Links and listens #3

Writing this list on the eve of the Lunar New Year holidays in Taiwan. It's a time for ... not resting at all, eating all day, collecting red envelopes, and eating some more.

Laurie Voss reflects on his experiences with AI, where it shines, and where it falls short of expectations. I vibe with his sentiments that Language Models (LMs) at the moment are suited to tasks are based on summarising text. I've found that's increasingly all I'm using them for.

There is no way to get an LLM to perform the thought necessary to write something for you. You have to do the thinking. To get an LLM to write something good you have to give it a prompt so long you might as well have just written the thing yourself.

Sticking with the topic of AI, Jeremy Keith explains how his views towards LMs are shifting especially in relation to their environmental impacts. He also floats an idea that I've seen a few others talking about too, the idea of charging a fair price for LM useage based on their actual energy and/or water usage.

Personally, I’d just like to see these tools charge a fair price for their usage. Right now they’re being subsidised by venture capital. If people actually had to pay out of pocket for the energy used per query, we’d get a much better idea of how valuable these tools actually are to people.

Yeah okay, this is a AI-themed edition of links and listens. Max Böck has a dig at the different AI "enhancements" users are having aggressively shoved down their throats. Often they're being added to products and services that the users are already used to using, and the users are being forced to opt-out (and sometimes that's even hard to do). More often than not, the quality of these AI "enhancements" detract from what once was a useful product.

I get that it’s not as fun to build “a faster horse”. To just make the thing you already have better, more reliable, more helpful. It doesn’t get your shareholders excited, and it doesn’t make you look like a visionary genius.

Shayle speaks with Mike Grunwald about the challenges of industrial agriculture, how we can increase yields per acre to continue feeding the world without using up more land for agriculture, and other potential solutions. This was a fascinating conversation about a topic that I'm not too familiar with, but which touches each and every one of us.

If you can grow beef without growing the cow ... you can imagine how it could be a really efficient process. Now, right now, they're basically using pharma-grade equipment to make food. And, you know, it's the economics of growing somebody a new heart are a lot, you know, easier than the economics of growing lunch.