This day's update interview with Daniel Gross in that free minute about the AI product revolution was published on Thursday, March 30, 2023.
今天的采访更新,关于人工智能产品革命的 Daniel Gross 的那个空闲时间采访,于2023年3月30日星期四发表。
Good morning, a quick bit of housekeeping. First, I missed this tweet from Elon Musk that clarified that the 4U tab will also include accounts you follow. That was not clear to me, although I should have checked and reduces my evaluation of the approach to probably not a good idea from truly terrible idea. I'll be it for the same reasons I got out in the yesterday's update.
Second, we discussed Twitter that opened the letter about AI and tick-tock on the latest episode of Sharp Tech, which will be released later today. You can add the podcast to your podcast player using the link at the bottom of this email.
Third, as I know the yesterday, I will be on vacation next week. The next update will be on Monday, April 10.
我想告诉你第三件事,就是我知道昨天的时候,下周我会休假。下次更新会在4月10日星期一。
I first interviewed Daniel Gross in that free minute last October, where a major thing was the lack of AI products, despite the quick capabilities of AI models like GPT-3. We checked in again in December after a chat GPT completely changed the conversation.
Well, it's been three months and the product explosion is well and truly here, so I wanted to chat with Gross in free minutes again to discuss exactly that. Gross founded Q, a search engine that was bought by Apple and incorporated into iOS, and led machine learning efforts at Apple from 2013 to 2017, before becoming a partner at Y-combinator and then transitioning into angel investing.
Freeman co-founded Xamarin, an open source cross-platform SDK, which was bought by Microsoft in 2016. Freeman led Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in 2018, and was CEO of the developer-focused company until last year. 32 is now focused on angel investing.
I didn't want to call it two neat projects that we didn't get to in the interview. First, Freeman set up the net.dev sandbox, which is like the opening AI sandbox, but you get access to non-open AI models as well. Second, Gross and Freeman created the Vesuvius Challenge to incentivize teams to leverage machine learning to read scrolls from ancient Rome buried under Ash from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. I really regret freeing to ask what the Vesuvius Challenge is. There was a lot to get to, but the website gives a great overview of the project that should be of interest to everyone.
On to the interview. Matt and Daniel, welcome back for what is now our quarterly AI catch up. I just have to put a disclaimer at the top of this interview, which is we are talking on Monday night and this won't publish until Thursday. I apologize in advance for the 9, 10 major announcements that were probably going to miss in these few days, so I just want to get that out of top.
It's incredible. I was putting together this list and I made it through just last week and I'm like, how are we going to get through this in an hour? That's not even going back to things like Bing or Barn or whatever all this stuff is.
But before we get to all the major announcements now, I wanted to go back to our podcast from six months ago because it kind of ties into this explosion, which is your whole thesis was we need to be talking about products not just papers. That was sort of a goal behind AI grant.
I think we're now talking about a lot more products. Where do you think we are now? Is there still a gap? Yeah, it is amazing. I think Daniel and I were both last summer in this situation where we had spent at that point kind of years playing with these new GPT models and just being blown away by their capabilities.
I've been in this lucky position to get hub to get to put together a co-pilot and put that out. And I expected after that just a flurry of new products as other people went through that same process and discovered, oh my goodness, you know, GBD3 can do all these incredible things. We should build into this product or that product and that didn't happen.
And so by like last summer or early fall, we were scratching our heads saying like, where is everybody? And then in that moment, relaunched AI grant with this call to action, this create a curse saying, hey, where are all the product developers? Like, it's time to pay attention to AI.
Obviously, since then, a ton has changed and really it was like chat GPT in December that fired the starting gun. And so I think you could really consider us to be in like month, three or four now of the kind of AI product revolution.
And it would be hard to imagine what it would look like for more people than are currently doing so to be integrating these models into products. It feels like we're at a sort of maximum overdrive. That said, I think even if the researchers stopped right here and they didn't produce any more capabilities, it would take us something like five or 10 years to digest just what GPT four can do and all the other state of the art models can do into products.
There are so many variations and variants and workflows and user experiences that need to be invented and reinvented and permutations that need to be tried. And we've just started to scratch the surface.
And you know, right now we have this narrative that's out there about value capture, recruiting to incumbents. But I think part of the reason for that is that we're just doing the obvious thing. We're just sort of bolting these models into existing products. But I think operating systems will need to be rebuilt around these capabilities.
The things that we can do with voice now, like incredible voice recognition, super high performance on device, incredible language models that can do reasoning, you know, the sort of self-checking, the data lookup capabilities, the integrations, the voice synthesis, which is now hyper realistic and multiple startups have demonstrated that, you know, I think you could you could take a decade, just and rebuild the entire computing platform on this.
So I would say still we're in the state where the researchers are way ahead and there's a lot of digesting to do, but it's hard to imagine how we could possibly go faster.
我想说我们现在仍处于研究人员领先、需要消化大量信息的状态,但很难想象我们如何可能变得更快。
Now, just a question on that, you know, the internet took two decades, I think in order to fully reach sort of a point of maturation and saturation, on the other hand, the rate of growth of some of the companies that find product market fit in AI is incredible now.
I think in part because everything is already fully networked and connected. So my sort of question to you is, do you think it would take a decade, like things that work work so quickly now? Yeah. And so maybe like it does seem like all reality that we're living is at two to 10X.
Yeah, things definitely feel like they're going fast and being able to code with GPT-4 certainly makes it faster, but yeah, I don't think the diffusion will be slow. I think the thing that still will take time is figuring out what AI native software actually looks like and, you know, not just kind of incrementally improving the existing workflows and software, but building the really AI native things.
I agree with you, Dad. I think there is what Daniel's driving at or you were driving at. What are you is driving at is there is always the V1 of any new sort of technology. And that technology basically says, oh, we can do what we did before, but we can do it in this new format. And what's fast AI is so compelling that there's going to be huge businesses that do just that.
And the most obvious one, and you know, which is exactly why I found the demo compelling is the Microsoft Office stuff where it's like, oh, your word processor cannot write by itself. Like it makes total total sense. But does that mean that's actually the optimal productivity application of AI? I think probably not, but just like, you know, Daniel, you mentioned the internet. Yeah, we had the decade to figure out that it should be a feed, for example, is the optimal way to deliver content.
I don't think that was a function of people, there being an insufficient number of people using it is a function of it just takes time to reset and repair things out. And it sometimes takes a new generation that isn't coming in with the paradigms of the old one.
Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, everyone's sort of worried about job displacement. And I think that's sort of an plausibly real and interesting problem.
嗯,我认为那是对的。而且,你知道,每个人都有点担心失业问题。我认为这是一个可能真实且有趣的问题。
But to me, what's exciting is the marginal cost of building software will go to zero. And so there's all these things that are never being built just because there too much of a slap to even consider building a new software engineer in order to build it. But if sort of making software can be done at the same ease as literally sketching on a notepad, then there will be just more weird and interesting software. And that non-consumption angle, I think everyone under values, which should be really exciting.
Actually, I just saw a thing on Twitter today. Everyone uses the Uber example where people were running the market based on taxis. There's a better example, which I just saw today. I'll see if I find out Twitter.
I mean, Twitter is another conversation. It's functionality thereof. But there was, there were, talk about some analyst notes when Apple was valued at, I think it was $200 billion or whatever it was. And they were, they had a cell attached to it because they're like, look, if Apple takes 100% of phone market share. They're not going to wave up to their valuation.
And it didn't appreciate that number one. They would dramatically expand the market because they were using the smartphone market share. They would basically take over all of phones number one.
And number two, their pricing power would be so huge, like they would go from $100 phones to people buying $1000 phones. And it's such a tangible example of the mistake analysts make about technology areas again and again and again, which is they look at what's there and then they map it to the new thing.
And non-consumption to your point is exactly what makes billion, you know, billion, trillion dollar companies. Trailion. Yeah, and that's right. The other thing I would just say is that the capabilities are not going to stop here. They are going to keep going. And like the dramatic improvements we've seen in capabilities over the last year or two, I think are very likely to continue. And those are kind of these big step changes.
And so even if you do design for kind of 2020, March of 2023, you know, native AI capabilities, March of 2024 may present you with completely different primitives and tools and it's going to be a whole new wave of things to digest into products. Well, I thought it was interesting because I think we were once when we were on here now and you were making, I think the very credible case that things weren't actually moving that quickly.
And you know, I think we, GPT-3 was a year and a half old and you know, sort of, I think there's Andy Grove who had that metaphor, that technology sort of like a river with rapids, at different speeds. And so you have, you know, decades where nothing happens and then you're sort of going very quickly. Do you think things have accelerated against since we sort of spoke last and what do you think was the catalyst for that?
Yeah, I think one of the things we talked about last year was this idea that if chat GPT was your first encounter with language models, then what came next would feel very fast because GPT-4 came out just a few months later, even though we now know OpenAI's had it for sort of seven plus months under wraps and it's been almost two and a half years since GPT-3. That said, I don't know how anybody could feel like anything's going slow right now.
I mean, the most common sense that I have from talking to people is vertigo. People feel there's this sort of disying pace of change and to Ben's question, you know, where do you plant your stake if the ground is sort of shifting beneath you all the time? You know, that is very common and I even, you know, Daniel, you and I have encountered some founders who are just sort of completely overwhelmed by this and don't, you know, don't even know where to start and some feel a little despondent because they think, we're sort of back in one of these waves that we've previously been in that Ben will certainly remember where there's this feeling like the leader could never be caught up with.
It's just going to do every single possible business or product. And so we definitely hear, you know, we're doing some therapy with some founders, you know, who have kind of been exposed to this and they're not quite sure what to do. There's a bit where your reputation always lasts longer than the reality and you saw this with Microsoft in the 90s where everyone was rightfully terrified of Microsoft and then that terror extended much longer than it should have, like kind of by probably 98 or 99 like it was kind of a spent thing in retrospect, but people didn't stop being scared until probably the early 2000s or maybe even mid 2000s.
And I think that runs the opposite direction where Microsoft was not anything worth worrying about or caring about for a long time after that. But you know, I still think the teams versus slack things should have been a massive wake up call to everyone because and I think what is part of it is you could chalk that up to Microsoft having better distribution and teams being free. And so there was an excuse to continue with your old viewpoint and there was an under appreciation.
I'm obviously talking, not talking my book per se of a talking by writing that there's an integration aspect here that's super meaningful. And I think the importance of that integration is really going to come to the forefront with this, the business chat sort of thing where if you, if you have meaningful data for your enterprise and you're not in the Microsoft ecosystem, you're going to get shipped out real quickly, particularly when you layer on top of the fact that Microsoft will have an alternative. That is quote unquote free.
And yeah, it does feel tough to be a startup founder now because if we're right that the paradigm shifting innovation will take a while to figure out, you know, that's probably, I mean, I don't know, I'm going to use your guys perspective as you're investing in these companies, you need the founders that are going to start from scratch, not try to do what's already done, but with AI. Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, I think we're excited about the founders who are doing new things that literally couldn't be done before, maybe with a completely new workflow, maybe something that seems a little too weird for the mainstream companies to, you know, are the large companies to want to approach it. And you know, it's sort of best of times, worst of times, yes, the incumbents are active and they can leverage these large user bases.
But like there are now an entire new field of companies that are possible that couldn't have been built before. And you know, I think the really excited and active founders are going to go find those. And you know, then they'll have to probably man the tiller pretty aggressively to navigate the new capabilities as they come out. But the best founders are going to do that and be excited to do it.
So yeah, probably the lazy and obvious startups might be much harder to do than the one they normally have been. Yeah, there's a bit where just like just take an existing enterprise functionality and make it sass and boom, you have a billion dollar company. And I don't think that's going to be the case with, with the say, I stuff. No, it's true.
嗯,那些懒惰且显而易见的创业公司可能比通常的创业公司更难做。是的,有些公司只需将现有的企业功能变成SaaS,就可以成为十亿美元的公司。但我不认为这对于像 I 这样的公司适用。是的,这是真的。
And I think there's been a generation of founders that have been bred by that era, which I think also to some extent was sort of a just general sort of zero interest rate or very low interest rate market boom era. And one thing we have seen is I think it is taking longer for the innovation pipeline of Silicon Valley to produce phenotypes that are both aware enough of the technology to be interested in it, but also building deeply enough in a way that I often wondered if the AI revolution was sort of happening with your 1980s, 1990s cohort of founders.
I actually think progress might be a little bit faster. Silicon Valley is really rich with people that are doing things on the margin, things that Microsoft is clearly going to do in our little despondent that now Microsoft is doing it. And I think that's a byproduct from a lot of these incredibly successful sass businesses actually being relatively thin layers. But that's changing. And I think this is sort of a different kind of revolution. But the market will adjust to Nance point. We're really only at day one. And we haven't seen any of this sort of native.
We're still at the TV at the cameras pointed at radio shows, era of television, not at sort of your native, you know, made for TV era. And that'll happen over time. It just takes a couple of quarters for that to get generated. I think it's a really good and important observation though about just the nature of Silicon Valley.
And you know, one thing that's worth noting is when did we actually figure out the internet as an industry? Right. It was after the bubble, after the bubble burst, right? Like the feed search, all those sorts of things. I mean, search did start in the late 90s, but by and large it became a thing after that. The auction model I think was 2002 or so. Facebook comes along to those four to those in five. Like they're there. I don't that's probably not an accident.
When the focus is money and the money seems easy, you're going to take shortcuts to get there. And the most obvious shortcut right now is take a thing that people do and add AI to it. And if the if it's not so easy, then you actually have to go back to first principles. And you know, I mean, that no one's cheering for a recession or for a bubble burst or whatever it might be. But it's just striking to look back at the timing of sort of the internet. It's figuring out the internet.
By the way, I think it's not just a zero interest rate phenomenon thing. I mean, I think programming languages have gotten much easier over the years. And so that's changed the phenotype of person that starts a company. I mean, the sort of degree of technical excellence that was required in order to make a consumer facing product. And in 2002, 3, 4, 5, 6, that was drastically different than it is today. You know, and we did a wonderful thing where we built multiple layers on the cake that make it simpler and simpler to, you know, build a technology and if AWS and you have react.
And so you end up getting a different type of person. And I think now to really excel in AI, you have to be a little bit deep. And you know, back when we were all starting startups, it was it was a hyphenate term. It was not a proper noun. It was a start-up, it was an obscure thing to do. And you know, now it's like a very normal thing to do. And so that means that you end up, we end up seeing a lot more things that we don't do just because the selection effects that Silicon Valley had just in terms of it really attracting these, you know, technical, brilliant savants, weirdos are less strong now. So there's more people in the pool, but.
And so selection is a little bit harder as a result. And the fact that AI is so hot, of course, doesn't help.
因此,选择有点更加困难。当然,人工智能如此热门这一事实也没有帮助。
I think anyone. But that's a reality.
我觉得任何人都可以这样想。但这是现实。
I mean, one of the theses that I put forward before is that everyone talks about tech having a big five, but actually there's a big six. And you know, the big five are obviously Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. But big six is basically Silicon Valley ink, which is basically the SaaS producing machine where everyone knows the playbook.
You get to call yourself a startup founder and feel great about it. But the level of risk is actually very low, the level of technical execution is very low. It's actually about building a sales team and doing sales, which to your point, this ties into the zero interest rate environment as well, where you can be encouraged to actually get super far ahead of your skis to give, you know, 15 years out, imagine what this cohort is going to be, you know, sort of producing for us.
And like the startup scene is was completely different. It was a corporate scene in many respects. And that's probably the first one of the big six that has taken a big hit these last couple of years.
That's right. Speaking of though, maybe there is a sixth.
没错。说起来,也许还有第六个。
I will say I was, you know, using the various GPT's, various flavors on the yesterday. And you sort of mentioned that it was sort of an oddity that chat GPT came along when GPT 3 was basically already obsolete. And it became this huge hit and then boom, suddenly GPT 4 comes out. And I think at first sort of blush, it feels fairly similar. And then maybe you get into it all, this can do these other things like, oh, it's actually different.
I have to say GPT 3.5, like the default model or even the legacy model, feels really ancient. Like when you're actually using just chat GPT, just a bit. And I'm not in with the API, but I can imagine it's the similar sort of thing.
It's really hard to get it to hallucinate. It's just in general much more sort of cognizant and coherent about things in general. I don't know. It seems like a pretty meaningful shift.
What sort of your perspective from the API side or your sort of, you've been using it longer than I think any of us. So what do you think?
你对API这方面的看法是什么,或者说,你使用它的时间比我们任何人都长。那么你认为呢?
Yeah. Daniel and I had, you know, opening up, I was good enough to give us early access a few months ago. And so we've had a chance to play with it for a while. And, you know, I think the thing, I agree with you that it is just smarter. And you know, I found myself during those few months, you feel like you're talking to higher IQ person. That's what it feels like.
Yeah. It's just smarter. And, you know, it's always been a bit slower. I think there have been sort of spurts where it got really fast. I guess they might have provisioned a lot more GPUs to it at various points for demos or something. But even when it was slow during those last few months, I found myself kind of in that position of asking, okay, am I going to run out of it? Or reach out to my pretty smart fast friend? Or am I noticeably smarter, but much slower friend? And ask them. And I found myself reaching for the smarter friend almost all the time. And I'll just tab away and I'll come back to that, you know, browser window with the answer in a minute and a half. And that's just fine.
One of the innovations of Copilot was the trade off of a faster model that was dumber. And the idea of auto-complete, helping people be sort of the product in a pre-media. The AGI world. How does that factor in, you know, to a smarter, slower model? Like, is there a trade off point in which?
Well, I think we're sort of figuring out what the value of intelligence is a little bit here. And it's interesting what we're finding. I mean, the scaling laws that lead to GPT-4 being better than GPT-3 have a logarithm built into them. You have to put exponentially more money in to get linear returns in kind of model quality or improvements in loss. And that's just something everyone knows to be true. But I think what we're also finding out is that small improvements in kind of the models IQ probably lead to not, you know, super linear improvements in the value of the model.
Great point. And so you have kind of this sub-linear improvement in loss, but maybe a linear improvement in model value or even a super linear improvement, it might swamp fully that logarithm. And so that's kind of what I found in the last few months.
The thing that I find myself using it for the most and many people have had this observation night, and it was hard to keep this quiet over the last few months is just writing code as unbelievable with GPT-4. Like my sort of friction to start a project is almost zero now.
I'm fearless. I'll write whatever programming languages I've never used before. Concepts I don't fully understand. And I still have to guide it.
我无所惧。我会写以前从未使用过的编程语言。我不完全理解的概念。还要为它指导方向。
You know, everyone loves the one shot examples where you just ask it to do something and it works out the box. I find that's very rare. It does happen, but it's, you know, for really useful things, it's quite rare. It's more like 10 or 20 back and forth with the model.
What is Wolverine? Yeah, well, right. So that's sort of the back and forth that people talk about. And I think here we start to get into, maybe we'll touch on this later, but things that are exciting and slightly frightening.
But, you know, one of the ways in which you use GPT-4 is you ask it to write some code. And then eventually after you begin to trust it, you just copy paste that code into your editor and run it without really fully understanding it. Then an error message pops up and because you didn't really understand the code, you don't fully understand the error. And so you could go and read it and understand it. But then you copy paste the error back into GPT-4 and say like, what's up? And then GPT-4 says, oh, excuse me, I made this error. Here's the updated code. And you copy the updated code back into your editor and that works.
And so there's a moment there when you're copying and pasting between two windows, that's your role in this entire system here as the copy pasteer where you think like, hmm, shouldn't the computer be doing this mechanical moving things back and forth? And so there's a Twitter account. I think it's an anon. All the best AI accounts are anons. And I think his name is, or his handle is bio bootloader. And he or she, or they came out with a system in Python that just automates this back and forth and they call it wolverine.py.
And so you can basically run wolverine.py and then any Python script. And if it throws an exception, it will ask GPT-4 to rewrite the code to fix that and it will continuously do that, self-healing your code until it works. And this is one of those demos that's incredible. But you can already feel the degree to which we've sort of taken our hands off the wheel and let the AI drive and we don't know exactly where it's headed.
Well, just to jump in on that, because I think this is that we talked previously that code is particularly well suited to this in part because it's well structured. It's sort of a fairly bounded space. And because it has to actually run, there's sort of error checking inherently sort of built in.
And you know, I think we're definitely seeing that seeing that play out. But this bit about you just sort of give in and learn to trust it and take your hands off the wheel, I think is a super important point because that, you know, that's part of why GPT-4 I think is so compelling to me is I feel more inclined to trust it.
And then you add in like the plug-in stuff, like if GPT-4, if I know that invoked will from alpha, I know question at all, right? Like just sort of this willingness to, you know, people are understandably hesitant. And they're like, oh, everyone hears about the errors and they hear about the hallucination. But I, and be like, oh, that's going to hinder adoption.
But people used to say people would not buy stuff online because your credit card's going to get stolen, right? And I think that tipping point comes pretty quickly. And once it comes, it's like a tidal wave going over it.
Yeah, I mean, a few thoughts there. One thing we learned when we were developing co-pilot, and this was nine, two years ago, back in the dark ages of Flarge Language Models, you know, is that like, as you're trying to find an AI product, the demo is always mind-blowing. And so, you know, you can easily buy cherry picking a couple of outputs, produce, you know, an unbelievably mind-blowing demo.
是的,我的意思是,我有一些想法。我们在研发 co-pilot 时学到了一件事,那是九年前,在 Flarge 语言模型的黑暗时代。就是在寻找 AI 产品时,演示总是让人刮目相看。所以,你可以轻易地挑选几个输出,制作一个令人难以置信的演示。
The proof is in the daily use and kind of how you use it daily. And I will say GPT-4 is very, very good. It's an enormous step change, but it does still hallucinate. And it does still make mistakes. It does it less, noticeably less. But it can't sort of, you know, one-shot every problem. And you do kind of have to be in the loop.
And so, but the big deal, I think, and we get to the sort of, some of the recent Microsoft releases here, the big deal is, you know, having like going back and forth between this browser window that has, you know, GPT-4 in it through chat GPT or the opening AI playground. And then you're like code editor window, you're just, you're just begging for this new workflow.
This, you know, co-pilot to me started to feel obsolete. And so now, you know, I think last week, the GitHub team released co-pilot X, which integrates chat into VS code. I don't think it's out yet, but they at least showed some videos and teased it. I guess it's coming soon. It's probably, my guess is constrained by GPU capacity for inference, which is why I think GPT-4 is, you know, you've seen open AI kind of throttle more and more access to GPT-4 as demand is dramatically exceeded their expectations, for sure.
Well, actually, on that point, I do want to get to co-pilot X. But I mentioned the big five tech companies. It does kind of feel like we're, and I think the plug-in announcement sort of felt like it cemented this to a certain extent, where we are well on our way to a big six. And the big surprise is where open AI, everyone, you know, we, I think our first podcast, very research oriented and like not more about sort of producing this output as opposed to products per se. Nope, turns out you're a consumer tech company.
And like, I mean, it just, it feels like whether they wanted to or not. It's way. Yeah. I mean, chat GPT, just the speed and intensity of the adoption basically left them no choice. It's like, nope, sorry, you're an apples league now. And then the way it's going to be. That's right. Yeah.
I mean, because obviously, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, obviously analogy or sort of way to think about, I, you know, we've talked about industry structure is, you know, is there going to be a centralized player that's going to be an aggregator, you know, that sort of idea? And the crazy thing about the plug-in thing is not only does it just in my estimation fundamentally change, and maybe this is, I, you know, I haven't coded in 15 years. So I can only imagine the experience of, sort of, coding with this co-pilot stuff.
But I go back to the, well, from alpha, alpha thing. It changes my perception and feeling and confidence of using it in a super meaningful way. And this, you know, I sort of trying to explore this idea yesterday. I'm not sure about, well, I did it. But, you know, to the extent of large language models are so human-like, they have the same limitations as humans in that they do make stuff up. They don't know everything. And I need a computer to figure stuff out. And now chat GPT has its own computer to sort of figure stuff out, which is this architecture.
But you can play that all the way through to a business model. Like consumers could buy plug-ins, or they could install plug-ins. Or if they don't choose a plug-in, suddenly there's like, you can bid to be the default plug-in. So if someone does a travel search, is it going to be Expedia or is it going to be kayak? They're going to have to bid for that and they're paying affiliate fee.
Like, I mean, it's just, how can this not be a huge consumer tech company at this point? Yeah. Yeah, I think the advice I would give, if being asked, you know, is that probably OpenAi's platform where they're selling these API tokens is kind of not the future of that business. You know, it's this lowest-com denominator, home depot, selling lumber, type of business, where every token has to be sold for the same price, no matter how valuable it is.
And chat GPT clearly could be a multi-billion user product, you know, that eventually gets integrated into people's devices and used in many different ways. OpenAi could build a phone. Like that is actually a potential branch on this tree given where they're at right now in March 2023, which is an insane thing to say because any possibly anyone other than the current incumbents building a device has seen duts for years, but that speaks to I think where they're at.
It'll be completely unsurprising if it has a billion monthly users and maybe 300 million daily users at the end of this year. I don't know if it's true or not, they haven't told me, but I've heard that they have between one and two million subscribers for chat GPT plus. Again, don't know $20 a month. That's what I mean. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of getting between $204 or $500 million a year if so that must eclipse the API revenue dramatically.
And not to mention, it's just a more valuable ecosystem position to be able to roll out these features and use the data that comes from chat GPT. So yeah, I think maybe they should rename the company chat GPT. I saw that. I think it's a good idea.
Well, also the other thing is, I mean, I thought the codex sort of cancellation and then they walked it back. But I thought even if they wanted an API business, I think that might have killed it in the womb because why would you build on chat GPT or not chat, I call it chat GPT? Why would you build on open AI when Microsoft is going to have the same API and they're not going to kill anything like that's like, like there's a weird sense where open AI is in a competition with Microsoft API space that they structurally just cannot compete with.
And also it's not even a good business for them. It's sort of a distraction and the margins are not going to be anything close to what they're going to get on the consumer front. They're sitting on top of the most difficult thing to build in the world, which is a dominant consumer platform. Like that seems exactly where they should go. It's the obvious thing to do. I imagine internally there's a cultural digestion moment that's happening now. The consumers are really telling them what they need to do. At some point after enough days of chewing glass and staring into the abyss to quote Elon Musk, they'll choose success.
Yeah. I mean, it is a very different kind of company, a consumer company versus like, we're just going to build this model and have an API like that. That's easy in a way, right? Like you don't actually have a difficulty. Yeah. Almost it feels like they need to build like a completely new organization. There should be a chat GPT app right now, right? Like the,
sorry, it's been four or five months. There's been five million people that have built it in a week to date. One thing though that my boss at Apple used to say, Eddie Q, was it's important to make the important things good, which was his way of saying implicitly. Not everything needs to be great. And so I think for the opening eye perspective on this would probably be, look, if the assistance is really good, people are going to use it from the browser, even if it doesn't have browser rendering, people are just going to use it in them.
You know, he would say this when we talk about app store performance because the end of the day and the early days of Apple, to some extent, still now, as everyone knows, the app store was terrible. Did not look fast at all. But if the phone is good, it really doesn't matter. I mean, no one likes saying this publicly, but it really won't matter. The phone just needs to be really good. And so I think in open AI's case, their organizational truth is, look, at the end of the day, the polish is around the chat GPT website and the app just don't matter. What matters is that it's the best agent with the widest plug-in ecosystem and the smartest, most accurate, fastest, advice. That's all that matters.
I think what's happening now with every single day that goes by is not really a network effect from a data standpoint, nor a network effect from a user standpoint. It is a network effect from a brand standpoint. People are walking around and they're saying chat GPT. It's Google. It's the new Google. That's right. It's a word and just like the word Google, it's a little bit weird, but it sticks in your head. And so in the second, third, fourth and fifth place come up. Unless they come up now, like this month or next month, it's just going to be too late, I think, for the consumer thing, because you're going to be an afterthought. Unless you have a particular niche or specialty or whatever, Lexus Nex is equivalent in Google, ParLons, but that's what I think is going on now. It's a fight to become a box in the customer's brain of the agents that you talk to. And every single day, they're acquiring more people that are just chat GPT. It's a verb. It's a proper noun. That's what they're winning and that's all that matters, I think.
That's exactly right. I think you completely agree. I'm glad we waited for you to wait in because that was an observation that was worth it. But to that point, Microsoft said like the opposite boat. Whereas when it comes to Bing, there's a few angles on Bing. I think big picture Daniel, your observation is the most important one, which is if you asked any consumer, number one, they probably don't know about Bing chats. And number two, if they do, they know that Bing has chat GPT, which is like, sort of gets to the point. It's not chat GPT, but I know they're all chat GPT, etc.
But in that, I am curious, are you surprised that Microsoft has sort of stuck with it, even though it's only been a few weeks, but obviously it was a very hairy sort of first week. I might have contributed to that a bit, but as that bit has surprised you, it has.
It's taken me a little time to kind of try to understand what's going on over there. Because when Bing Chad had those sort of moments of amusing or even slightly frightening behavior, I thought we'd see kind of a little more caution for Microsoft afterwards or some apologetics or things like that. And we really didn't.
They're just kind of at a fever pitch over there, obviously going on ho and rolling this stuff out as aggressively as they can. Frank Shaw tweeted last week that this is going to be another busy week. So probably by the time people are hearing this, there are more announcements that we don't know about yet.
But I've tried to think about sort of psychologically what may be happening there. And obviously this is armchair remote psychologist, but you were there. Yeah, I was there. Right.
So the company that Satya joined decades ago now was a company that was absolutely holding all the carts. They had DOS. They had Windows. They had Excel. They were really kind of standing astride the entire industry in a very, very dominant position. And he got to enjoy that for a while. And then Microsoft spent multiple decades on defense. And it was defense against the internet and defense against the web and web apps and defense against phones and defense against cloud. And Microsoft has been a kind of no and web search, of course, as well.
Microsoft has been a kind of number two player underdog in each of those categories. And they've settled into a recent equilibrium as not a consumer technology company, but a business to business technology company kind of playing defense on all these trends, but really helping incumbent players stay relevant in the same way Microsoft itself has managed to stay relevant.
And what's happened now is that Satya, I think, finds himself at a company that's much more similar to the company he originally joined. It's got all these great things. It's got GPT-4. It's got co-pilot and this whole concept of a co-pilot. And so I think he feels like they're back and they're going to behave with the same aggression, excitement, optimism that they had 30 years ago when he joined the company. They were like a young handsome man that sort of got fat, couldn't fit the old jeans anymore, but could never bring it to sort of throw them away. Now they've gotten right and tight and sort of in shape in the jeans. There's a sliding right back on. They're ready to go.
Yeah. Well, and then the other thing, a couple other sort of psychology points here, maybe worth being aware of is that Satya, one of his first, he had many large jobs at Microsoft before becoming CEO, but one of his first big ones was running Bing.
And he ran Bing in the era, I think of like 1% market share and grew it, but it was a tough fight against the dominant Google. And so there's a way in which I think he's back and Microsoft's got a chance to take share. And I think they're excited about that. And then I don't, it's all my speculation. I know and respect and like all these people over there. So I'm just guessing based on what I know.
The other thing though is that there's a degree to which he and the Microsoft leadership team are kind of playing with house money in the sense that what was the stock price when he joined 40%. $40. I know very well because I had to sell all my, when I left. I for for went my remaining stock grants and then it immediately has gotten much higher. Yeah.
So now it's 270 to 80. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's a lot higher. You know, he's added trillions and market cap or at least a trillion and a half or so. And so I think there's probably an element of legacy and all of that here too. And so I was surprised when they weren't a little more shrinking at some of the criticism. But they do seem going home and it's showing up everywhere. It's clearly kind of the paradigm.
Yeah. I do, it does feel like I'm not sure that Bing is going to ultimately be a thing to do. Like just to Daniel's point, chat GPT seems like the clear winner here. I think the plug-in architecture feels much more elegant than whatever it is Bing's trying to do. Bing I think is limited by trying it to have it be a part of search. Not just because Bing search is bad, which it continues to be bad. Exactly, using it much more and being reminded. But also the UI is just weird. It's just, it feels tacked on because it is. And yeah, but that doesn't mean the technology won't be meaningful.
有可能要重新组织的段落:
原文:The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of exercise on the quality of life among breast cancer survivors. A total of 500 participants will be recruited from ten different hospitals across the country. Participants will be randomly assigned to either a control group or an exercise group. The exercise group will engage in a specific exercise program for 12 weeks while the control group will not engage in any specific exercise program.
重组后:这项研究的目的是研究锻炼对乳腺癌幸存者生活质量的影响。我们将从全国10家不同的医院招募500名参与者。参与者将随机分配到对照组或锻炼组。锻炼组将进行一个特定的锻炼计划,持续12周,而对照组不进行任何特定的锻炼计划。
It kind of feels like Apple and Google back in the day where if both of them could have just done what they were good at and they got in this unfortunate fighting where they infringe like open eye and Microsoft. They're obviously partners, they're joining it to hip regardless. But it does feel like from a product perspective, look, you guys, there's an obvious way to split this pie.
Yeah, I don't think Microsoft is amazing at new user experiences and things that require a lot of taste and aesthetic tuning. But they're great at B2B. And so I expect them to expect that pattern to play out in this new AI era also. And they're great at being a platform. If you want to use an API, like I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't know. It's out like this is maybe weird for I'd be obviously, I've obviously always been relatively more familiar with and positive towards Microsoft in part from having been there and just, you know, this is the company I've been the most right about.
So I can't be biased to that regard. But if I'm building a startup, I would rather build on the equivalent Microsoft API than basically any other company in the world because that's literally what they do is they build APIs and support them for 40 years. Yeah. You generally write that it's sort of funny that the company that should be doing consumer is really excited about enterprise and vice versa.
Yeah. Exactly. Well, what about Google? Bard, congratulations to Google. They have finally watched a product. You know, it's out there. It's able to be used. It does feel like, man, they are feeling the weight of being second super heavily. I think in two regards. Number one was you, they announced the integration like Google Office. The docs, whatever. And like no one cares because it's like, yeah, what ships something. Whereas Microsoft has gained because of being has sort of gained the benefit of the doubt.
Like, yeah, wait, this is definitely coming. I can see it. But that number two, and without Bard being astronomically better than chat GPT, it is basically by default going to be considered worse, whether it's actually worse or not, just because it's, it feels like it's coming in late. Yeah. And the insiders think of the joke and so that spreads to outsiders.
It did have a couple of tricks up its sleeve in the fact that no one noticed them, I think speaks to your point, meaning no one cared or noticed that it was current, which is a big deal. I mean, chat GPT is current as of November 2021. Right. You know, which was true for my brokerage account, but obviously a lot has happened since. And Bard is current up to today. No one cared. Bard is faster, but it doesn't stream the tokens out. So it actually appears slower. No one cared. That's really interesting.
I can't decide which one I like better. I feel like intellectually I like the Google one better because I can see that it's faster overall, but there is a feeling where chat GPT immediately starts writing and you sort of sit there and watch it. The big psychological irony is at least when I was at Apple, we all looked to Google as a business that really understood the value of very fast response time. And in search, you know, that they can really quantify it.
我无法决定哪个我更喜欢。从理智上讲,我觉得我更喜欢 Google 的那个,因为我可以看出它总体上更快。但是,有一种感觉是 Chat GPT 可以立即开始写作,而你则坐在那里看着它。最大的心理反讽是,至少在我在苹果的时候,我们都看到 Google 作为一家真正理解非常快速响应时间价值的商业公司。而在搜索方面,你知道,他们确实可以量化它。
You know, the difference between 300 and 100 and 100 and as a big deal and you can, Google can see it in the number of subsequent queries people make and then subsequent ad spend. And the big irony to me that sort of reeks of whatever metastasized cancer is, you know, working its way through Google is the business that was obsessed with speed was unable to deliver on this very simple trick to make things appear faster.
And so I don't know that sort of like a diamond dealer who, you know, is losing his vision, you know, and you're sort of wondering, well, that's the key thing you need is an obsession of speed if you're a search engine. Yeah. And so I don't know is it was sort of a sign, a real sign of sort of lack of health. And yeah, my theory about why they did that is I don't know if you guys, I'm sure you did notice, Ben, I think I saw some videos from you of this, but Bing Chat would sort of say something offensive and then it would start deleting its own words and say, I didn't mean to say that.
You know, sort of like someone with a really bad temper who's constantly apologizing for blowing their stack. Deleting their tweets. Deleting their tweets all the time. And I think exactly that's exactly why Bar did that is just so they don't have this thing where it says, it says terrible things and deletes them. They want something a little safer. That sort of makes Daniels point. That is speaks to a company that is concerned more about screwing up than about winning.
And it's like you talked about Microsoft being on the defensive, like Bing may not win this space, but it's a whole lot more fun to have nothing to lose. And Google has everything to lose and having everything to lose is a tough place to be.
Yeah, I mean, right. And there's all those, I mean, I think valid observations about Google sort of built on the understanding that search was forever going to be a high margin business. And as we sort of shift search from a IO, very cheap IO operation to a synthesis of information, which is I think more CPU and GPU balance, the cost of every or most queries go up. And therefore the margin goes down, which is not an issue from Microsoft, which has been monetizing office forever. And for them, this is an afterthought, but could be an issue for Google.
是的,我的意思是对的。还有所有这些关于谷歌的有效观察,建立在搜索将永远成为高利润业务的理解基础上。随着我们从一种非常廉价的 I / O 操作转向综合信息(我认为更加 CPU 和 GPU 平衡)的搜索,每个或者大多数查询的成本都会提高。因此,利润率下降,这对于一直在将办公室赚钱的微软来说不是问题。对于谷歌来说,这可能是一个问题。
Not a material issue, but an issue that the street would notice. And so, you know, I think Sasha has a lot of interviews now where he seems to have noticed this. It's very much racial. I'm also going to notice it. Yeah. Yeah. And wants to make sure everyone is watching extremely closely in the next earnings. And I do think it's sort of a material issue for Google. I think the market is a little bit overreacting to it.
One thing we're learning from OpenAI is just how efficient you can make the models given time. You know, because I think there's a massive GPU shortage, there is actually a lot of market pressure on making things like turbo GPT, which is OpenAI's slightly dumb or slightly faster model. So, actually, I think, you know, Google could make this work. And not all queries need a GPU spin up to begin with.
But the real issue is Google is a company seemingly without a founder acting like a founder. And there are throughout the history, I think, of the free market examples where the non-founder had founding moments, maybe Howard Schultz with Starbucks, but, you know, for the most part, you know, sort of funny, these moments in history, I think, really probably come down to four or five people in a room and what they decide to do. And we seemingly, in Google's case, those people have not gotten together and decided to do the thing. And if they don't, it's sort of a car on autopilot. And it's just going to go where it's going to go. Yeah.
And this isn't a critique of Sundar Pachai, the person. It's sort of, it is the tangible human example of everything to lose and nothing to gain. Like, literally, the only possible long-term legacy for him is that he lost Google, right? Because Larry and Sergey are going to always have the credit for building it. And so when you have a company in general that is large and dominant and you go back to the same thing, same thing about Steve Balmer. I mean, it's just, if anything, this is a reason sort of as an aside where Tim Cook probably deserves even more credit than he gets by virtue of, you know, it's such a trap. It's not even a trap because it's like, it's like an inevitability. Because like, your car is hurtling along and there's a cliff in front of you. You're going to go over the cliff. It's just what happens to big companies.
That's right. Yeah, it really feels like Google was actually built for this moment. And just because of internal issues, culture, leadership, they're just unable to seize it. Yeah. I mean, it's tough. I mean, but again, it's sort of, you've seen it happen before. You'll see it happen again.
I'm sure. I mean, what about Apple and Amazon as long as we're here? I mean, both seem like they should be heavy investors in the open source ecosystem. I mean, that sort of fits, I think, broadly their models. At the same time, can you get away with not having your own model? I mean, anthropic launched quad, which hasn't gotten much buzz. I mean, maybe because it's not broadly available, but isn't there going to be a bidding war which would Apple and Amazon for anthropic? That seems sort of the obvious outcome to me. I'll let Daniel take the Apple part of this.
Well, Apple will famously tell you if you ever call them for M&A, that they don't do a lot of M&A. And then they go off and buy beats. So there's clearly exceptions to the rule. But I think, look, I think Apple's culture and philosophy, at least, you know, I haven't been there for a couple of years, but to the extent I remember it, is very much last, first mover advantage was not the first music player PC or mobile phone, just the best. And so I don't think there any particular rush. You know, I think if opening I were to launch a phone and it were suddenly start stealing share from Apple, which I don't think who knows. Yeah, I don't think that's any time soon to be clear. Who knows? You know, we're more in the air about how incredible their share already is.
I've all these little thoughts in my head, you know, of crazy things that can happen. And there's little voice in my head that says, that's for sci-fi. That can't really happen.
And then you know, time and time again, you know, Brexit happened, Trump happened, you know, COVID happened. AI is happening. So, you know, I really don't know.
But that said, I think Apple is just going to wait. Now, you know, in terms of an anthropic bidding more thing, you know, how would you say M&A proclivities aside? I think there's an open question as to how long it will take the incumbents to believe that they can't build it internally.
And usually in any market cycle, there are a couple of quarters where they have to have the internal thing that has to fail before they can really pay up the price. So I don't, I mean, who knows, but I think they're probably going through that exercise.
Now, I also think it's not really clear even to me how far, like, how far ahead a company like, you know, anthropic is of open source. I actually don't know maybe not would disagree with me on this, but I think we go through these fits and starts where open source, everyone feels like is five years behind.
Then it turns out it's two years behind. Then it turns out it's a year behind. So we go through these phases where the gap widens and narrows. And so I don't even know if you are Apple and you need to do a anthropic like model today. I mean, I don't know that you can't do it in house.
So now, I don't know if you disagree with me like, yeah, I think the thing I'm thinking about more with Apple is just the that we've barely begun to use the capabilities of the existing hardware for running these networks. So I think one of the big events, you know, that we a lot of us have been talking about and waiting for was the release of an open source text model that you could run locally and play with this sort of stable diffusion moment for text.
And we had that just a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. It came from a totally unexpected place to totally unexpected places. One was met or released this Lama model with a non-open source license, but they made the weights available to researchers and it was trained using the best available techniques and they had every size of it up to 65 billion parameters and it's very, very good.
我们几周前才得到了这个。是的,它来自完全意想不到的地方到完全意想不到的地方。其中一个与 Lama 模型的非开源许可证相遇或发布了它的权重给研究人员,并使用了最佳可用技术进行训练,他们拥有每个尺寸高达 650 亿个参数,很好,非常非常好。
And of course, the weights immediately made their way into torrent and then what happened afterwards. Now they're sitting on the hard drive. Yeah, it's like a perfect mirror. It's all a truck. And a defense hard drive.
Yeah. I mean, what happened next was exactly what Apple was stable the fusion last summer, which is the open source community started optimizing and tweaking and toying and playing with it. And I think one of the big events was Gayorki, Gergenoff and Sophia came out with Lama.cpp.
So he had previously released this optimized inference engine for whisper called whisper.cpp. He took some of the same techniques he used to build that and this technique of forbit quantization of these language models, which he had learned from Feb.
Boulard, who did this for Texan. And Gaut Lama running on a MacBook and M1 MacBook and an iPhone and a Raspberry Pi, you know, has a consequence. And so we had the combination of, you know, a state of the art language model with weights available and, you know, the creativity of the open source community.
Subsequently, some folks at Stanford fine tuned it using RLHF and some available human feedback data sets into a model they called alpaca. What they trained it using open AI's API. Yeah.
Well, they used, did they? Okay, I didn't know that. I thought they used Laura. And what you're both are correct. Laura was the actual fine tuning method. I think it is true that some of the prompts it was fine tuned on were generated using turbo GPT.
Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. They did, yeah, take some tokens from opening AI models and use them to fine tune. And so the great thing is that all these are in flagrant violation of licenses, which does feel like the old days of Silicon Valley, so maybe, maybe we're back, maybe.
Yeah, but I mean, the consequence of that is that you can run fully locally on your laptop, you know, a 13 billion parameter model that is chat tuned and you can talk to it on a airplane. And, you know, people have reported doing this. So interesting about that.
It's pretty fast, actually, but it doesn't even use Apple's neural engine. It's only using the metal performance shaders and some other tricks. And so there's probably another, I don't know, three to five X left in there. And someone optimizes that.
And so I think Apple's day is, you know, this is part of the capability overhang we often talk about is like, all these permutations that haven't yet been tried. Someone will figure out how to run at least some layers of these models on the neural engine and get huge performance improvements and will have even more powerful local models in the near future.
And we should mention, you know, local models are exciting, not just because they're sort of, you know, privacy friendly and local and available to anyone. But there are also use cases that only emerge at very low response times. And even in the conversation we're having now, like you can interrupt me instantly. I will stop talking and listen to you.
And those modalities are pretty hard to do when you're talking to someone that has a half a second or two second delay. So actually, I think the comfort level that people will have with a lot of these models will grow, you know, when they become more local. Just new products are possible that you just wouldn't really want to have if they weren't.
Yeah. And I think I bore optimists or pretty optimists about Apple again. We talked about this previously. So I need to re-match it. But there's speed of response to stable diffusion of not just releasing their own modification to run their hardware, but actually releasing an operating system update to make sure that it was sort of used meaningfully. The natural extension of that down the line is actually tuning down to the chip level, you know, whatever their preferred model sort of ends up being.
And now, in just the fact, we all thought, well, when's the LM moment going to happen? Is that going to be possible locally? Sure can. Raspberry Pi. Here we go. Why do you think that the Lava model is where this happened instead of like Flan? Is there a difference in quality or was there this sort of a list of it that this comes from Facebook or what do you think?
That's an awesome question. I don't know. I thought Gayorgue was going to do it for Flan T5 first. And then I think Lama came out and it's bigger. It's a new thing. And it's hot new thing. Yeah. Exactly.
I'm not sure if there's something about the architecture of the Lama model that made it easier to do this that I'm not, I don't know, the answer to you know me now. I think the market at the point at which you take these sort of raw, unformed pieces of clay and turn them into a useful jar, this fine tuning thing.
The market of people that have the lexical ability to do that and to slave over the fine tuning data, but also of the ability to run these pie torch models is really small. And so you end up with these inefficiencies of Y, X over Y. Well, just the scene was in another space that week.
To your point, Lama was the hot thing. Had a funny name. And so a bunch of people at Stanford did it. I'm pretty sure if those people at Stanford truly applied themselves to T5, just like Flan did to T5, they could have done a better and structured version model of it. And so yeah, it's sort of funny that the market's not efficient. That way it's just we're in this era where the truth is fine tuning and taking again this raw model and making it something you can converse with that has a personality, that is actually a design problem.
That is not a hardcore engineering problem, but there are no design tools for it yet. I mean, this will emerge over time. They'll be the equivalent of word for these models where people who have the design sensibility, your sort of Aaron Sorkins of the world, will be able to write instructions to those models. But that doesn't exist.
And so you end up having a very small number of people that can live in both worlds and do both. It's very reminiscent of the early days of iOS where there were just very few people that knew how to make really polished apps, but also new objective C. And so that was a real edge, the companies that had it, a lot of the more old school Mac developers. And that grew over time. And now with react native designers can make beautiful apps and apps just get more beautiful.
And so the reason I think that market's so inefficient now is you just sort of don't have tools for fine tuning, which is ultimately a very much sort of lexical as-thete job where you have to look at the right words, really slave over the fine tuning data. Is it nudging the model in the right way? And just very few people have both, you know, yin and yang in their head.
Is this you sort of mentioned before, there's no Walt Disney or Steve Jobs. Is that sort of the bit that you're driving at?
你之前所提到的是,没有沃尔特·迪士尼或史蒂夫·乔布斯,是不是你说的重点就在于这个?
Yeah, I think we're entering this sort of odd area of AI where things are getting pretty big. I mean, you know, chat GPT, we were saying might have a billion users, you know, at some point, you know, in the next 12 months. And the sad thing to me, and actually the really alarming thing to me, is not the capability of the models or whether it's connected to the internet or not, to me, it's the fact that the models, known as really spent time making them, you know, sort of wonderful and fun in a Pixar way.
We don't have a John Lasseter or in Walt Disney, who's really focused on the technology, but also the enjoyment of the model. And so every day on the internet, billions of tokens are being issued from these AI systems, which is by the way, reflexive effect, meaning future AI systems will be training on the output of current AI systems.
我们没有像约翰·拉塞特或华特·迪士尼那样真正专注于技术和模型的享受的人。因此,每天都有数十亿个代币从这些 AI 系统中发行,顺便说一下,这是一种反射性效应,意味着未来的 AI 系统将会受到当前 AI 系统的输出训练。
The underlying genome of these systems is not sort of whimsical, funny, joyful. And that's really issue in my view, because every day the problem gets worse. It's sort of an exponential rate, as the norm for AI is sort of very strict, very guarded, you know, very much trying not to offend anyone, but also being extremely offensive in some ways, once it's quote unquote jail broken.
We're missing, I think we're missing just because these people are rare. I mean, Steve Jobs is like a, is a rare thing. People that can really think deeply about how to make a very funny LLM. I mean, I've been shouting, you know, at NAD and anyone else who will listen to me, that we need to find someone making a really funny language model, which is not easy to do, by the way.
And I think on a relative basis, many more papers about LLM's doing math than LLM's being funny. But I think actually being funny is much more important. And I would sort of argue broadly a very important direction, if you think about, you know, broader AI safety, risk, and all that sort of stuff.
You know, it should feel like as if we're creating the world's best pet, not the world's smartest actuary. And we don't have that spirit now. And I know I'm hoping the market will sort of produce it at some point, because I think that's something we really need.
You know, and I think the one corner where we do see this is there are these businesses that generate, you know, not words, but they generate images, you know, businesses like Lexica or mid-journey. And those, you know, can be used obviously for good or bad. But you know, when you see a really funny mid-journey image, you know, you laugh. That's funny. That's awesome. And I think we need much more of that.
And I'm personally interested in funding much more of that. And you know, much less of, you know, can we solve the Riemann hypothesis or whatnot? And mid-journey does seem the one that, although it's interesting, their recent model is, which was kind of got buried under everything else.
And they're just sort of over in their little discord world. And I think it's actually really to their benefit, because they're like, they're user based bioconciles as astronomical and their revenue is incredible. And they kind of get a just escape by all the criticism, because who's wants to install discord. But the V5, the full realism is unbelievable.
But at the root of mid-journey is the whimsy that was V1, V2, V3. That's right. And that's something that's just part of what mid-journey means now. And I think that is something that's, you know, if you've talked, I gave it a holes on for an interview. It's kind of no surprise that that's downstream from that.
Yeah, I saw him a couple days ago in San Francisco and I asked him, hey, David, how much is your thumb on the scale now when it comes to the aesthetics of the model? Because I know you were heavily involved in making sure it was, you know, fantastical and imagination tool, that sort of thing at the very beginning. And he said kind of not at all anymore. He said that the human feedback they have now, they have to nudge it a little bit out of some gullies that might otherwise sort of land in. But the human feedback does it.
And by the way, on the funny image front, the first mid-journey image that fooled me was just like the other day, it was the Pope in that giant puffy jacket. I don't know, the Balenciaga Pope, I don't know if you saw that one. I thought that was real. I thought the joke was that this looks like an AI image.
顺便说一句,在有趣的图像方面,第一张欺骗我中途的图像就像前几天一样,那是教皇穿着巨大的蓬松夹克。我不知道,大家看到那个巴黎世家教皇了吗?我当时认为它是真的。我以为这个笑话是它看起来像一张 AI 图像。
So there you go. No, that was the image you're looking at. Yeah. If you look in the corner and near his hand, you can see like he's carrying a ghostly I don't know, he's sort of something. Yeah, looks like a Starbucks. Looks like someone is generating like a celebrity like coat thing, which always has a Starbucks coffee cup. That's what it looks like. That's funny.
But I do think there's some, you know, I think by mid-journey V6, probably that's gone and you just won't be able to tell without detailed forensic analysis. And, you know, within a year or two, 80% of the population will be functionally insane because we won't know what's real on the internet or not.
The good news is I think the people have been doctrine words and images forever on the internet. And too many people I think have been sort of a loop to that. And if we can, if these models make people default skeptical about things they see because they think it's from this quote, quote, AI model. Oh, I won't want to get fooled. That's fantastic in my view.
好消息是,我认为人们在互联网上的学说词和图像已经被永远铭刻在他们脑海中。而且我认为太多的人已经陷入了这种循环中。如果我们能够做到,如果这些模型能让人们对所见到的东西持怀疑态度,因为他们认为这是来自所谓的 AI 模型,那就太好了。噢,我可不想被愚弄。在我看来这太棒了。
I mean, we've been looking for a way to sort of up level the degree of thinking people have on the internet. And I think it's great if everyone would be a little bit more suspicious. Yeah, the answer is just to, to, people are believing too much crap. So we're going to completely and utterly immerse you in crap until you don't realize it's all crap. Yeah. That seems to be where we're going.
That's one of the potential risks of AI. I actually agree with you, Daniel. That's a potential benefit. I have heard, I think, a lot more chatter from folks, I think including you, Nat, that have generally been somewhat skeptical of the AI alignment movement, particularly to the extent it seems more concerned about political positions than maybe about actual like existential risk that no, actually, maybe there is an existential risk sort of question here.
I mean, what's your, yeah, how is that shifted for you? Yeah, I mean, I think I've always been, this is sort of an uncomfortable conversation for me. I've had to face some of my long held elements of my identity and beliefs to think kind of from first principles about it, not just by analogy, but, you know, I think there are some elements of the risks here that are real and we're thinking about and kind of the way I arrive at that is, and I'm still trying to determine exactly what I think and so trying to talk to smart people here.
But the way I arrive at that is, you know, number one, like just take GPT-4, we know how to make it, but we don't really know how it works. Like there's no one on Earth that really knows truly what's going on inside of that thing. It's probably arguably the most complex artifact we've ever created in our civilization. You know, it's got over a trillion parameters, just inferencing it, I'm guessing takes at a 16 or 24 A 100s, you know, a single A 100 can do something like 300 trillion floating point operations per second.
So if you've got 16 of them, you're doing like, I don't know what that is, four or five, a trillion floating point operations per second. And that's a lot, you know, like that's crazy. And so there are kind of these big blobs of math and we don't actually know what's going, there's like literally, I've tried to find the person who knows what's happening inside of there.
Like we can explain it at the kind of, you know, quantum mechanical level, but the phenomenology above that, no one really understands. And then, you know, I've had access to it for months, but people are still showing me things like every day on Twitter and I'll swear that it can do that. I didn't realize like I'd played with it, but I hadn't found them. So there's kind of hidden capabilities in there that we don't know about.
So it's big, it's complicated. We don't know how it works. It's got this capability overhang built into it. And then there are clear examples where we're still learning to kind of control it, where it's going to go off and do something we don't want it to do.
I think the Bing chat Sydney example was a very public demonstration of how even, you know, Microsoft is very closely partnered with OpenAI and is full of smart researchers. You know, they can even have one of these things kind of slip deletion go off and do things that's not spiced to. And then I just say we're really eager to hook these things up.
You know, we talked about the Wolverine, you know, the Puy example or just like running code with that really reading it. I think that is going to be normal. Or the plugins. When I got access to plugins, the web, the access web plugin was gone. I'm not sure what happened there, but I could have had to. Yeah, the plugins were interesting. It was for long.
Somebody said there's a way in which the plugins were like seeing the humanoid robot power on and this frizzing of energy just pass through the body and it sits out on the table or whatever. And, you know, it's not just talking to you. It's now taking action in the world on your behalf or God knows exactly what it's doing. And that was sort of a moment.
And then I think the other thing that I've, you know, started to think about is like maybe human intelligence is not so impressive. You know, like maybe our intelligence, which has seemed so singular and unique, maybe it just can be exceeded. Like this is not a theoretical thing or a fun sci-fi idea, but maybe it's just something very practically we can do and maybe kind of very, very quickly.
You know, you take GPT-4, you add a little scratch pad, you add some memory, you throw it into a loop, you give it the internet and a bank account, like what's going to happen? It's sort of hard to predict exactly. And so I think then kind of my final thought is that over time these things will, you know, not just respond to queries, but there'll be agents, you know, they'll execute plans. People are already in the sort of hustle GPT corner of the internet, you know, empowering them to run e-commerce businesses autonomously to see what happens. And so there are these agents that are like copyable and they're also subject to some kind of selection pressure and just like where does that go from a Darwinian point of view.
And so I don't know, I'm still sort of thinking this through, but I think these are really legitimate, they sound crazy, but they're legitimate concerns. And I think there's a lot of people outside of the tech folks who are just naturally kind of creeped out by AI. And I think whatever that instinct is has like something in it that's essentially worth paying attention to. And like those of us who are just purely boosters, which I had certainly been and probably still in largely should think about it a little bit.
I don't know though. I mean, well, I, number one, I don't know. I think that is sort of the big picture takeaway for literally all of this is we are in completely unprecedented, uncharted territory. And I think part of the reaction against sort of AI essentialism is some of the people that are talking about AI risk are so absolute is in their statement that there's a natural sort of pushback against that you don't want to grant any sort of room there.
But at, you know, at the same time, you mentioned the selection pressure. We've talked about the open source models like China, you know, there was a model that came out in China that is not as capable, but it exists. And we've worked if we don't anything in tech over the last 40 years, it's that the level of capability on the day something is launched is much less important than whether or not it exists, right?
The fact that Lama runs on a Raspberry Pi is meaningful, not because you're going to use on a Raspberry Pi, it's because it shows that inevitably it's out there and it's going to happen. And that's the reality of this stuff. It's all a matter of timing at this point, which, you know, means there's a bit about the internet. Like you can talk about the internet was this actually good for society? It doesn't really matter. That's a nice discussion to have around a fire, wait at night or whatever your recreational choices, because it is here and the only way to figure out these issues is to go forward.
Lama 在 Raspberry Pi 上运行这个事实具有意义,并不是因为你要在 Raspberry Pi 上使用它,而是因为它表明这些技术已经不可避免地存在且将会发生。这就是这个领域的现实。现在只是一个时间问题,这意味着这与互联网有些关系。就像你可以谈论互联网是否真正有益于社会一样,这并不重要。这是一个很好的讨论话题,可以在晚上在篝火旁或在任何娱乐选择中进行,因为它已经到来了,解决这些问题的唯一方法是向前走。
And it feels like we've already crossed that Rubicon with this AI stuff. So let's push forward and figure it out. And if we blow ourselves up on the frost as well, it was probably going to happen regardless. It definitely does seem like there's just unlimited enthusiasm. That's probably where we're headed.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting question and no longer theoretical, no longer fictional and to your point, like the GPT-4 was built on A 100s, like chips that are out there and exist, right? And to your point, GPT-4 has so much capability that it's going to take us years to digest it and figure out what can be done with it.
Even if you think the door to the barge should be shut, the horse is over the horizon. It's a moot point at this point. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's interesting.
即使你觉得驳船的大门应该关闭,马已经到了地平线。这个问题现在是毫无意义的。嗯。嗯,我觉得这很有趣。
I think there will probably be a market for tools to better, you know, we have dog training businesses to Daniel's pet point. And you can send your dog off to finishing school to get trained or there's techniques for teaching your pet kind of to be house trained or even having guard dogs that will attack intruders, but not you.
And so I think there's going to be a real market need for tools and techniques to, yeah, just to like quality, do quality assurance on these things, validate them and sure they do the things you want, not the things you don't want. And like probably the more powerful they are and the more we hook them up, the greater the demand for those techniques will be. And it would be cool if in some areas we got ahead there and didn't merely react although it will probably mostly be.
Yeah, well, the other issue is the fact that language is super important and meaningful. Because I think the vector of risk is much less the terminator. It figures out how to operate machines and do XYZ. It's going to be it convincing people to do things. And like that, it already has the brain blood barrier sort of has already been broken in that regard because language is the ultimate viral mode of virality. Like it's already there.
One thing though, one area where one of the reasons I keep on harping about, you know, the output of the models really matter now is we've had these systems for creating tokens that drive humans insane for 10 years now and it's called social media and it does drive people insane. And the nice thing about the system that we have now is we have the opportunity to control the types of tokens it emits to people in a much more specific way. I think then we did with social media where you just get random tweets and retweets and you can't really shadowbound people because they find out you've been shadowbound. And so I do think we have a choice.
Whether these models sort of drive people to be more open and happy or whether they drive people insane based on what they say. I grew through that the main risk is not that they shut down the Azure data center but just that they start driving people to do wild things.
I do sort of think, I mean, if you could force all AI to just be funnier, you know, from some dream regulation that we're with that actually would work, which is impossible. But in that hypothetical world, everything would be better. And so because of the centralization dynamic with sort of these language models, I mean, the tokens are ultimately outputted by one of five companies now. I actually think you can actually do much better than the current status quo, which is social media emitting tokens that really drive people off the wall and, you know, obviously you heard our, I think our country quite a bit down the world as well just in terms of vulcanizing everyone.
It's a phenomenal point because I think there's a good chance we look at this 20 year run as a total aberration that on one hand was useful to give these models this sort of raw language that they needed to learn. But it was actually all things considered a pretty crappy experience for everyone. Right?
I mean, I mentioned this on a recent chart, tech episode, but I feel like I'm living in the future in this regard specifically where basically all of my social interactions in encrypted chat apps and it's in a high trust environment with people that I like hanging out with and the way things can be perceived and whatever is just so much better. And it's a genuine meaningful improvement in my life. And this idea of public social media was absolutely insane. We're just, we're not like, how can AI be worse than this idea that you're going to just put yourself out there on the internet?
Anyone can drive by and take shots at your criticize you or you can become the current thing of the day. Like it's just an all around sort of bad idea. And so to your point, Daniel, like it's just going to be more pleasant to interact with this AI and people view that as a bad thing. But I think that's a inherent distrust of the future and improperly evaluating where we're at right now.
I mean, every time I say that, I think Twitter is a real big problem, people get upset. They're like, oh, you're so anti-tech. No, I'm like, no, it's not good.
Humans were not meant to interface with the entire world in real time.
人类并不打算实时地与整个世界进行接口交互。
Yeah, we are encountering, by the way, more and more companies that are really interesting that are in a way we've kind of come to believe competing with social media with AI.
And you can kind of think about these parasocial relationships that people have set up on social media where you follow, I don't know, the rock on Instagram and the rock it writes post. And hundreds of thousands of people reply. And the rock reads approximately zero of those replies and responds to even fewer. And so what is that relationship that you have with the rock? It's not a real relationship.
你可以想象人们在社交媒体上建立的这种“准直播关系”,比如你在Instagram上关注“The Rock” ,他发帖子,数十万人回复,但是The Rock 实际上只回复了极少数。那么你与The Rock形成的这种关系是什么?它不是真正的关系。
And then if you have an AI friend online that you can talk to, whether it's a chat GPT or character.ai, which is a great back-sidney. Yeah, or Sydney or whoever it is that gets you excited, then at least you know they're going to like read and reply to your mouth, at least you have a two-way relationship.
The numbers on these, even just pure entertainment, non-productivity chatbots, like replica or character are crazy. People are spending hours a day talking to them. And they're not even funny. Just imagine how good they would be if they were funny.
I'm serious. I mean, there was one effort we know of, you know, that I actually, I mean, is the way they set it up is particularly convenient. And I've found myself reaching for it, you know, and I say this as a person like, you know, I have the great pleasure of being able to WhatsApp on that Friedman and Ben Thompson at any time of the day.
It's helpful to talk sometimes to these other things. And so I think it's one of those ideas that sounds really out there to people. In my view, it's better to Nats Point than the current status quo, which are these parasocial relationships, the drive loneliness, because it is like interacting with a human that never responds or has eye contact with you.
That's what responding and not getting a response back feels like. I think at a deep basic level. And that's why people are walking around, you know, days confused and depressed. Whereas these agents, especially if they're made well, especially if they're funny and enlightening and whimsical, I think will be much better.
And to your point, Ben, we may treat the last two decades as a giant training run in order to create this era of sort of infinite companionship, which hopefully is good. Now, look, it can get just as dystopian as it is good. Fire can be used for arson.
You know, every technology has two sides. But, you know, this is where I think, you know, there's some element of responsibility in everyone making these models to make them funny. I think that really, really matters.
It's a really good boy. I think actually this is sort of a, to go take this full circle six months ago, you're like, where are the people that are making the products, right? There's just a lot of research. Well, we answered that.
But I do think there's almost like the, the Aliza sort of optimists angle, which is actually this is good. And it's not good because it's more productive. It's good because this is going to make people happier.
And again, the truth is probably going to be somewhere in the middle, right? It's not going to be one extreme, one way or the other. But I see no reason why, you know, if you think about all the expected value outcomes, yes, I grant there is this very dark outcome where the machines are just so much smarter and somehow they gain volition, despite the fact that it's not clear how that bridge is going to be crossed.
But there's also, it's just as reasonable to have not utopian, but a very one that relative to the terrible 2010s, this is actually people are happier. They're more productive. They actually have better real world relationships because this distinction between online and offline is actually more meaningful.
This is the bit about like getting them more shit, right? It's almost a good thing to make online, the digital and the real, the more distinction the better because that's is going to invest you or incentivize you to invest more in the real world, which makes people happier. I think there's a valid case to make.
Yeah, I know. There's definitely upside scenarios here which are extreme. And you know, I recently rewatched that movie, her, I think, I did do it. I talked about this. Did you watch it? Okay, yeah. After this indie experience. Yeah.
I mean, I had remembered it as this sort of dystopian kind of world and there were certainly parts of it that still felt that way. But, you know, I saw a different story when I watched it this time, which was.
He was happy. Yeah, I mean, there's just an, yeah, I wrote about that very patiently performed therapy on this traumatized man and then released him at the moment. He was ready to kind of reenter the world of human relationships. And it's an incredible story when you view it that way.
He was greatly improved by his interactions with this, with this AI. And yeah, I mean, hopefully that's, that's what we're building. I think probably we're building that right now to a much greater degree than most people appreciate.
That's a perfect note to end it on. Good to check in. We somehow, I think we made it through most of it was we didn't get to in video. But that's fine. We can leave that for a few months from now.