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Elsewhere: Twitter Bot Wars & GPT-4's True Power

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Elsewhere: Twitter Bot Wars & GPT-4's True Power

Posts I did in other venues on topics of interest to my newsletter audience.

Jon Stokes
Apr 1, 2023
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Elsewhere: Twitter Bot Wars & GPT-4's True Power

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I hate to be like “web3 fixes this” about anything in 2023, not because it’s not true but because nobody wants to read that now that they’ve either lost their shirt in crypto or are feeling smug about others having lost their shirts in crypto.

But still, when Musk started tweeting about how the future of social media is paid subscriptions because botnet operators will be priced out, I had to say something. Crypto has been working on this proof-of-human problem for a long time now, and there are shipping solutions.

You can read my argument in

RETURN
, or in Meteor, a new web3-focused publication where my RETURN piece was reprinted.

RETURN
Musk Is Right About AI Bot Swarms, But We Can Fix Social Without Users Paying
Elon Musk has been going viral with tweets suggesting that the future of social media is paid because otherwise, it’ll all just be bots…
Read more
6 months ago · 5 likes · Jon Stokes

The other piece I did this week outside this newsletter was a post for

Pirate Wires
where I look into the issue of GPT-4’s missing parameter count and what it might tell us about the true power that OpenAI is holding back:

Pirate Wires
With GPT-4, OpenAI Is Deliberately Slow Walking To AGI
Read more
6 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Jon Stokes

This piece is a follow-up to my most recent post on the nascent AI culture wars, and it picks up where that piece’s postscript left off. A sample:

Here’s my thesis: The performance numbers published in the GPT-4 technical report aren’t really like normal benchmarks of a new, leading-edge technical product, where a company builds the highest-performing version it can and then releases benchmarks as an indicator of success and market dominance. Rather, these numbers were selected in advance by the OpenAI team as numbers the public could handle, and that wouldn’t be too disruptive for society. They said, in essence, “for GPT-4, we will release a model with these specific scores and no higher. That way, everyone can get used to this level of performance before we dial it up another notch with the next version.”

… So based on this paragraph alone, we should look at GPT-4’s benchmark performance as a pre-selected outcome. They looked at a point on their parameters vs. performance curves and said, “Let’s turn the scaling dial so that GPT-4 lands… there! That’s about what we estimate society will be ready for when we launch this in a few months.”

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter then you’re going to want to read the whole thing because it’s kind of important and relevant to the whole issue of how fast all of this is going.

Finally, I made substantial editorial contributions to this large

RETURN
explainer on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which I encourage you to check out if you're interested in crypto, money, and related issues:

RETURN
CBDCs In Their Own Words: Technocrats Blackpill Us On The Future Of Money
In financial circles, CBDCs—or Central Bank Digital Currencies—are being talked about as an inevitability. Twenty-nine countries have already implemented CBDCs or pilot programs, including China, India, Nigeria, Jamaica, the Bahamas, UAE, Australia, Singapore, and Thailand, with…
Read more
6 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Return

Loose threads

I’m not sure how many of you follow me on the bird site, so here’s a poll asking whether periodic roundups of some of my more substantial threads are worth doing in this newsletter.

Loading...

So with this first thread, I kinda lost my mind a bit… I signed up for Midjourney and just couldn’t stop with this silliness.

Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
I finally ponied up for Midjourney access. It's going about like you'd expect.
Image
4:49 PM ∙ Mar 24, 2023
44Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
The thing that's not widely appreciated enough about programmer-oriented advances like this, is that they increase the second derivate -- the rate of change of the rate of change. All the new ML-powered coding tools are 2nd derivative maximizers. 🚀🚀🚀
Twitter avatar for @AlphaSignalAI
Lior⚡ @AlphaSignalAI
JUST IN: @stripe partners up with @OpenAI to enhance their documentation: GPT-powered Stripe Docs. I believe this will quickly become a standard. https://t.co/4mCfoWPExu
3:33 PM ∙ Mar 15, 2023
52Likes7Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
He's describing how OpenAI'S ChatGPT plugins integrate with your service. You just describe what your API does in English, and OpenAI's model figures out how to call it and make it work with ChatGPT.
Twitter avatar for @mitchellh
Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh
For those who aren't aware: you write an OpenAPI manifest for your API, use human language descriptions for everything, and that's it. You let the model figure out how to auth, chain calls, process data in between, format it for viewing, etc. There's absolutely zero glue code.
1:48 AM ∙ Mar 24, 2023
31Likes4Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
Me: Well grandson, when I was your age, humans wrote the software. GS: Oh wow? How was that even possible? Me: It kinda wasn’t possible. Software was just terrible. Nearly all of it was garbage. If AI hadn’t arrived in time, software would’ve killed us. GS: We survived an… https://t.co/82tNI4WVWT
9:38 PM ∙ Mar 28, 2023
127Likes9Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
The lightning storm of awesome (jonstokes.com/p/i-say-this-u…) strikes again. This but for all forms of electronically mediated symbol manipulation labor, and in a very compressed timeframe. And then in a slightly more extended timeframe, for all forms of labor.
Twitter avatar for @AutismCapital
Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital
This will continue to be a very common story moving forward. The fastest to accept, process grief, and evolve, will thrive. https://t.co/VwvKAARiyN
5:41 PM ∙ Mar 29, 2023
25Likes5Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
People are pattern-matching the current AI hype to past hype cycles. This is an error. I've lived & worked through all the hype cycles back to the dotcom boom/bust, & AI has a quality that sets it apart from all the others: the sense of crisis.
1:58 PM ∙ Mar 30, 2023
158Likes12Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jonst0kes
jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes
Was recently talking to an HFT guy who does cycle-by-cycle optimization in C++, & I realized there are whole pools of untapped code optimization talent in our civilization that can & will be shifted to the emerging market for inference & training optimization. Gonna be wild.
Twitter avatar for @JustineTunney
Justine Tunney @JustineTunney
Yesterday my changes to the LLaMA C++ file format were approved. Here's how folks in the community have been reacting to my work. https://t.co/cLzg19n81f https://t.co/5gcrVp8jvn
8:58 PM ∙ Mar 31, 2023
29Likes3Retweets

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Elsewhere: Twitter Bot Wars & GPT-4's True Power

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Elsewhere: Twitter Bot Wars & GPT-4's True Power

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George Menyhei
Writes A Grain of Paprika
Apr 1·edited Apr 1Liked by Jon Stokes

I came across the ReAct pattern:

https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern

https://interconnected.org/home/2023/03/16/singularity

Copied and pasted content from this article to GPT-4 to explain it, had it play with me (in the browser, where I'm the intermediary), and now I'm making it write a Javascript that will automate my intermediary job (doing basic math).

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Leo Abstract
Apr 1Liked by Jon Stokes

The piece on pirate wires was oddly chilling. Up until earlier today I just laughed about AI X-risk, but there's something about how you describe Altman's caution that gives me an actually bad feeling for the first time. I'm hoping this is just an artifact of the piece being well written.

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