Letters
As we enter the new year, let’s view 2023 not as a single year, but as the first of more in which we will accomplish our long-term goals. Some results take a long time to achieve, and even though...
Letters
What should be AI’s role in moderating the millions of messages posted on social media every day? The volume of messages means that automation is required. But the question of what is appropriate moderation versus inappropriate censorship lingers.
Letters
One of the dangers of large language models (LLMs) is that they can confidently make assertions that are blatantly false. This raises worries that they will flood the world with misinformation. If they could moderate their degree of confidence appropriately, they would be less likely to mislead.
Letters
On Monday, the European Union fined Meta roughly $275 million for breaking its data privacy law. Even though Meta’s violation was not AI specific, the EU’s response is a reminder that we need to build AI systems that preserve user privacy...
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
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
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
Andrew Ng considers how inconsistent human decisions are, and how AI can reduce that inconsistency.
Letters
While working on Course 3 of the Machine Learning Specialization, which covers reinforcement learning, I was reflecting on how reinforcement learning algorithms are still quite finicky.
Letters
A Google Engineer recently announced he believes that a language model is sentient. I’m highly skeptical that any of today’s AI models are sentient. Some reporters, to their credit, also expressed skepticism.
Letters
One of the challenges of building an AI startup is setting customer expectations. Machine learning is a highly experiment-driven field. Until you’ve built something, it’s hard to predict how well it will work.
Letters
With the pandemic easing in the United States and Canada, I’ve been traveling more in the last two weeks. I spoke at TED 2022 in Vancouver and ScaleUp:AI in New York and attended a manufacturing conference in California.