Letters
Last week, Facebook’s parent company Meta released a demo of Galactica, a large language model trained on 48 million scientific articles. Two days later, amid controversy regarding the model’s potential to generate false or misleading articles, the company withdrew it.
Letters
The population of Earth officially reached 8 billion this week. Hooray! It’s hard to imagine what so many people are up to. While I hope that humanity can learn how to leave only gentle footprints on the planet, I’m excited about the creativity and inventiveness that a growing human population...
Letters
The economic downturn of the past six months has hit many individuals and companies hard, and I’ve written about the impact of rising interest rates on AI. The effects of high inflation, the Russian war in Ukraine, and an economic slowdown in China are rippling across the globe...
Letters
A new report from UN Climate Change says that the world might be on track for 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a potentially catastrophic level of warming that’s far above the 1.5 °C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Letters
Each year, AI brings wondrous advances. But, as Halloween approaches and the veil lifts between the material and ghostly realms, we see that spirits take advantage of these developments at least as much as humans do.
Letters
Is prompt engineering — the art of writing text prompts to get an AI system to generate the output you want — going to be a dominant user interface for AI? With the rise of text generators such as GPT-3 and Jurassic and image generators such as DALL·E...
Letters
The rise of AI over the last decade has been powered by the increasing speed and decreasing cost of GPUs and other accelerator chips. How long will this continue? The past month saw several events that might affect how GPU prices evolve.
Letters
When I wrote recently about how to build a career in AI, several readers wrote to ask specifically about AI product management: the art and science of designing compelling AI products. I’ll share lessons I’ve learned about this here and in future letters.
Letters
In this letter, I’d like to address the serious matter of newcomers to AI sometimes experiencing imposter syndrome, where someone — regardless of their success in the field — wonders if they’re a fraud and really belong in the AI community.
Letters
Activities such as writing code and solving math problems are often perceived as purely intellectual pursuits. But this ignores the fact that they involve the mental equivalent of muscle memory.
Letters
Stable Diffusion, an image generation model that takes a text prompt and produces an image, was released a few weeks ago in a landmark event for AI. While similar programs can be used via API calls or a web user interface, Stable Diffusion can be freely downloaded and run on the user’s hardware.
Letters
I’m thrilled! Paywalled journals that block free access to scientific research are the bane of the academic community.