GPT/LLM links

Russ Roberts interviews The Zvi; An AI nanny?; Sam Hammond predicts AI legislation; Ethan Mollick on AI creativity

On Econtalk with Russ Roberts, Zvi Mowshowitz says,

even the people who are just focusing on how to use it for productivity, who are just building apps on top of it, just haven't had the human time necessary to unpack what it can do and to progress the capabilities you can build on top of what we have. So, I think that even if we don't see a more advanced model for several years, we're still going to be very impressed by the pace of what we can do with it.

Yes. The relevant margin for getting something out of AI is figuring out the best uses for what we have now and getting those widely understood and adopted.

For the WSJ, Dana Suskind writes,

a decade from now. Most aspects of child rearing won’t have changed, but others may well be transformed by the use of artificial intelligence. AI devices are likely to become electronic babysitters, just as previous generations of parents adopted television and video games as tools for lightening their caregiving duties.

AI teddy bears could respond in personalized ways to baby coos and toddler questions. Computer-assisted “nannies” who never tire of reading the same book over and over would make bedtime a breeze. Advanced nursery versions of Alexa could sing and teach favorite songs on demand, play games and even deduce why a baby is crying.

This is one vision I cannot buy into yet. Get back to me when an AI can change a diaper.

Sam Hammond writes,

By this time next year, we’ll have multimodal GPT-5-level models, LLMs hitting every enterprise, more reliable AutoGPTs, an explosion in deepfakes, scams, and cyberattacks, and many other known unknowns. These will generate ad hoc debates, but they may also finally aggregate into the existential realization — the bitter lesson — that many of us had years ago, but which has been regrettably slow to diffuse.

Bet on it

To put my money where my mouth is, I’m making a public bet with Ezra Brodey that Congress will pass “major AI regulation” before EOY 2024 (with some wiggle room for a billed passed in the December rush to get to the President’s desk)

I would take the other side of that bet. My thinking is that the impact of new AI technology will arrive slowly, in spite of the speed at which the technology itself is advancing.

Ethan Mollick writes,

Each of the three papers directly compares AI-powered creativity and human creative effort in controlled experiments. The first major paper is from my colleagues at Wharton. They staged an idea generation contest: pitting ChatGPT-4 against the students in a popular innovation class that has historically led to many startups. The researchers — Karan Girotra, Lennart Meincke, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl Ulrich — used human judges to assess idea quality, and found that ChatGPT-4 generated more, cheaper and better ideas than the students. Even more impressive, from a business perspective, was that the purchase intent from outside judges was higher for the AI-generated ideas as well! Of the 40 best ideas rated by the judges, 35 came from ChatGPT.

Reinforcing what I wrote, he writes,

In the real world, most new ideas do not come from the ether; they are based on combinations existing concepts, which is why innovation scholars have long pointed to the importance of recombination in generating ideas. And LLMs are very good at this, acting as connection machines between unexpected concepts.

Substacks referenced above:

@

Automating creativity

@

Will there be major AI legislation before 2025?