does it feel like the world is changing again?
Joan Brown, The Bride, 1970
My first phone was one of those tiny little Nokia slabs. Smaller than a chocolate bar, no touchscreen. I think it was a Nokia 3310, though my memory is unreliable. I used to stay up late playing games on it and listening to Down by Jay Sean. My first smartphone was the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and it was ginormous. Too big to fit in my 14-year-old hand. I knew instantly that I would never go a day in my life without a smartphone again. For me, it was a portal into all the things that made life worthwhile: books, Youtube videos, conversations with friends. As a teenager I spent evenings chatting with strangers on Omegle. One of these strangers was a PhD student at Berkeley. My first summer in San Francisco I met up with him and we kissed. I was so impressed that I had pulled a complete stranger out of the bubbling primordial swamp of the Internet. I wanted to try doing it again. You see why I like Twitter.
I always believed in technology despite its many problems. As Kevin Kelly put it, technology creates problems, then we create more technology to fix them. That’s a cycle I have faith in, though perhaps I shouldn’t. As a kid I read Chobits and wanted a cyborg to love. I dropped out of college to work on an AI startup with my best friend. I didn’t know what I was doing, but as usual I was right on the money when it came location, time, people, and scene. That’s always been my particular gift. The startup didn’t work, I started writing. But I never lost that compulsion to keep track of tech. The accelerationist in me never fell out of love.
For a while, things felt like they were going too slow. No flying cars. No robot girls with cat ears. But lately it feels like things are going fast again or at least faster. Which is why, I suppose, I am writing to you. This is a place for me to catalogue what I’m reading and thinking about as far as technology is concerned. I want to tie the string around my wrist and follow it wherever it leads.
3/1 links
I used ChatGPT to do my job
At my job I spend a lot of time trying to produce good writing with ChatGPT. The startup I work for strives to write poetically. Can AI write poetry? Currently, by my definition of poetry, it cannot. But it can write basic copy, and sometimes with lots of prompting it can write very good copy.
Life after food.
The rise of Ozempic makes me feel bad for my teenage self, who wanted so desperately to be rail-thin (I am after all a child of the 90s). But it also creates a new world, where people who want to lose weight can lose weight. I wonder if it will fade into the background like Botox, used by so many it’s considered no longer interesting or worthy of discussion.
ChatGPT is not a blurry JPEG of the web. It’s a simulacrum. Referencing of course the Ted Chiang essay. “What’s going on is that large language models are engines in which simulations and simulacra can be instantiated. These simulacra live in a world of words, starting with some initial conditions (the prompt) and evolving the world forward in time to produce the end result (the output text). The simulacra, then, are the intelligences we interact with, briefly instantiated to evolve the simulation and then becoming dormant until we continue the time-evolution.”
This Slate Star Codex essay about OpenAI’s recent planning for AGI statement.
Chatbots adapt to the people who use them. New York Times piece so it’s a bit well, duh, but it’s very interesting to watch as we form a new cultural understanding in real time of how to react to chatbots who say bad things.
$2 can get you 1M tokens – or approximately 750,000 words – on the ChatGPT API!🎉 The ChatGPT API is here! The energy, execution speed, and insights from developers during the alpha period have been unparalleled and made work _so_ fun. Read more about today's announcements here: https://t.co/rWYTJZsjfYJoanne Jang @joannejang