Operations.
Corporate culture is the operating system of a company. No company achieved greatness without it. Six core values of that corporate culture are: (1) Work Hard (2) Play By The Rules (3) Innovate (4) Treat People With Respect (5) Communicate and (6) Serve.
