Hey friend,

The hype is strong around GPT-4.

• If you want to develop websites and games, coding is no barrier. GPT-4 can take in your instructions and spit out the final product (source).
• Make thousands in hours using GPT (source).

Of course, all these claims are sensationalized bullshit.

This is a race to the bottom of the stem cell (a term I learned from The Undivided Attention podcast). A way to exploit lowest human instincts to garner publicity on social media.

But hype aside, there is something very uncanny about the most recent generation of AI models.

In the GTP-4 release stream Greg Brockman showed two amazing applications:

• developing a working Discord ChatBot (GPT-4 had to parse Discord API documentation for some of the functionality)
• calculating tax liabilities for a relatively complex situation by relying on fed in tax code

And the progress in Generative Art is equally stunning.

Ethan Mollick @emollick Text-generating AI isn't the only type of AI improving massively. Midjourney just updated today, and the level of expertise to make good images keeps dropping Six months of an "otter using wifi on an airplane," first try in: 🦦Midjourney v5 (today) 🦦v4 (November) 🦦v3 (October) pic.twitter.com/a3T8S7erBI March 16th 2023 364 Retweets 2,905 Likes

Or take a look at these generated shoe ads below.

Ethan Mollick @emollick The thing that blows my mind about this is that I don't have to do anything: I just ask for a shoe ad with Queen Elizabeth (and specify commercial photography), and I get the person, shoe style, posing, clothes, everything. 👟Madame Curie 👟Montezuma 👟Hammurabi 👟Eric the Red pic.twitter.com/JORDvJMKOJ Ethan Mollick @emollick Midjourney presents historic sneaker collections: 👟Queen Elizabeth 👟Mansa Musa 👟Ghengis Khan 👟Socrates pic.twitter.com/niGxq6RtER March 17th 2023 5 Retweets 85 Likes

To be honest, I feel caught off guard.

A quality threshold has been crossed that I didn't expect AI to cross anytime soon.

And I suspect I understand why I feel surprised.

Our human mind evolved to extrapolate from data linearly.

If we found 5 mushrooms in this area of the forest this year, we can expect there to be 6 or 7 mushrooms next year, should the weather be particularly good.

We don't expect to find 13 or 36 mushrooms there.

GPT-2 was fun and impressive. It could write coherent short stories about unicorns.

GPT-4 should write just slightly better stories.

And yet a whole new set of capabilities have been unlocked!

To understand what is happening, we need to take a look at a slide from Jeremy Howard's TED talk from 8 years ago.

The line for "Computer Performance" is self-accelerating, the pace builds on itself. It is exponential.

This is the reality I have missed.

So what am I doing about all this now?

First and foremost, I want to spend more time with this cutting edge technology. To learn how to integrate it into my life.

To learn to code with it.

That is the best way to future-proof myself.

Sure, I could go back to studying transformers. Or stable diffusion.

But the ground-breaking applications and functionality live at the top of the stack.

You want to become an expert F1 driver and for that you don't need to understand exactly how the engine works. You need to understand what it can do and its limitations.

And be able to squeeze its capabilities to the limits.

This is a scary reality for many of us in tech. What good is my understanding of how BatchNorm works if a teenager who has been using the OpenAI API for months now can run circles around me when it comes to the quality of output she can generate?

But I welcome this reality. This is the great democratization of AI.

In 2012 you had to be an expert coder to leverage the GPU.

In 2017 you only needed a year of programming experience to be able to implement SOTA models thanks to Keras and later PyTorch.

And now all you need is to be able to use natural language and think.

I am not bitter. I am just sad I missed this reality, that these models have so much potential. That I didn't start to capitalize on this trend earlier.

But I welcome this new technology.

And will do my best to not miss the boat on this paradigm change.

My favorite things ❤️

📺 GTC is right around the corner - ...and with it the most amazing keynote in all of tech will be aired in just a couple of hours! I plan to watch it when I wake up tomorrow -- you can register for the conference here if you haven't done so already.

🤖🧙‍♂️ The one chatbot to rule them all - I only started to use ChatGPT+ but I am blown by the experience! Yes, I know how to program. But what does that even mean? There is still a lot of friction in learning to use new APIs. Programming using a new framework IS PAINFUL AND TEDIOUS. The fact that I can now ask questions to an extremely knowledgeable apprentice, or tell it to do stuff for me, changes everything. I haven't had that much fun programming in ages! Just hoping this feeling sticks around for a while 🤞

My new video 📺

No video this week! These videos take SO... MUCH... EFFORT... But that is okay. Instead, may I interest you in this Twitter thread detailing my experience with using GPT-4 to work on a small project.

Maybe it can serve as a source of inspiration for how you could start using it in your work?

Radek Osmulski 🇺🇦 @radekosmulski Programming has changed forever 😳 Today I used GPT-4 for the first time and I can't imagine coding without it ever again. Here is the project I worked on: March 17th 2023 76 Retweets 609 Likes

Quote of the Week ✍️

GPT-4 when prompted with the following: "In a single sentence, what do you have to say to people afraid you will take their jobs?"

It gets what so many people do not.