Mentions personal use of ChatGPT.

Transcript context

…It’s the Deep Blue of chess playing. Yeah, it’s ugly. Yeah. Claude Shannon had this… When you describe chess suggested that there are two main strategies in which you could play chess. One is that you are making a very complicated plan that reaches far into the future and you try not to make a mistake while enacting it. This is basically the human strategy. The other strategy is that you are brute forcing your way to success, which means you make a tree of possible moves where you look at in principle every move that is open to you or the possible answers, and you try to make this as deeply as possible. Of course, you optimize, you cut off trees that don’t look very promising, and you use libraries of end game and early game and so on to optimize this entire process. But this brute force strategy is how most of the chess programs were built, and this is how computers get better than humans at playing chess. I look at the large language models, I feel that I’m observing the same thing. It’s basically the brute force strategy to thought by training the thing on pretty much the entire internet and then in the limit it gets coherent to a degree that approaches human coherence. On a side effect, it’s able to do things that no human could do, right? It’s able to sift through massive amounts of text relatively quickly and summarize them quickly and it never lapses in attention. I still have the illusion that when I play with ChatGPT, that it’s in principle not doing anything that I could not do if I had Google at my disposal and I get all the resources from the internet and spend enough time on it. But this thing that I have an extremely autistic stupid intern in a way that is extremely good at drudgery, and I can offload the drudgery to the degree that I’m able to automate the management of the intern is something that is difficult for me to overhype at this point because we have not yet started to scratch the surface of what’s possible with this. But it feels like it’s a tireless intern or maybe it’s an army of interns. So you get to command these slightly incompetent creatures and there’s an aspect because of how rapidly you can iterate with it. It’s also part of the brainstorming, part of the inspiration for your own thinking. You get to interact with the thing. I mean, when I’m programming or doing any generational GPT, it’s somehow is a catalyst for your own thinking. In a way, that I think an intern might not be.…

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