I was peripherally aware that large language models have crossed a chasm in the last year or so, but I haven’t realized how large of a jump it was until I compared ChatGPT’s answer to my standard question: “How many lymphocytes are there in the human body?”.
Back in February of last year it took some effort to produce an over-inflated estimate. Today, I was served a well-reasoned and beautifuly formatted response after a single prompt. Sure, I have gotten better at writing prompts but the difference there is marginal. Not so marginal is the leap in usefulness and trustworthiness of the model, which went from being an overeager high school freshman to an all-star college senior.
And that is just the reasoning. Creating quick Word documents with tables and columns just the way I want them has become routine, even when/especially if I want to recreate a document from a badly scanned printout. My office document formatting skills are getting rusty and I couldn’t be happier for it.
In his Kefahuchi Tractt trilogy, M. John Harrison conjures up alien algorithms floating around the human environment, mostly helpful, sometimes not, motives unknown. Back in the early 2000s when the first novel came out I was wondering what on earth he was talking about but for better or worse we are now headed towards that world. Whether we are inching or hurling, that depends entirely on your point of view.
(↬Tyler Cowen)