Ethan Mollick
Introduction: Three Sleepless Nights
- Instead, they act more like a person.
- You realize the world has changed in fundamental ways and that nobody can really tell you what the future will look like.
- He had venture capital scouts reaching out to him by the end of the next day.
- I could code in Python, a language I never learned.
- Early studies of the effects of AI have found it can often lead to a 20 to 80 percent improvement in productivity across a wide variety of job types, from coding to marketing.
- No one really knows where this is all heading, including me.
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🍏 Based on all these conversations and papers, I can assure you that there is nobody who has the complete picture of what AI means, and even the people making and using these systems do not understand their full implications.
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1: Creating Alien Minds
- For instance, they struggled with predicting “unknown unknowns,” or situations that humans intuitively understand but machines do not.
- The search for high-quality content for training material has become a major topic in AI development, since information-hungry AI companies are running out of good, free sources.
- AI can also learn biases, errors, and falsehoods from the data it sees.
- Each step removes a bit more noise based on the text description, until a realistic image emerges.
- For instance, GPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile on the bar examination, while GPT-3.5 managed only the 10th percentile.
- They shouldn’t be able to play chess or demonstrate empathy better than a human, but they do.
- Where AI works best, and where it fails, can be hard to know in advance.
2. Aligning the Alien
- The most famous illustration of this is the paper clip maximizing AI, proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom.
- What happens then is literally unimaginable to us.