I’m always amazed by how much and how well the average person knows Excel — the extent they’re willing to suffer to bend the tool to their will. So many companies run on spreadsheets cobbled together in a fashion not dissimilar to vibe coding.

Will apps as prepackaged products lose importance over what they enable — the skills or data sources they add? The AI chat interface is proliferating across apps, but it seems more likely we will be bringing our own favourite assistant to them, pulling and accessing specific capabilities.

Frank Chimero in an exhortation to treat AI as an instrument, with a focus on practice.

David Galbraith: AI buttons are different from, say Photoshop menu commands in that they can just be a description of the desired outcome rather than a sequence of steps (incidentally why I think a lot of agents’ complexity disappears). For example Photoshop used to require a complex sequence of tasks (drawing around elements with a […]

Nowfal Khadar, expanding on the Jevons paradox (production efficiency leading to higher demand), which is frequently mentioned when discussing AI and employment: Once demand saturates, employment doesn’t further increase but holds steady at peak demand. But as automation continues and workers keep getting more productive, employment starts to decline. In textiles, mechanization enabled massive output […]

Jasmine Sun: Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible. It is inevitable—given this reality and these incentives—that most people will soon use AI to write most things.

Robert Saltzman pressed Claude into thinking about itself — with some interesting results. At a certain point it even declared itself self-aware, full stop. What looks like introspection though is just a performance of it: statistical answers based on patterns that fit with what introspection and self-awareness look like. With what we (us) expect it […]

Some examples of how AI is being integrated in apps — and by integrated I don’t mean slapping a floating button with a chat interface: While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX. I […]

Ted Gioia: Slop is all about wastefulness! Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists—in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology. In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop. This seems […]

When is it okay to train a LLM on scraped data? Robin Sloan: If an AI appli­ca­tion delivers some pro­found public good, or even if it might, it’s prob­ably okay that its value is rooted in this unprece­dented oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the com­mons. If an AI appli­ca­tion simply repli­cates Every­thing, it’s prob­ably not okay. […] I […]

I think this is quite a good analogy: Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence […]

Ted Chiang: I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company.

Steven Johnson: Long context is also a boost for collective intelligence as well. If you assume the average corporate document—a press release, or marketing plan, or minutes from a board meeting—is a few thousand words long, then today’s models can simultaneously hold in their short-term memory close to a thousand documents. A state-of-the-art language model […]

GPT-3 — let’s define it as the autocomplete tool by OpenAI trained on a large amount of uncategorized text from the internet — is quite impressive, comparable to what happened to AI image processing from 2012 onward. We can safely ignore the hype — it’s probably a dead end in terms of reaching artificial general intelligence […]

Toby Shorin: In both the medieval and traditional forms of society, mankind was at the whim of God and nature. We could die in any number of ways. A locust wave (sent by God) ruined our crops, or you ate a poisonous berry, were bitten by a snake, or attacked by a bear, or some […]

Arvind Narayanan: I will focus the rest of my talk on this third category [predicting social outcomes], where there’s a lot of snake oil. I already showed you tools that claim to predict job suitability. Similarly, bail decisions are being made based on an algorithmic prediction of recidivism. People are being turned away at the […]