Over the last four decades I've written several food logging apps for my own use. They've never been good enough to release, because I've always wanted more from them.
But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used. I added a GrokBot, and told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or upgrade the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.
Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!
cant recommend this book enough. Gibson continues to amaze me. I read it when it just came out, gave me the chills. 2021 and super current (talking about the time after pandemics etc.)
Gibson published Agency nearly three years before ChatGPT's release, and six years before the emergence of today's increasingly autononomous AI agents.
...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...
...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...
> including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T..
Apple may have built the phone, but AT&T is the network that carries it. Wasn't the first iPhones on ATT only?
this guy speaks a lot with people who know where things are headed technology wise and somehow is so good at understanding potentials and implications. u know he wrote neuromancer on a typewriter because appearently he does/did not like computers (atleast back then).
Neuromancer was written between 1981 and 1984. The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.
(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)
Pournelle was using a microcomputer to write, then, as was Gerrold. Word processors of the time didn't try to keep a whole chapter in memory, and Pournelle famously started using a home computer to write novels in 1977.
It wasn't that he didn't like computers at the time, he didn't have money for a proper word processing setup. Something good enough to write a full length novel on in 1981 with a printer and the commercial word processing software would have been the equivalent of $3500-4500 or more in today's money adjusted for inflation.
Nevermind that. Looking at Ukraine, we're getting close to Philip K Dick's Second Variety.
I'm always amazed at the handwringing over whether language models are "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.
And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.
But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used. I added a GrokBot, and told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or upgrade the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.
Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!
Another one that comes to mind constantly is 'The Peripheral'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(novel)
I'm pretty sure Gibson has a wormhole with a lens attached stashed away somewhere.
...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...
...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...
Apple may have built the phone, but AT&T is the network that carries it. Wasn't the first iPhones on ATT only?
(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)
I'm always amazed at the handwringing over whether language models are "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.
And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.