The Weekly Blip: Friday 19th May 2023

Digging with our hands when there are shovels

This week:

• Digging with our hands when there are shovels.

• Betting on the end of the world.

• High interest rates are good for bank income but bad for balance sheets.

Hi folks, I’m at a hackathon for LLMs (large language models, like GPT) this weekend and a bit behind here on getting this out.

My short takes on LLMs:

1. Socially and technologically, chatGPT is like the printing press. There is a lot of fear around it, but we shouldn’t close down access to it.

2. GPT is both underrated and overrated:

   1. It’s underrated if you’re not using it at least one hour per day.

   2. It’s overrated because it is not capable of developing new knowledge. It can predict but it cannot explain. If you ask it for an explanation, it is only providing a prediction of what the explanation should be based on the knowledge it was fed. That’s a subtle but important difference.

3. Some day we will achieve human capabilities including explaining and we will have to treat those things as humans.

EU AI Act To Target US Open Source Software

The EU has drafted legislation that limit access to language models (the printing press) to large companies only:

• EU AI ACT

I am scared of the fear mongering. With the draft EU laws - we would be left without a printing press in the EU.

End-of-the-World Bet