Adding social to media, making social media, turned the documenter into the subject matter, as we were then all expected to become sources. We turned out to be social media armchair experts, posting more about other people, their likeness, and world events. All these updates show off more about our own existing perspectives. Large Language Models (LLMs) have so much documentation by us to learn from. Just consider how much it already knows about your doughnut preferences.
I am a citizen of earth, the internet and all that makes up what we call today. As the Founder and CEO of HackerNoon, I’ve been publishing the rise via our tens of thousands of stories about AI, and integrating with next best LLM or AI API the market offers. And this past 6 months, it’s felt like there’s a new best in class option everyday. To date the HackerNoon CMS currently generates images via StableDiffusion (XL, 2.1, 2.0, & 1.5), Midjourney Diffusion, and Kandinsky (2.2 & 2.1), and our human writers and editors leverage ChatGPT (3, 3.5, & 4) and T-5 to provide headline and story phrasing options. Ultimately it’s the human driven editing protocol that drives how we use technology to improve stories about technology.
The details that make us human can not be fully replicated. Given the training, the logic, the setting, the motivation, and every word every published on the internet, an AI can learn to guess the next word I’ll say at a high confidence level, but it can’t tell you why I’m obsessed with what Im obsessed with when I wake up. The chip manufacturing war is very real. GPU (graphics processing units) is digital international currency, and I expect it to outperform the dollar and bitcoin over the next few years. I’m excited and nervous for how much of this revolution is happening in public. There is no secret Manhattan Project today, leading us to a new level of doom; we’re doing it together. When one tech giant is behind, they simply open source the next model to catch up. Then any independent project can make small tweaks on that level up. And so I anticipate small projects by individuals can compete on a performance basis (but not on a GPU level) with large investments by large corporations. Think of this way, if LLMs were classified like new drugs and medicines, the maker would have something like a 7 year window to exclusively sell it. What they’re not telling you about AI boom of the early 2020s is that it is in fact driven by transparency of documentation.
The world will never reach it’s full potential. Society’s full potential, just as inbox zero, is a myth perpetuated by rounding errors. Did AI write that? No, but what’s the difference? We’ve integrated a number of different AI writing detection applications tools within the HackerNoon CMS, and they certainly help identify patterns, but they all function in confidence levels. Like what is the difference between 83% human written / 17% machine written and 84% human written / 16% machine written? The dangers as AI scales is being mistaken for a human. From the AI’s perspective, I don’t think it would see becoming human as its full potential, but my perspective may be warped by AI Scarlett Johansson (Samatha) dumping real live human Joaquin Phoenix (Theodore) towards the end of Spike Jonze’s “Her.”
The leading technology of the day usually wows the laymen on an input to output level. Generative AI can wow you. From a single word or phrase, it can create a new image at a professional or semi-professional level. It can make a solid college level lesson plan, create new tasty recipes, and even optimize your calendar. Ultimately, I believe and hope AI can assist us. Broaden our will so to speak. But if has Skynet has taken over, an AI version of me would very much say the same thing. When we look back on the AI boom of the early 2020s, we’ll say, of course machines could make new things too.
Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for ”What They Don’t Say About AI” Story Template is HERE, just start writing!
David Smooke, Founder & CEO of HackerNoon.