OpenAI: “ChatGPT consumer usage is largely about getting everyday tasks done. Three-quarters of conversations focus on practical guidance, seeking information, and writing—with writing being the most common work task, while coding and self-expression remain niche activities. Patterns of use can also be thought of in terms of Asking, Doing, and Expressing. About half of messages (49%) are “Asking,” a growing and highly rated category that shows people value ChatGPT most as an advisor rather than only for task completion. Doing (40% of usage, including about one third of use for work) encompasses task-oriented interactions such as drafting text, planning, or programming, where the model is enlisted to generate outputs or complete practical work. Expressing (11% of usage) captures uses that are neither asking nor doing, usually involving personal reflection, exploration, and play.”
FT: “This looming crisis creates a rare opportunity to rethink the way the internet is funded and come up with a better solution. That solution could make use of AI’s own construction. While a chatbot’s output may seem like an opaque mash-up of its sources, we in fact know how to quantify exactly how much each source contributed. The key to this is the algorithm that AI systems are built on: backpropagation, known colloquially as backprop. Backprop was designed to solve what we in AI call the credit assignment problem. When a network that processes data using billions of parameters sees an image of a dog and says that it’s a cat, we need to know how much each parameter must be changed so that it will do better next time. Backprop’s answer is to wiggle each one just a little, see how the output changes and set the parameter to a new improved value. This system could also be used to solve a different assignment problem: calculating who should be paid when someone uses AI.”
Eric Yuan shares tips to make meetings more productive: “No. 1, you need to prepare: who to invite, who not to invite and a very clear agenda. The second thing, make sure everyone can be themselves. Don’t be too nice, too polite. In a Zoom call, people tend to be so nice. It’s becoming too formal. It’s OK to interrupt a little bit. And after the meeting, you need to have some follow-up.”
Bret Taylor: “One of the things that we do differently at Sierra from traditional software companies is we charge only for outcomes. So for most of our customers, that means when the AI agent autonomously resolves the case that the customer called about or chatted in about, there’s a fee for that. If the AI agent has to transfer to a real person, it’s free. We really like this as a business model, and I think it will become the standard business model for agents because the word “agent” comes from the word “agency,” and the principle of it implies some degree of autonomy. I think most of the most sophisticated agents will actually start and complete a task, whether it’s generating a new lead for your sales team or solving a customer service inquiry or doing a legal analysis for an antitrust review, whatever it might be.”
