simonmesmith

7 ms·

1.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. And I think the problem has gotten worse for a few reasons. One is that if you’re interested in a subject, you likely follow it closely online, so reading a book-length treatment feels like learning a lot of stuff you
2.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Probably the two most telling phrases: “Almost all scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C require novel CDR.” “Virtually all current CDR (99.9% or 2 GtCO₂ per year) comes from conventional management of land, primarily via afforestati
3.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
One thing that always confuses me with unemployment figures is that they don’t account for labor force participation. People who drop out of the workforce and stop looking for work no longer count towards the unemployment rate. Theoreticall
4.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Good ideas posted in response to this. Perhaps we need to try just rearranging images of specific things. Like, rearrange a bird and see if it can figure out that. Above I jumbled up everything and that’s different than what they did with t
5.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
It strikes me that this opens or at least expands an attack vector for prompt injection. Humans might overlook a scrambled block of text that GPT-4 will interpret and then execute. Also, I was curious about whether this would also work with
6.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Just a heads-up that there isn’t much new in here if you’ve been following the saga on Twitter and have seen Brockman’s and Swisher’s tweets and are aware of the other recent departures. It’s mainly a summary of tweets. Not criticizing, jus
7.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
I’m interested to see this happen but “as soon as” approximately June 2024 doesn’t feel that soon. It’s about as far from today as today is from the launch of GPT-4. Think of everything that’s happened since then. And things only seem to be
8.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
There are so many stories of these falls from grace. I remember when Theranos, WeWork, FTX, etc., were media darlings. People rush to emulate their strategy, leaders, and culture. Then the companies unravel or performance suffers and everyo
9.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Not quite that plot, but Change Agent by Daniel Suarez is about genetically engineered humans and includes a “right-hand man” with that trait who was originally designed to withstand epidemics, etc., that might harm normal humans. Link: ht
10.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Looks like the soap uses salicylic acid, glycolic acid, and tretinoin: https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/10/11/a-ninth-grader-from... Those ingredients looked familiar to me from work I’ve done with skin hea
11.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Having worked on this problem in biology, I think one of the challenges you’ll find is that the knowledge graph will be extremely context-dependent and biased towards highly probable nodes and edges. For example, if you ask an LLM to create
12.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
It says participants were only able to achieve a “12% reduction in calorie intake.” That’s a reduction of 240 calories a day on a 2,000 calorie diet. The target for the two major monkey studies (that I know of) to date was a 30% reduction.
13.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
N = 1, but I’ve been taking 1700mg of metformin (in two split doses of 850mg) for five years. I was able to get the prescription from my doctor by presenting evidence and the rationale and design for the TAME trial. He was comfortable with
14.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
From some experience I've had with this: * Is that the right chunk size? How much of a chunk might contain the relevant information? Is it better for your use case to chunk by sentence? I've done RAG with document chunks, sentence
15.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Yeah, but I wonder if it’s even more powerful to say, “we asked the world’s most powerful AI and it recommended that we lay off 20% of our staff, while ensuring we treated them all fairly.”
16.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Having been a consultant, what strikes me about this is the next, to me seemingly obvious question: What if you just removed the consultants entirely and just had GPT-4 do the work directly for the client? If you’re a client and need a cons
17.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Preprint from August: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08155 Docs: https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/docs/Research/ Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/autogen Installs
18.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
So, some of the findings in relation to the psychology of AI fact-checking they found may be valid and interesting (e.g. how it increases confidence, even in false information when incorrect). But their methodology to me seems quite flawed:
19.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Looks like they posted this video a few days ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJOA5IDaL5g Video seems focused on moving boxes. Perhaps that’s the entry point for them in the market. This said, they also show the robot mov
20.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
But if you anticipate that GPT-5 will have X capabilities that will negate the need for you to learn Y intermediate tools, so you can instead focus on Z, you will have avoided wasting effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Like, if I
21.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
For sure. But would you really be a year behind? I don’t think it’s necessarily so. For example, if GPT-5 can write a full, deployable application from a text prompt with no errors, is it worth trying to hack something like AutoGPT to do it
22.
Ask HN: Does “Effort Deflation” Demotivate? Why Not Wait for Ever Easier Tech?
3 points by simonmesmith 3y ago|7 comments
23.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Agreed, but I’m not just talking about engineers. From conversations I’ve had, I think it’s more a question of what will be possible with generative AI over the next year, and whether that uncertainty makes it prudent to hold headcount stea
24.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
For sure. I’ve also read about companies now, like consultancies, retaining people despite not having enough work, with the expectation that work will pick up in future. So there are many complicating factors.
25.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
I think that's a great point. Though now we need to determine whether the result is a company that wouldn't otherwise exist, or a company that would exist but with lower profit margins. Also, would be good to know if this new comp
26.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
Any discussion of it at all at your company?
27.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
I'm curious to know what you've tried it for, and whether you've tried GPT-3.5 or GPT-4.
28.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
So in this case, it's negation of 2-3 hires, and likely negation of using freelancers as well. I'm curious to know which LLMs you're relying on for which tasks.
29.
Ask HN: ChatGPT’s Impact on Headcount – What’s Your Experience?
20 points by simonmesmith 3y ago|38 comments
30.
by simonmesmith 3y ago
This is anecdotal, but from conversations I’ve had it seems that at least some companies are realizing productivity gains from ChatGPT and similar tools but not yet firing people, opting instead to shrink headcount via attrition and non-rep

More ›