They let just anyone put stuff on the Internet. (Including me.)
11 posts
Late night noodling, but even in the light of day this still feels right to me. If we mapped current #AI companies to consumer tech from the 2010s: Anthropic = Apple. Focused on high quality for a smaller market. Stubborn and opinionated in annoying ways, but innovating in important ones. Sets
Much of the advice around using AI is that if you use it, then you need to verify what it produces. This is presently good advice. But I'm doubtful it will be good advice in the long-run. Consider how little verification happens in large institutions by leaders who
Politically, academics are much more liberal than the average person. But Paul Bloom makes the excellent point that, in areas related to their work, academics are actually deeply conservative. Asking a prof about AI is like asking a taxi driver to weigh in on Uber. I think I have good
From an economist, about his extensive experiments with AI-driven academic research. I don’t have much of a research background, but his experiences seem right where expected. My point is that the experiment — can we do research at high speed without much human input — was a failure. And it wasn’
Companies laying off workers for AI agents are either misjudging how agents will work or they're just low-ambition companies.
Apropos to my earlier post about the Springer textbook with fake citations, academic journals are seeing a rash of the same thing. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he
I don’t think I can adequately stress how bad this is for a publisher as big as Springer to screw up this badly. A new textbook of theirs had extensive hallucinated sources. Based on a tip from a reader, we checked 18 of the 46 citations in the book.
The ability to do more doesn’t equate with wise judgment or good character. What we bring to AI matters at least as much as what AI can actually do.
AI-assisted cheating being so easy to do means the normal mechanisms for dealing with cheating get completely swamped.
Plenty of industries are getting stalked by AI right now. But if AI is the lioness, universities are the already-sickly members of the herd lamely trying to outrun her.
Since May, I've been using Cursor to build some projects that I'll certainly be sharing more here. It's been pretty invigorating. I've learned more in the last six months than I can remember learning at any time. And that includes grad school.