There was some excitement online recently around “Freysa”, a contest which combined large language models (LLMs) with some sort of blockchain technology. The basic idea was for participants to interact with an LLM to try to get it to do a thing that it had been instructed not to do. The trick was that the cost of each attempt increased after every submission (up to some maximum), as did the potential reward.
Somewhere on social media I encountered the recent story that the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, (a large, avowedly centrist think tank created by Tony Blair), put out a report estimating the potential impact of AI on jobs in the public service, but that ironically, they arrived at their estimates by basically just asking GPT-4. While this does have a certain kind of poetry to it, it’s not exactly what we think of as a reputable methodology.1
A whole genre of podcasts seems to have emerged recently, taking the shape of interviews with CEOs of AI companies, or similar. Although I have not listened to many of these, they mostly seem to be pretty abysmal, both because of the amount of hype they involve, and due to the lack of meaningful specifics.
That being said, of the ones I’ve heard, the recent interview with Dario Amodei of Anthropic on the Ezra Klein Show seems to me to be vastly better than the average. In part, this is because Klein is a smart, curious, and well informed interviewer, who asks a lot of the right questions, and pushes for details when responses get too mushy. In this case, it also helps that Amodei seems much more straightforwardly honest about limitations than most spokespeople in similar positions.
A lot of this is still unresolved in my mind, but I think there is something interesting happening at the intersection of generative AI, art, style, and entertainment. Rather than letting it gestate until more fully formed, I figured I’d just post some preliminary thoughts and come back to this at some later date.
The main reason I’m thinking about this now is the ongoing debate about how generative AI will impact creative fields, such as writing and design (as well as white collar jobs more broadly). Arguably there have already been some pretty dramatic effects, such as the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld being suddenly overwhelmed by spammy submissions. At the same time, it’s hard to know the extent to which these disruptions may end up being transient phenomena that broader systems will adapt to.