So - I published a new presentation, on technology in 2021 and 2022: 'Three Steps to the Future'.
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Benedict Evans
@benedictevans
Trying to work out what's going on, and what happens next. Mostly tech.
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I have this problem every year. Short of custom-coding a bunch of open source JS modules together, there is no good way to embed slides.
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(Side note - it is kind of absurd that in 2020, embedding a google slide file is the only unshit way to embed a presentation)
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"All the news that's fit to print". I'm shocked that appears so far to have had exactly zero coverage of ChatGPT, surely the biggest tech innovation of the year. Big win for Twitter on this one. The examples curated here have been breathtaking.
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POV: You're a Senior Data Engineer at Twitter. Elon asks what you've done this week. You've done nothing.
Frantically, you open ChatGPT.
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Marc isn’t an author either. Seems to be a stock phrase?
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Plausible, almost entirely untrue
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Old: Half of my ad budget is wasted, but I don’t know which half
New: I don’t need half of my engineers, but which half?
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Beckett does MTV
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To be clear, I'm talking about the second sentence, which says "the reason they were good at X is that they were good at X" - this seems to be a common pattern
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I take it all back, this is extremely useful.
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I wonder why ChatGPT3 has such a strong pattern of rephrasing the question as an answer. (Also, none of the facts are are correct and the Ottoman Turks were literally the first people to use firearms in Europe, so LOL.)
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Automated ‘apologies’
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FYI
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It is kind of perfect that the Twitter thread on how Twitter was broken... is broken.
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I asked AI to render Wes Anderson's The Shining
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I think you will be able to see ChatGPT as a dip in the monthly productivity statistics
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We are proud to announce that Anduril raised $1.48 billion in our Series E funding. This new funding will enable us to accelerate R&D to bring new, cutting edge, autonomous defense capabilities to market & continue to mature and scale our current business lines.
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PSA: Why Hasn’t Sam Bankman-Fried Been Arrested Yet?
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Nothing racist in this story. No, not at all. Nothing to see. No problem at all. All fine.
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Applying to College, and Trying to Appear ‘Less Asian’ nytimes.com/2022/12/02/us/
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I asked ChatGPT3 to explain Sundance in the style of Abel Ferrera
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1) I'm working on something really exciting and looking for excellent engineers to join. Come build best-in-class products for a very early stage co that has the potential to transform a massive industry. Will share more live.
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Return half the price of one way. Airlines are so clever and so dumb.
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Ye is banned, Daily Stormer is not. This is why you you should have a team and a plan instead of running things on the CEO’s whims.
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Official
Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin has been reinstated to Twitter under Elon Musk’s new policies for the platform. The founder of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer had been banned from Twitter since 2013. trib.al/6RJv9sD
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Google search: "where is this in the library?"
Generative search: Ask the librarian a question. They've read every book and write you a page based on what they remembered & understood. Well? badly? Which books are in this library?
But I might want a book, not a librarian's answer
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"What are the current standings in the World Cup?" was search and has become a question. It will no longer be a link.
"Tron as imagined by Jodorowsky" was search and becomes generative...
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Thinking a bit more about generative search:
Some of my Google queries are questions, many are searches. And some are both, or could be either. If I want a hotel I would like in Lisbon, I use Google to Search for a manually curated list of expert recommendations. Which is that?
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Has anybody seen the actual paper this is based upon? These results are going to be very sensitive to the exact methodology.
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Hate speech on Twitter has soared since Musk's takeover.
From racial slurs tripling to a shocking increase in antisemitic and misogynistic tweets, Musk's @Twitter has become a safe space for hate.
Read more on our findings in @nytimes 
nytimes.com/2022/12/02/tec
nytimes.com/2022/12/02/tec10
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Sam Bankman-Fried has claimed in high-profile interviews that he was unaware of what was happening at Alameda Research.
@ChaseWithorn, who oversees billionaire reporting at @Forbes, has receipts from the FTX founder that punch holes in that narrative.
forbes.com/sites/chasewit
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Cashing in my dogecoin to bet on Japan v Soth Korea in the final
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I’m sorry, I simply cannot be cynical about a technology that can accomplish this.
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It’s amazing. But how do we understand what it’s doing and how it works? Look for cracks and patterns in how it breaks, perhaps. Is it better at being right or better at being fluent?
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Google uses internet users as a collective mechanical turk - it indexes our behaviour to understand the internet. FB, YT or Tiktok do the same on their own networks. Perhaps Generative ML will do this with 'all text ever written' or 'all images ever created'
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Like wikipedia, this is a vast mechanical turk - it’s mined the internet, so what did the humans on the internet write? Some parts might be better than others…
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On the other hand, both of these are D grade at best. The first factual assertion in each is just wrong…
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Second try is better, but again, this is talking *around* the question rather than answering it.
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This SOUNDS like a great answer. But…
The first paragraph is circular. The second I think is half true. And the third is wrong and confuses cause and effect.
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One thing that is nagging at me is that in all the incredible GPT work I’m seeing, it feels like its ability to sound convincing might be outpacing its ability to be right. Seems worrisome.
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