New capabilities
ChatGPT — The Third Attractor — Courage in China — Some inner things
Hello, here’s the last TK3 for for this year as I must wrap up a number of things on the professional front, and prepare for the holiday break and related travels with the family. I’ll see where this little newsletter experiment goes next year, as I advance on my core ‘Alpine’ project, which I hope I’ll be able to dedicate more of my time to. I hope you’ll enjoy the holidays, and I’ll see you here in January — LJ
I.
The current thing
It’s probably hard to get anybody's attention this week given that the world seems entirely focused on ChatGPT, for good reason. Here are the pieces I read that answered the four main questions I had this week, in case this is of interest to you:
1. Where can I find a variety of views on the topic?
2. What's a deeper, most likely reliable take on the topic that takes into consideration the broader tech picture?
I found Ben Thompson’s “AI Homework” useful.
Commenting on the speed of its development and cascading impacts:
What has been fascinating to watch over the weekend is how those refinements have led to an explosion of interest in OpenAI’s capabilities and a burgeoning awareness of AI’s impending impact on society, despite the fact that the underlying model is the two-year old GPT-3.
Referring to former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman’s comments from another interview:
So the situation that we’re in now is the researchers have just raced ahead and they’ve delivered this bounty of new capabilities to the world in an accelerating way, they’re doing it every day. So we now have this capability overhang that’s just hanging out over the world and, bizarrely, entrepreneurs and product people have only just begun to digest these new capabilities and to ask the question, “What’s the product you can now build that you couldn’t build before that people really want to use?” I think we actually have a shortage.
3. How biased is ChatGPT?
A thread by David Rozado on the political orientation of ChatGPT
ChatGPT dialogues display substantial left-leaning and libertarian political bias
4. What are some of the broader, short-to-medium term ramifications we can already anticipate?
Tyler Cowen explores how it may affect the machinery of government.
Consider the regulatory process. In the US, there is typically a comment period before many new regulations take effect. To date, it has been presumed that human beings are making the comments. Yet by mobilizing ChatGPT, it is possible for interested parties to flood the system […]
ChatGPT seems to do best when there is a wide range of relevant and available texts to train from. In this regard, the law is a nearly an ideal subject. So it would not surprise me if the comment process, within the span of a year, is broken.
II.
Other things
I spent a lot of time listening and analyzing the audio and transcript of two long conversations by Rebel Wisdom with Daniel Schmachtenberger titled “In Search of the Third Attractor” (part one, part two) I've mentioned Daniel here before, and the topic of the conversation, broadly, is the meta-crisis.
I was interested to learn more about the significance of the protests in China, trying to understand what the ramifications. Here’s N.S. Lyons.:
I was also curious to know why there seemingly hasn't been a protest movement in Russia, so I found this thread:
Lastly, in beautiful San Fransisco — “Dad reveals horrific details of baby’s reported fentanyl overdose at S.F. playground”
A 10-month-old baby suffered an accidental fentanyl overdose Tuesday at a Marina district playground, the boy’s father told The Chronicle in an interview, a medical emergency that required paramedics to administer overdose-reversing medication Narcan.
III.
Inner things
Prior family commitments (my son’s hockey game) are preventing me from attending this live virtual event with David Whyte, titled “A single star in the night”. The event takes place this Saturday, December 10th (registration is $35).
In every human life there comes a time when we are asked to have faith in what the powerful, the invisible and the unspeakable can reveal to us. Out of that sweet, restful darkness we may catch the first glimpse of the new star we recognize we are just about to follow. This will be a time to look at the way we can all open the inner door to a much greater story than the one we tell ourselves at the surface.
Attend if you can, as I’m sure it will be, like most things David Whyte, extraordinarily nourishing.
I’m also looking forward to listening to Henry Shukman’s book “One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir”. Audible definitely recommended. (Read by the author, and the author has such a soothing voice he could be reading from a Maytag dishwasher operating manual and I’d still listen to it.)
Somehow I remembered this absolute gem of a podcast, circa 2015 by Love and Radio titled “The Living Room”.
Diane’s new neighbors across the way never shut their curtains, and that was the beginning of an intimate, but very one-sided relationship.
Thanks for reading through. I’ll see you in January.
I call them tickets because they opened a door in my mind and briefly turned me into an investigator, wanting to know more. Perhaps they will have the same effect on you.