Letters
How to Achieve Your Long-Term Goals: Make your projects add up to achievement by charting a path and gathering advice from mentors.
As we enter the new year, let’s view 2023 not as a single year, but as the first of more in which we will accomplish our long-term goals. Some results take a long time to achieve, and even though...
Letters
Should AI Moderate Social Media: Deciding which posts to show or hide is a human problem, not a tech problem.
What should be AI’s role in moderating the millions of messages posted on social media every day? The volume of messages means that automation is required. But the question of what is appropriate moderation versus inappropriate censorship lingers.
Letters
When Models are Confident — and Wrong: Language models like ChatGPT need a way to express degrees of confidence.
One of the dangers of large language models (LLMs) is that they can confidently make assertions that are blatantly false. This raises worries that they will flood the world with misinformation. If they could moderate their degree of confidence appropriately, they would be less likely to mislead.
Letters
AI, Privacy, and the Cloud: How One Cloud Provider Monitors AI Performance Remotely Without Risking Exposure of Private Data.
On Monday, the European Union fined Meta roughly $275 million for breaking its data privacy law. Even though Meta’s violation was not AI specific, the EU’s response is a reminder that we need to build AI systems that preserve user privacy...
Letters
What the AI Community Can Learn from the Galactica Incident: Meta released and quickly withdrew a demo of its Galactica language model. Here's what went wrong and how we can avoid It.
Last week, Facebook’s parent company Meta released a demo of Galactica, a large language model trained on 48 million scientific articles. Two days later, amid controversy regarding the model’s potential to generate false or misleading articles, the company withdrew it.
Letters
Why 8 Billion People on Earth Are Not Too Many: The growing global population brings more opportunities to make the world a better place.
The population of Earth officially reached 8 billion this week. Hooray! It’s hard to imagine what so many people are up to. While I hope that humanity can learn how to leave only gentle footprints on the planet, I’m excited about the creativity and inventiveness that a growing human population...
Letters
What to Do in a Tough Economy: How to Survive and Thrive Amid Economic Uncertainty
The economic downturn of the past six months has hit many individuals and companies hard, and I’ve written about the impact of rising interest rates on AI. The effects of high inflation, the Russian war in Ukraine, and an economic slowdown in China are rippling across the globe...
Letters
How AI Can Help Counteract Climate Change: It's Time to Consider Cooling the Earth By Atmospheric Aerosol Injection
A new report from UN Climate Change says that the world might be on track for 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a potentially catastrophic level of warming that’s far above the 1.5 °C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Letters
Prompt Engineering: Future of AI or Hack?
Is prompt engineering — the art of writing text prompts to get an AI system to generate the output you want — going to be a dominant user interface for AI? With the rise of text generators such as GPT-3 and Jurassic and image generators such as DALL·E...
Letters
How to Reduce Risk and Uncertainty in AI Projects
When I wrote recently about how to build a career in AI, several readers wrote to ask specifically about AI product management: the art and science of designing compelling AI products. I’ll share lessons I’ve learned about this here and in future letters.
Letters
Imposter Syndrome: Don't Let It Hold You Back
In this letter, I’d like to address the serious matter of newcomers to AI sometimes experiencing imposter syndrome, where someone — regardless of their success in the field — wonders if they’re a fraud and really belong in the AI community.
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