Viewing profile — simonmesmith

Wholeheartedly agree. And I think the problem has gotten worse for a few reasons. One is that if you’re interested in a subject, you likely follow it closely online, so reading a b…

Probably the two most telling phrases: “Almost all scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C require novel CDR.” “Virtually all current CDR (99.9% or 2 GtCO₂ per year) comes fro…

One thing that always confuses me with unemployment figures is that they don’t account for labor force participation. People who drop out of the workforce and stop looking for work…

Good ideas posted in response to this. Perhaps we need to try just rearranging images of specific things. Like, rearrange a bird and see if it can figure out that. Above I jumbled …

It strikes me that this opens or at least expands an attack vector for prompt injection. Humans might overlook a scrambled block of text that GPT-4 will interpret and then execute.…

Just a heads-up that there isn’t much new in here if you’ve been following the saga on Twitter and have seen Brockman’s and Swisher’s tweets and are aware of the other recent depar…

I’m interested to see this happen but “as soon as” approximately June 2024 doesn’t feel that soon. It’s about as far from today as today is from the launch of GPT-4. Think of every…

There are so many stories of these falls from grace. I remember when Theranos, WeWork, FTX, etc., were media darlings. People rush to emulate their strategy, leaders, and culture. …

Not quite that plot, but Change Agent by Daniel Suarez is about genetically engineered humans and includes a “right-hand man” with that trait who was originally designed to withsta…

Looks like the soap uses salicylic acid, glycolic acid, and tretinoin: https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/10/11/a-ninth-grader-from... Those ingredients looked familiar to me from …

Having worked on this problem in biology, I think one of the challenges you’ll find is that the knowledge graph will be extremely context-dependent and biased towards highly probab…

It says participants were only able to achieve a “12% reduction in calorie intake.” That’s a reduction of 240 calories a day on a 2,000 calorie diet. The target for the two major m…

N = 1, but I’ve been taking 1700mg of metformin (in two split doses of 850mg) for five years. I was able to get the prescription from my doctor by presenting evidence and the ratio…

From some experience I've had with this: * Is that the right chunk size? How much of a chunk might contain the relevant information? Is it better for your use case to chunk by sent…

Yeah, but I wonder if it’s even more powerful to say, “we asked the world’s most powerful AI and it recommended that we lay off 20% of our staff, while ensuring we treated them all…

Having been a consultant, what strikes me about this is the next, to me seemingly obvious question: What if you just removed the consultants entirely and just had GPT-4 do the work…

Preprint from August: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08155 Docs: https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/docs/Research/ Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/autogen Installs via pip: pip ins…

So, some of the findings in relation to the psychology of AI fact-checking they found may be valid and interesting (e.g. how it increases confidence, even in false information when…

Looks like they posted this video a few days ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJOA5IDaL5g Video seems focused on moving boxes. Perhaps that’s the entry point for them in the mark…

But if you anticipate that GPT-5 will have X capabilities that will negate the need for you to learn Y intermediate tools, so you can instead focus on Z, you will have avoided wast…

For sure. But would you really be a year behind? I don’t think it’s necessarily so. For example, if GPT-5 can write a full, deployable application from a text prompt with no errors…

In economics, deflation causes people to delay spending, expecting future prices to be lower. I find myself experiencing a similar phenomenon with technological advancement, especi…

Agreed, but I’m not just talking about engineers. From conversations I’ve had, I think it’s more a question of what will be possible with generative AI over the next year, and whet…

For sure. I’ve also read about companies now, like consultancies, retaining people despite not having enough work, with the expectation that work will pick up in future. So there a…

I think that's a great point. Though now we need to determine whether the result is a company that wouldn't otherwise exist, or a company that would exist but with lower profit mar…