Recent Links related to ChatGPT, 2/2

Upanishad Sharma on useful Chrome extensions; Scott Alexander on Helpful, Harmless, and Honest; Ethan Mollick on prompts for creativity; Amjad Masad explains ChatGPT

Feb 02, 2023

We have scoured the internet and found the 10 best ChatGPT Chrome extensions
…Since ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to 2021 data, this makes the answers out of date for anything that happened after that time. However, one of the best ChatGPT Chrome extensions, WebChatGPT, helps overcome this limitation.

The article explains where to find and how to use that and nine other extensions.

Scott Alexander writes,

Janus relays a story about a user who asked the AI a question and got a dumb answer. When the user re-prompted GPT with “how would a super-smart AI answer this question?” it gave him a smart answer. Why? Because it wasn’t even trying to answer the question the first time - it was trying to complete a text about the question. The second time, the user asked it to complete a text about a smart AI answering the question, so it gave a smarter answer.
…GPT simulates how texts play out according to the rules and genres of language.
But the essay brings up another connotation: to simulate is to pretend to be something. A simulator wears many masks. If you ask GPT to complete a romance novel, it will simulate a romance author and try to write the text the way they would. Character.AI lets you simulate people directly, asking GPT to pretend to be George Washington or Darth Vader.
…What really helped this sink in was reading Nostalgebraist say that ChatGPT was a GPT instance simulating a character called the Helpful, Harmless, and Honest Assistant.

Ethan Mollick writes,

Let’s imagine that we want to come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop. The AI can generate those for us, but we will get even better quality if we tell the AI to act as someone who is good at coming up with ideas. You can see below, we get better results if we say: You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting. You use clever wordplay. You try not to repeat themes or ideas. Here is your first task: come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop, make them different from each other, and make them clever and creative.

Sotonye interviews Amjad Masad, who says,

We’re going to see a totally new crop of software developers. On one end, people who otherwise would never touch a line of code will enter the software development game. On the other end, the people who are very good at programming, what we call 10x engineers, are going to achieve productivity levels that are hard to imagine.

I very much buy the third sentence above, but I disagree with the second one, because I think that executives who understand software engineering will have better instincts about what sorts of projects are worthwhile and can be done. Today, CEOs who come from a programming background have an advantage in building tech companies. I think that advantage actually will be extended.

You will also find Masad on Erik Torenberg’s podcast, a discussion of ChatGPT that I find well informed. I found this and the Masad interview above much more insightful than anything else I’ve encountered regarding ChatGPT.

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