This is an entertaining snapshot of ChatGPT a week odd in.
It suffers from what I have found a recurring issue on Stratechery, a failure to account for the cognitive error around our collective inability to project non-linearly from current state.
Think back to the grotesque comical and unsettling errors in the output of the first widely disseminated DALL-E level prompt to image generators.
Now compare MidJourney v4b, today's baseline.
There is no certainty that any particular aspect of ChatGPT will evolve with similar speed.
But there is no certainty that some many or most of its shortcomings will similarly be chipped relentlessly away, over a comparable timescale, i.e. something reasonably measured in months.
I don't know if this is the case, but I know enough to consider the possibility, which I would describe myself as a likelihood,
and to infer that when we think about the impacts tools like this are going to have on knowledge-inquiry and yes, homework,
it's a mistake to think, "ah, this is a new tool, that like Google web search, will undergo modest improvements but provide more or less the same value proposition for the next oh decade."
We're in a different moment with these technologies, and getting closes to what mechanically looks like singularity, their ability to make suggestions as to how better improve them.
Not too close. But closer than we think.
Let's not make assertions or spend too much speculating about modest, linear extrapolations.
We should be focused on the more troubling bewildering and hard to reason about non-linear ones.
It suffers from what I have found a recurring issue on Stratechery, a failure to account for the cognitive error around our collective inability to project non-linearly from current state.
Think back to the grotesque comical and unsettling errors in the output of the first widely disseminated DALL-E level prompt to image generators.
Now compare MidJourney v4b, today's baseline.
There is no certainty that any particular aspect of ChatGPT will evolve with similar speed.
But there is no certainty that some many or most of its shortcomings will similarly be chipped relentlessly away, over a comparable timescale, i.e. something reasonably measured in months.
I don't know if this is the case, but I know enough to consider the possibility, which I would describe myself as a likelihood,
and to infer that when we think about the impacts tools like this are going to have on knowledge-inquiry and yes, homework,
it's a mistake to think, "ah, this is a new tool, that like Google web search, will undergo modest improvements but provide more or less the same value proposition for the next oh decade."
We're in a different moment with these technologies, and getting closes to what mechanically looks like singularity, their ability to make suggestions as to how better improve them.
Not too close. But closer than we think.
Let's not make assertions or spend too much speculating about modest, linear extrapolations.
We should be focused on the more troubling bewildering and hard to reason about non-linear ones.