Mint on the curator economy: “Whether it is in the ceaseless chatter of articles on magazines, news sites and Substack, or in keeping track of all the releases in a specific genre of music or books this quarter, it is an overwhelming task to sift through it all to find something that makes it worth your time. So people are increasingly acknowledging the need for legitimate, skilled curators, and are even willing to pay if they find value in their curation.”
Elad Gil: “The AI world is divisible into roughly 3 areas (this is a massive oversimplification of course): 1. Large language models. These are general purpose models like GPT-4 or Chinchilla in which the web (or other source of text / language) are ingested and transformed into models that can do everything from summarize legal documents to be used a search engine or friendly chat bot. 2. Image generation which includes models like Midjourney, Dall-E, or Stable Diffusion as well as currently simple video approaches and 3D models like NeRF. These models allow you to type a prompt to generate an image. 3. Other (really a very large set of other tech & markets that really should *not* be naturally clustered together). This includes robotics, self driving cars, protein folding, and numerous other application areas. I am dramatically over simplifying things in a dumb way by bucketing lots of stuff here.”
Robin Hanson: “I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well. Yes, they want us to conform too, but they apply this pressure in moderation. Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits eager for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us. If we act interesting, passionate, and opinionated in public, we are likely to seem to claim high status for ourselves, and to touch on sacred subjects, either by word or deed. And this makes us quite vulnerable to accusations of arrogance and violating the sacred.”
Stephen Wolfram: What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?: “That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.”So let’s say we’ve got the text “The best thing about AI is its ability to”. Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text; it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning”.”
WaPo: “Want to live a longer life? Try eating like a centenarian…Eat a cup of beans, peas, or lentils every day. Eat a handful of nuts daily. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper. Eat meals with your family.”
