given that the distribution of natural talents is arbitrary from a moral point of view (see Rawls), generative AI could be seen as broadening the distribution of natural talents (e.g. composing a song using Drake's voice), and thus a kind of distributive justice?
Russia's president expects that the West will gradually lose interest in helping Ukraine—and the United States and its partners must prove him wrong, writes @McFaul.https://t.co/ZG87M7xLOA
TikTok is like a black hole for my time. I start scrolling through videos and the next thing I know, my phone battery is dead and my bedtime has turned into wake-up time. (Courtesy: ChatGPT)
Job seekers, Beware. One of the most dangerous / risky things you can do for your career is to join a company to work on or lead a “yet to be staffed” product or business.
While it can be seductive to imagine the possibilities (and company execs will encourage this thinking…
At Microsoft all employees are asked not to look at patents. Why? In a patent suit, I learned, damages are triple if they can prove an employee saw the patent in question.
How would a company enforce that when you are using an LLM on your home computer or phone that does this? https://t.co/MkQq7oLZZ5
INTERNET: “This is only good for porn.” ONLINE DATING: “Way too creepy.” AIRBNB: “People won’t sleep in a stranger’s house.” AI: “This will never make an image of a Pope in a coat or the best rap song ever.”
First reactions to trailblazing tech are usually wrong. Ignore them.
I can't imagine anything worse than a floating TED from which there is no escape from "a multidisciplinary experience designed to foster deep connections within our community of amazing like-minded people." Drown me now. https://t.co/anlrgdYh8e
The influence of teachers, good & bad, can last generations.
A study of 500 years of music shows a teacher’s style is reflected in the work of their students & their students’ students: “the teacher lives on as a reverberation in the work of the student” https://t.co/QxAfOLPgFbpic.twitter.com/ueWCV6NFqV
“The United States is in an especially weak position to defend global norms after the presidency of Donald Trump, which saw contempt for global rules and practices in areas as diverse as the climate, human rights, and nuclear nonproliferation.”https://t.co/V3l8TQUQWD
All the #Humanities need to be involved here and not the professors or researchers but the ones closest to the public. Too many academics here who have forgotten where the real impact sits and are too far removed from reality.@sundarpichaihttps://t.co/nngViJ7wy0
At Microsoft all employees are asked not to look at patents. Why? In a patent suit, I learned, damages are triple if they can prove an employee saw the patent in question.
How would a company enforce that when you are using an LLM on your home computer or phone that does this? https://t.co/MkQq7oLZZ5
If you don't believe in GOD, I don't care. That's your choice. But I do, so don't tell me GOD doesn't exist just because you don't choose to believe in him. While you're NOT believing in him, tell the rest of us where did all of this creation come from & where are the offices?
A longer clip. I'm always for diversity and pluralism of intelligence. The first principle is about the importance of pluralism and diversity. Logically, Musk hints that intelligence that seeks truth will also value diversity. The logic is inescapable. https://t.co/RngeApH8jk
I do not understand sentences like "we use machine learning to..." in papers. Did we ever write "we use statistics to..." or "we use mathematics to..."? Unnecessary, or not specific enough.
At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully. pic.twitter.com/xQF0UM1ySg
Now that I think about it, there's another and perhaps more important reason journalists like the adversarial approach: it's a way to compensate for their lack of domain knowledge. If they can't think of anything interesting to ask, they prod you with a stick.
Though I don't program, GPT-4 gave me working software out of a tweet.
“Write code (and tell me how to run it) that will take whatever is in my clipboard, send it to GPT, ask it to summarize using text-davinci-003, and display the results on the screen.” https://t.co/juFabLQyZapic.twitter.com/sulDn3WIfL
.@SecBlinken shared the powerful story of his stepfather’s survival during the Holocaust. On Yom HaShoah, we remember the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. #WeRemember
In the fairly near future, internal combustion engine vehicles will be viewed in the same way that we view external combustion engine vehicles (steam engines)!
Context: The AI stack has 4 layers. From bottom to top, infrastructure (eg Nvidia), foundational models (eg GPT), AI tooling (eg Hugging Face) and Apps (eg Harvey for legal). There are many sub-buckets within each layer, but for the purposes of the post below, I’m…
Ali told me he was TOTALLY ALONE in LA. Had no family or friends here. Lived in a tiny house with 4 roommates who mostly speak Spanish. (He doesn’t.) He had a phone, but no computer, no car, no money, few clothes besides what was on his back. Ate eggs for every meal.
He was actually a celebrity in Afghanistan, the violinist for the on-screen backup band for their version of American Idol, Afghan Star. It was the number one show in the country. He did it for 5 seasons.
We have managed to get him a few things: an immigration lawyer he can call, a laptop, some clothes, a few rounds of groceries, a few decent meals. He was here for his birthday. We watched him try a s’more for the first time. (He loved it, duh.) pic.twitter.com/nZZfXPzlhG
In that time, he has done SO MUCH MORE by himself. Got a green card, a driver’s license, a bank account, a car. Got a more stable job at a big downtown hotel, @thebonaventure, as a food expediter, preparing room service trays. His bosses & coworkers treat him with dignity. pic.twitter.com/xo2vY4gVKh
UPDATE: Wow. Ali and I are gobsmacked. In one day, we blasted past our goal of money for his violin lessons. So we decided to up the goal to what he really wants: music school tuition money. Chip in if you can/want. Regardless, your gifts, your words, your love is life-affirming. pic.twitter.com/Kus7alHZ7N
This week on the podcast, @MilanV talks to @myraemacdonald about India and Pakistan’s decades-long battle for Siachen and the toll that war at 20,000 feet takes on soldiers from both sides.
I don't think the accidents of individuals' personalities are the reason tech is different from Wall St. I think it's because tech is a positive-sum rather than zero-sum game.
In 2016 - John Robert - then CEO & President of Orbis (Retired Brigadier General) graciously gave me & my mom private tour of flying eye hospital, a fully functional eye hospital built inside airplane. https://t.co/Maj2TreqfB
The last-generation Google TPUv4 and Nvidia A100 could not have possibly been designed with large language models in mind. Similarly, the recently deployed Google TPUv5 and Nvidia H100 could not have been designed with the AI Brick Wall in mind https://t.co/dNJfjrt8X1
Politicians who can't distinguish between people who got rich playing zero-sum and positive-sum games literally don't understand the first thing about wealth.
"Many of us are wondering if he was killed because he was a Muslim. I don't know if that's true, but this incident has terrified the city. We deserve better." https://t.co/i9oKCwtYyK
We don’t know whether AI will benefit low-performing or high-performing workers more.
The first controlled study of ChatGPT on realistic business writing tasks found worse writers gained most. In robotic surgery, the worst surgeons get the most benefit. That may change in time. pic.twitter.com/ukiORjFaVC
Atiq Ahmed: The brazen murder of an Indian mafia don-turned-politician It was all over in less than a minute. ....... As they start walking, surrounded by a ring of police constables, local TV reporters besiege them - among them are gunmen pretending to be journalists. ...... A second later, a gun is pulled close to his head, his white turban detaches from his head as he collapses to the ground. A moment later, his brother is also shot........ Two gunmen and another man immediately surrender to the police. ....... Lawyer and politician Kapil Sibal said there had been "two murders" in Uttar Pradesh - "one, of Atiq and brother Ashraf and two, of Rule of Law". ......... Starting in 1989, he was elected five times as a legislator to the state assembly from the city, and was also elected to the parliament from Phulpur constituency in 2004........ But this persona unravelled as Ahmed was accused of kidnappings, murders, extortion and land grabs. ........ Many parts of Prayagraj were a ghost town on Sunday morning. The main bazaars in the old city - usually buzzing with activity at this time of the year as Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid - were deserted. ....... Police vans and officers are deployed on almost every street. Internet services are down in most parts. And locals are reluctant to talk to the media or say anything about the murders. ...... people were shocked. ....... "How can somebody be killed in front of the media and the police? He was a convicted criminal I agree, but that doesn't mean he can be shot like that. What about the rule of law?" he asked.
The 'monster' that terrified Georgian London A century before Jack the Ripper, another now long-forgotten fiend haunted the streets of London. He became known as the London Monster and his modus operandi was to stalk well-to-do Georgian ladies and attack their thighs or buttocks with a sharp rapier....... Hysteria gripped the city; sightings of a bang-haired, long-limbed ‘Monster’ were reported on many a dimly-lit street corner. With the police seemingly outsmarted at every turn, it created one of the earliest examples of what would later become known as a ‘moral panic’.
35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now are helping people to save time at work, to code without knowing how to code, to make daily life easier or just to have fun. ......... companies and scholars have started to use A.I. to supercharge work they could never have imagined, designing new molecules with the help of an algorithm or building alien-like spaceship parts. ......... (1) Plan gardens. ...... I’ve been employing ChatGPT to give me inspiration on species that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred to me, and for choosing the site for each tree: the best part of the yard with regard to the sun at different times of the year.” ............ Taking into account his geographical location, it suggested, for example, that he might use a moringa tree to provide shade for a star apple. ........ (2) Plan workouts. ....... (3) Plan meals. ....... “It completely eliminated my normal meal-planning process that involved searching for recipes, trying to think of meal ideas, configuring a list of all of those ideas, and then making a list of the ingredients I need, too.” ........... (4) Make a gift. ........ Mr. Strain used ChatGPT to create a custom book of cocktails based on the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine written in the style of the J. Peterman catalog. He took the idea further the next day, using DALL-E to generate images of the cocktails for the final book, which he gave to his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. ........... (5) Design parts for spaceships. ...... But where a human might make a couple of iterations in a week, the commercial A.I. tool he uses can go through 30 or 40 ideas in an hour. It’s also spitting back ideas that no human would come up with. ....... “The resulting design is a third of the mass; it’s stiffer, stronger and lighter,” he said. “It comes up with things that, not only we wouldn’t think of, but we wouldn’t be able to model even if we did think of it.” ...... Sometimes the A.I. errs in ways no human would: It might fill in a hole the part needs to attach to the rest of the craft. ......... “It’s like collaborating with an alien,” he said. (6) Organize a messy computer desktop. ......... I basically just gave ChatGPT a directory, a list of all my folder names, and the names of all my files. And it gave me a list of which notes should go into which folders!” ........ (7) Write a wedding speech. ....... “The first version was generic, full of platitudes. Then I steered it.” ...... Adam is a great lover of plants ......... (8) Write an email. ...... Mr. Wirth uses ChatGPT to simplify tech jargon when he emails his bosses ....... He also gets it to generate first drafts of long emails. ........ He also asks for a bullet-point list of the concerns that have to be addressed in the email. .......... (9) Get a first read. ........ “I generate a lot of writing both for my work and for my hobbies, and a lot of time I run out of people who are excited to give me first-pass edits.” ......... (10) Play devil’s advocate. ........ “I use ChatGPT to simulate arguments in favor of keeping the existing tool,” he said. “So that I can anticipate potential counterarguments.” ........... (11) Build a clock that gives you a new poem every minute. .......... it’s enormous fun.” ......... (12) Organize research for a thesis. ............ Scholarcy and Scite, among other A.I. tools that find, aggregate and summarize relevant papers. ........... “Collectively, they take weeks off of the writing process.” ............ (13) Skim dozens of academic articles. ...... Instead of picking through Google Scholar, he now uses an A.I. tool called Elicit. It lets him ask questions of the paper itself. It helps him find out, without having to read the whole thing, whether the paper touches on the question he’s asking............ (14) Cope with ADHD … .......... “Describing the audience I’m speaking to, that context is super important to actually get anything usable out of the tool,” she said. What comes back is a starter framework she can then change and build out. ............ (15) … and dyslexia, too. ........ I’ll dictate my entire article. Then I’ll have ChatGPT basically correct my spelling and grammar. ...... “So something that was taking like a full day to do, I can now do in like an hour and a half.” ............ (16) Sort through an archive of pictures. ......... (17) Transcribe a doctor’s visit into clinical notes. ............ Before: Writing up notes after a visit took about 20 percent of consult time. Now: The whole task lasts as long as it takes him to copy and paste the results from Copilot. ......... (18) Appeal an insurance denial. .........
“What used to take me around a half-hour to write now takes one minute”
........ Write an insurance rebuttal to an insurance company about treatment of the primary prostate tumor and single site of metastases. Make the tone polite but assertive. Use the terms ‘medically necessary’ and ‘would render the patient without evidence of radiographic disease.’ ............. (19) Write Excel formulas. ......... “I could ask a specific question on the type of formula I wanted, and then I could reword my question based on the answer it gave me. This allowed for a more interactive and iterative process towards finding the answer than I found through tutorials, articles or random message board posts.” ........ (20) Get feedback on fiction. ......... Summarize the meaning or symbolism of this story I wrote. Mention any plot twist. Speculate on the moral of the story. Analyze how well the story reads to an average reader grammatically and structurally. Analyze if the title matches appropriately. .......... If ChatGPT misses the point, or the moral, “that tells me as a writer probably many readers will miss it too.” ......... it helps me get insight into what a future reader might get or miss.” .......... (21) Get homework help. ......... It will give her an answer, but also step-by-step instructions on how it got there — a kind of self-guided tutoring process that she once used math apps or Khan Academy videos for........ “Sometimes if I’m still confused, I can ask the A.I. to put it into simpler terms. It’s just become another option for me to use and it’s been really helpful to have whenever I need it.” ............... (22) Learn Chinese. ......... (23) Get help when English is your second language. ............... (24) Create an app when you’ve never coded before. ........... “I pasted in everything it told me to paste in. Now I have a button on my computer to summarize documents. And I can’t code, by the way.” ............. (25) Fix bugs in your code. ........... He pastes in his code, and he often gets a decent suggestion for how to rewrite it. ......... “It’s like if you had a good, mostly respectable co-worker, that can give you the time to make their suggestions match your tools, your environment, everything that couldn’t possibly be addressed in one of those generic posts online.” ........... (26) Play Pong … ......... (27) … or 3D games. .......... (28) Build entirely new games. ............ Can you code me a playable version of this? ........... He even let the A.I. name the game. ....... (29) Teach people to curl like a pro. ......... “We only focus on strategy,” he said. “We do assume the person would be Olympic level.” ........ (30) Create new proteins in minutes. ......... Now A.I. can do it. He used it recently to make a light-generating firefly-esque protein. Other researchers have used A.I. in the search for a malaria vaccine, and for Parkinson’s research. .......... I have not memorized all the protein structures. The algorithms have. They’ve looked at all of them, and generalized rules for how to put together new structures. It’s pretty amazing.” ....... He has done protein research for a decade. This, he says, is the most efficient he has ever been. ...... “It’s crazy,” he said. “Everything is becoming much easier.” ........ (31) Identify diseases in banana plants. ........ the farmers responsible for producing more than 100 million tons of bananas each year aren’t trained as diagnosticians. ........ He trained an A.I. on nearly 20,000 pictures of all kinds of banana plants: sick, healthy, young and old. Now farmers across India, Latin America and Africa can use his app, Tumaini, to take pictures of their crop and get a diagnosis. ......... (32) Draw like Sol LeWitt. ........ On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place 50 points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines. ........... (33) Describe entire Dungeons & Dragons worlds. ......... (34) Make a Spotify playlist ....... Give me songs that are acoustic but energetic. ....... Play the Cars but none of those boring slow songs. .......... (35) Play with language. ....... the A.I. is useful when she needs a creative boost. .
Pentagon Leaks: New Twists in a Familiar Plot Some in Ukraine even welcomed the disclosures as confirming what they have been saying for months — that its forces desperately need more weapons and munitions. . Why DeSantis Has to Run The Threats to Our Democracy Have Gone Local This Is What a Post-Roe Abortion Looks Like The 100-Year-Old Reason U.S. Housing Is So Expensive Local governments figured out that they could use zoning to achieve racial segregation. Suburbs adopted exclusionary zoning that prohibited the building of the least costly forms of housing, not just to keep out racial minorities, but also to boost local housing values and save on the costs of educating poor children. Localities lack incentives to take into account the impact of their policies on people who live elsewhere. Growth in the most economically vibrant regions, such as Silicon Valley, is constrained by a lack of housing for employees. People end up trapped in places with more affordable housing but no work........ “America’s Frozen Neighborhoods: The Abuse of Zoning.” ......... “The purpose of zoning … should not be to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” ....... Once a neighborhood is zoned for single-family detached homes, it almost always stays that way, even when a city’s growth makes such low density inefficient. Los Angeles permits the building of only detached houses on 75 percent of its residentially zoned land; Chicago, 79 percent. First, those detached houses are built to last. Second, “the politics of local zoning almost invariably works to freeze land uses, especially in a neighborhood of detached houses,” he writes. “This is a significant finding, not yet part of urban lore. I chose the title of the book to emphasize it.” .......... France, “hardly a nation averse to regulation,” in 2014 prohibited its municipalities from setting minimum lot sizes for houses ......... Ellickson praises the Biden administration for trying to weaken exclusionary zoning.
Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals The tech giant is sprinting to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one. ....... Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November.... ......... Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices. ........ Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic” ........ An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year. .......... A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features ..........
and until recently it was hard to imagine anything challenging it
. ........ The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year. ....... But the idea that Samsung, which makes hundreds of millions of smartphones with Google’s Android software every year, would even consider switching search engines shocked Google’s employees. ......... Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. ......... Its chatbot, Bard, does not feature ads, and there has been anticipation in the tech industry that A.I. answers on search engines could make ads less relevant to users. .......... Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot .......... A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results. Another tool, Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.
TOKYO, April 10 (Reuters) #OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said on Monday he is considering opening an #office and expanding services in Japan after a meeting with #Japan's prime minister Fumio Kishida . pic.twitter.com/I70RlIkmuk
🌐🤖 #ChatGPT, a game-changer in the coding world! 💡 Its ability to understand and generate human-like text is simply astonishing, making it an invaluable tool for developers and innovators alike. 🚀🌟 Let's celebrate this marvel of AI and the exciting future it brings!… pic.twitter.com/hEbWgcRhl7
— Janette Camacho, ED.S. (@iJanetteCamacho) April 13, 2023
AI is broad like the Internet, GPT is more specific like search, social, mobile. #iThink
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 9, 2023
Agreed: the hype for self-running AI far exceeds the system’s ability (for now). And the more you try AutoGPT the more you see the gaps
Instead we need to train to be humans-in-the-loop. Nudge AI to do what you normally do more efficiently. There is no guide for that, experiment https://t.co/R1fJ9hNbwk
I'm struggling with the flood of videos from doomerist AGI folk. Here's a preliminary cut of my conversation with @drmichaellevin on AGI agency and pluralism to catch up and provide a counter-narrative. I still have more cleanup to do though. https://t.co/9fkO0QfJik
“Born in America, in Europe bred, in Africa travell’d, and in Asia wed, Where long he lov’d and thriv’d…much good, some ill he did.” https://t.co/o2K9CvI8zv
Yale Was Built on Stolen Riches from India. Why Don’t We Talk About It More? Elihu Yale became the reluctant namesake of the prestigious university by exploiting Indian diamonds, textiles, and even mango chutney........ This was also the port where, during his roughly 30-year stay at Fort St. George, East India Company official Elihu Yale would amass much of his fortune. ........ His legacy would include building up the city now known as Chennai, enriching Britain and himself, but also making a significant donation that would lead to one of the most prestigious schools in the world: Yale University. .
