374: My Thoughts on OpenAI's Weird Deal with Microsoft, Amazon Buy With Prime, Nvidia & China, and Flexport

"make everything that came before look like a toy."

 Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time. —Linus Torvalds

🏦🤔 To appear impressive to customers and competitors, banks used to build massive marble buildings with Roman columns.

Today, digital businesses build... armies of engineers?

🧠💭 I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that what we are is largely defined by our memories. They shape our identity, our understanding of the world, and our sense of self.

This is why brain injuries that affect memory or diseases like Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia are so devastating.

But if you combine that fact with the other undeniable truth that human memory is fallible, fuzzy, selective, biased, fragmentary, decaying, ephemeral, contextual, distorted, malleable, dynamic, colored by emotion, re-written every time we remember so it drifts over time, and generally untrustworthy, what do you get? 🤔 😬

🔪👩🏼‍🍳 It’s kind of a side-quest when it comes to learning about kitchen knives, but having a good cutting board will make your life better.

I’ll have to upgrade mine at some point — I think it would be nice to have a large wood one where I don’t constantly run out of real estate.

If you have a *glass* cutting board (😩), consider this an intervention:

🤖✍️ Ethan Mollick has good advice on how to get more out of ChatGPT (and other language models) by remembering prompt engineering lessons from visual generative AI:

Because ChatGPT often acts like a helpful human, we get lured into thinking it is one. [...]

Since AI image generators are not as verbose as ChatGPT, people using them have learned they need to spend time doing “prompt engineering:” editing and playing with prompts to come up with the results they want. These prompts can get very elaborate, and can often seem abstract, or almost poetic. [...]

between the human-like nature of chat and the fact that written material is harder to immediately evaluate, many people tend to avoid explicit prompt construction in ChatGPT. But that is a mistake! More elaborate and specific prompts work better.

Don’t ask it to write an essay about how human error causes catastrophes. The AI will come up with a boring and straightforward piece that does the minimum possible to satisfy your simple demand. Instead, remember you are the expert and the AI is a tool to help you write. You should push it in the direction you want. For example, provide clear bullet points to your argument: write an essay with the following points: -Humans are prone to error -Most errors are not that important -In complex systems, some errors are catastrophic -Catastrophes cannot be avoided

But even these results are much less interesting than a more complicated prompt: write an essay with the following points. use an academic tone. use at least one clear example. make it concise. write for a well-informed audience. use a style like the New Yorker. make it at least 7 paragraphs. vary the language in each one. end with an ominous note. -Humans are prone to error -Most errors are not that important -In complex systems, some errors are catastrophic -Catastrophes cannot be avoided

This makes a ton of sense and has unlocked some interesting interactions with ChatGPT where I let go of the “chatbot” idea and instead used more of my intuition developed playing with visual generative AIs.

🥶☃️🧤🧦 Ever wondered how people living in places like Norway and Canada make it through the winter? Outer shells, insulating layers, base layers, all that stuff…

Here’s some advice on how to stay warm and get to enjoy some quality hiking during the cold season:

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🤖 💰💰💰OpenAI’s Weird Deal with Microsoft 🤔🕵️‍♂️