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Simon Willison

I really like Drew's framework here dividing current AI use-cases into Gods (human replacement, which I think of as still mostly science fiction), Interns (assistants you delegate closely-reviewed tasks to, which is most of how I use LLMs today) and Cogs (smaller tools that can more reliably serve a single purpose, like Whisper for transcription) - more of my own notes on this here: simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/20/
note.computer/@dbreunig/113330

18 comments
Matt Campbell

@simon For the "gods" category, also check out @forrestbrazeal's excellent song "AGI (Artificial God Incarnate)": youtube.com/watch?v=1ZhhO7MGkn

Simon Willison

@matt @forrestbrazeal oh hot damn I've been working on a blog entry which tries to say what's in this song but in 10x more words and 1/10th as good youtube.com/watch?v=hrfEUZ0UvR

Matt Campbell

@simon You sure you linked to the right song? Have you gone through the kind of existential crisis portrayed in that song? I always saw you as being cautiously optimistic about AI, that it can be a useful tool if used well, but not making us redundant.

@forrestbrazeal

Simon Willison

@matt @forrestbrazeal oh I absolutely went through these 5 stages of grief, but I've been firmly in the 5th step for over a year at this point

When ChatGPT first came out, I think a lot of us went through about 5 stages of grief:

 1   Shock (how is a language model this good? what the actual ***?)

 2   Denial (it’ll never be as good at writing code / words / etc as me. look at these hallucinations! silly model)

  3  Anger (how dare they train their models on my creative work?)

  4  Depression (what’s left for me? Who even am I)

  5  Acceptance (this is the new world, AI isn’t going away, let’s figure out what that means for us)
Matt Campbell

@simon @forrestbrazeal I don't think I ever actually felt the anger. And I feel kind of guilty about that, because of course some people have decided to stop there and fight against AI, and they have such moral certainty about it.

Simon Willison

@matt @forrestbrazeal I've not felt the anger personally, because I've been releasing open source code for 20+ years so I already default to "I want people to be able to reuse my work as much as possible" - but I absolutely understand the people who ARE angry

If I was an artist and someone trained Stable Diffusion on my work without my permission and then started competing with me for commissions that used my own personal style I think I'd feel very differently about this all

Glyph

@simon @matt @forrestbrazeal I don’t feel like I am stuck in step 4, but I can’t get to step 5 because I do very much believe that (at least in their current incarnation) AI is very much going away. I am worried about the collateral damage that this particular dead tree is going to cause when it smashes into the rest of the ecosystem. E.g.: nvidia currently has a market cap of 11% of GDP, which I do not think is sustainable. But who on earth is going to get a positive ROI on ChatGPT at $20/mo?

Simon Willison

@glyph @matt @forrestbrazeal I expect there's going to be a substantial AI crash, but I don't think (most of) the tools I'm using right now will become unavailable to me - especially since I can run Llama 70B on my own laptop now

Matt Campbell

@simon About running models locally, I've experimented with that, but large context windows take up lots of RAM, right? Like, isn't it O(n^2) where n is the number of tokens? Or do you not depend on large context windows?

@glyph

Simon Willison

@matt @glyph the models I can run in my laptop today are leagues ahead of the models I ran on the exact same hardware a year ago - improvements in that space have been significant

This new trick from Microsoft looks like it could be a huge leap forward too - I've not dug into it properly yet though github.com/microsoft/BitNet

Jeff Triplett

@simon I have been struggling with terminology, so this is useful. That said, I'm not a fan of "interns" used like this. The context that you used it in felt more appropriate than a whole class of AI terminology that literally means to replace a useful class of workers and learning.

I have personally struggled with the term Agents for lack of a framework or way to use them outside of running a Python script.

Simon Willison

@webology my usual version is "weird intern" to help emphasize that it's really not a replacement for an actual human intern - but I do find the term useful in that it indicates the need for close supervision and some form of "coaching" in terms of prodding it in the right direction

I hate the term "agent", everyone seems to have a completely different idea of what it means, and often don't seem to realize that there's no single universal definition so nobody else understands what they mean

Jeff Triplett

@simon Knowing how tech works, I hate that the term Intern when used in AI is going to kill most internships or at least the paid ones.

"Supervised {AI Term}" would be better.

Same goes when someone deems a medical AI with "Nurse" which also feels like the wrong term.

I understand the "weird intern" terminology, but that felt more like you are asking weird questions, expecting that the result than the answers one gets are weird by default.

Simon Willison

@webology I think the reason I don't find the term as upsetting is that I'm not sold on the "AI means no more junior/intern roles" thing yet

I think it means no more not-AI-enhanced juniors, but I'm very excited to see what AI-enhanced juniors end up looking like

Maybe I'm completely out of touch and the intern/junior role has been extinguished already though

Jeff Triplett

@simon Overall, the numbers seem to have fallen off quite a bit this year. I lazily searched and linked the first one bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

but I have heard a half dozen Bloomburg articles (my preferred morning finance/business news via Echo) that have been reporting on it for a while.

I would be shocked if 2025 isn't much worse.

Simon Willison

@webology right, but is that because of AI, or is it because the tech companies all over-hired during the pandemic, had massive layoffs and as a result the market is flooded with experienced talent which makes the market for juniors really awful?

Jeff Triplett

@simon It's both, but 2025 will be more AI-driven than 2024 was. Now I hear at least once a week on podcasts like Marketing Against the Grain and whatever Greg Isenberg is one that Iterns are a waste of money over AI. So that's a trend you can calendar and we look at in a year and it will be more then norm.

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