Page 9
Much of what we do as modern people—at work and beyond—is to process information and generate action. GPT-4 will massively speed your ability to do these things, and with greater breadth and scope. Within a few years, this copilot will fall somewhere between useful and essential to most professionals and many other sorts of workers. Without GPT-4, they'll be slower, less comprehensive, and working at a great disadvantage.
Page 14
GPT-4 doesn't have the equivalent of a human mind. It's still helpful to think in terms of its "perspective," anthropomorphizing it a bit, because using language like "perspective" helps convey that GPT-4 does in fact operate in ways that are not entirely fixed, consistent, or predictable. In this way, it actually is like a human. It makes mistakes. It changes its "mind." It can be fairly arbitrary.
Page 15
They can also sometimes generate replies that include factual errors, explicitly nonsensical utterances, or made-up passages that may seem (in some sense) contextually appropriate but have no basis in truth.
Page 16
Even with various guardrails in place, an LLM itself can't make reasoned judgments about complex ethical quandaries, or even about more straightforward questions.
Page 20
in your overall quest for authoritative information, GPT-4 helps you start somewhere much closer to the finish line than if you didn't have it as a resource.
Page 22
But when human users treat GPT-4 as a co-pilot or a collaborative partner, it becomes far more powerful. You compound GPT-4's computational generativity, efficiency, synthetic powers, and capacity to scale with human creativity, human judgment, and human guidance.
Creativity
Page 58
Reid: GPT-4, once large language models are fully developed and deployed, what would you suspect will be the worst effects on the quality of overall cultural production? (200 words) (less wooden style than usual)
Page 58
Homogenization and loss of diversity: Large language models could generate massive amounts of content that mimic existing styles, genres, and trends, but lack originality, creativity, and authenticity. This could result in a saturation of the cultural market with bland and repetitive products that appeal to the lowest common denominator and discourage innovation and experimentation.
Journalism
Page 84
But transparency and accountability are the true north of any society that aspires to truth- seeking. And, in a world overwhelmed by misinformation, disinformation, and simply too much information, it becomes especially necessary for truth- seekers to live the values they work to preserve.
Page 89
Throughout this leg of my journey, I've asserted that the spread of AI tools like GPT-4 will create once-in-a-generation opportunities for journalism and journalists.
Page 89
It's hard to embrace risks that lead to growth when you've been stuck so long in survival mode.
Page 89
when the need for principled truth-seeking is more pressing than ever, there are clearly opportunities, especially for those who can figure out novel ways to capitalize on new AI tools as they come online. Leveraging new technologies' power is one of the main ways the journalism industry grew in the past, and probably the main way it can do so again.
Social Media
Page 96
when my co-founders and I launched LinkedIn twenty years ago, we were motivated largely by the fact that the divisions between "cyberspace" and "the real world" were rapidly collapsing. Instead of existing as a place that people "went to" under the cover of pseudonymous screen names, the internet had evolved into a place that people were using to facilitate their lives.
Transformation of Work
Page 104
In my opinion, ignoring AI is like ignoring blogging in the late 1990s, or social media circa 2004, or mobile in 2007. Very quickly, some degree of facility with these tools will be increasingly essential for all professionals, a primary driver for new opportunities and new jobs.
Page 105
knowledge workers are also facing these challenges. While I strongly believe that these new AI tools will create new jobs and new industries, along with great economic benefits and other quality-of-life gains, they will also eliminate some jobs, both blue- and white-collar.
Page 105
To navigate this moment most effectively, though, we must also do so with an adaptive, forward- looking perspective. In my mind, that means embracing AI in the same spirit that we once embraced the Model T and the Apple II.
Page 118
believe that the future will see the sales profession shrink as a whole. At the same time, the productivity of individual sales professionals will increase, and likely their compensation as well. And the AI-driven increased quality of selling means that companies that aggressively adopt these tools will beat any competitors that don't.
Page 119
can see how AI could equal or exceed the work of human clerks and paralegals for conducting patent searches, digging through discovery data, or searching for red flags in long, boring contracts. Leveraging AI might also be a good first step before bringing in an (expensive) outside expert, or to make a lawyer's usage of such an expert more effective.
GPT-4 In My Own Work
Page 126
Principle 1: Treat GPT-4 like an undergrad research assistant, not an omniscient oracle.
Page 126
Principle 2: Think of yourself as a director, not a carpenter.
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Principle 3: Just try it!
When AI Makes Things Up ("Hallucinations")
Page 152
believe LLMs have the capacity to answer a much wider range of questions than Wikipedia or any other source; I believe they can answer these questions faster; and I believe they can do so through an intuitive interface that makes information retrieval highly accessible to a wide range of users.
Homo Techne
Page 196
Technologies are never neutral. We embed the tools and systems we create with specific values and specific intents, and assume that they will produce specific outcomes. This doesn't necessarily limit their potential uses. A car can be a weapon, a life-saving device, a place to sleep, and many other things, but that doesn't make it "neutral." Above everything else, a car is a technology that prioritizes effortless and extremely powerful mobility—and it ends up having much different impacts on the world than, say, a horse-drawn carriage or a bicycle.
Page 196
But if it's detrimental to society to claim that "technology is neutral" in order to evade responsibility for tech's potential negative outcomes, so is invalidating a technology simply because it has a capacity to produce negative outcomes along with positive ones.
Conclusion: At the Crossroads of the 21st Century
Page 209
The paradox of the AI era is this: as today's imperfect LLMs improve, requiring less and less from us, we will need to demand more from ourselves. We must always insist on situating GPT-4 and its successors as our collaborative partners, not our replacements. We must continue to figure out how to keep human creativity, human judgment, and human values at the center of the processes we devise to work with these new AI tools, even as they themselves grow more and more capable.
