Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah ... I wonder what your plan is going forward there. I, I think of like a Jay Akatra, you know, sort of advising everybody to figure out how to get AI to work in the area that is like your core area. Because you wanna know when it can do that, and you're gonna need the enhancement to be able to keep up with the pace as things get crazier and crazier. Do you buy that advice, and do you have any plans or aspirations to sort of incorporate AI into whatever it is that's kind of the most core Dean Ball activity? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, even in the last... So I was, a couple weeks ago, I, um, I went to a, um, I rented an Airbnb out in the country and, um, wrote the first chapter of, of my book, uh, that's gonna come out next year. And it was... The first chapter is always the hardest one, but this one, it... The, the subject matter of this chapter was conceptually quite hard for me because it's about a lot of things that are not my normal area that I write about. Um, and so I, I would've been using LLMs, like, a lot in that process anyway just to, like, brainstorm stuff. But there were a couple moments when both GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 wrote stuff that was better than I had in my head to write, like considerably better, um, which is noteworthy. I didn't ultimately use it, but I incorporated some of the ideas and some of the, the framing into... I was in- I was influenced by it in the way that, in a way that felt novel to me. Um, and, uh, yeah, I expect... I, I didn't try any of that with Fable, but I bet you it would be even more true with Fable, and I bet you that'll just continue to get more and more true. At the same time, the thing is that LLMs can write a great paragraph. If you prompt them well, LLMs can write a great paragraph. They're still... And they can write a good... They can write good legal docs sometimes. Um, they're not, they're still not that good, and I bet you even Fable is this way, at actually constructing a really good essay and pr- or a book chapter or a book, right? Even harder, where the thing about a book is that, and, and a good essay too, is that to pick a poignant... You have to pick poignant structural metaphors and then embed them throughout the piece. But you also have to, you have to have, you have to leave them implicit sometimes. Very frequently, the best part of writing well is a kind of restraint, right? It's exercising this kind of, "I could've gone there, but I'm not going to. I'm just gonna let that sit a little bit." And actually, I don't really think AI can... I have not seen an AI model that can really do that all that convincingly yet. Um, it's one thing that I think remains a human skill. Also, I bet you the labs haven't really tried to make the AIs into good essayists. They've tried to make them good analytic prose, like Wikipedia article writers or economic... But writing essays in the classical sense of the word is not that economically useful, what I do.…

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