blog of Ben Thompson

Dave Winer: ChatGPT clearly has a place. This thread is worth money. I've given ChatGPT programming jobs like the ones the author descibes, and it's saved me huge amounts of time. Last one was asking how to do something with the Twitter API. I could have spent fifteen minutes trying to find it in the docs (more)

Robin Sloan: How the ring got good. I’ve been tearing through a series of books I never expected to read, and they have revealed something breath­taking about where The Good Stuff comes from. (more)

Dan Sinker: Use Your Illusion. It's March 11, 1918. Eva Carrière sits in a corner of a darkened room, mostly obscured by thick black curtains on three sides. The front is curtained too, but she can open and close those (more)

Robin Sloan: Author's note. My new short story was com­mis­sioned by Google and pro­duced using a new AI-powered edi­tor called Word­craft. Titled Author’s Note, it is pre­sented along­side new sto­ries from sev­eral other very impres­sive writ­ers. (more)

Simon Willison: In defense of prompt engineering. I’ve seen two subtly different meanings for that term: (more)

Robin Sloan: Attention router. Throughout 2023, this newsletter will be largely devoted to mapping new “ways of relating” online. You can return to the December edition, if you missed it, to get the gist. (more)

Robin Sloan: Phase change. Group of internet thinkers has proposed a Summer of Protocols. I don’t know a ton about the program or its organizers, but I like the spirit captured on the website, and I feel like it might be a gener­a­tive oppor­tu­nity for someone(s) reading this. (more)

Nathan Baschez: Supercharging My Focus (with Help from AI). When I was about 12 years old, my mom took me to a doctor’s office... I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #1: Sydney and Bing. Microsoft and OpenAI released the chatbot Sydney as part of the search engine Bing (more)

Ted Chiang: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Imagine that you’re about to lose your access to the Internet forever. In preparation, you plan to create a compressed copy of all the text on the Web, so that you can store it on a private server. Unfortunately, your private server has only one per cent of the space needed (more)

LM Sacasas: The Prompt Box is a Minefield: AI Chatbots and Power of Language. This is a brief, rather urgent reflection on the rapidly developing field of a AI-powered chatbots. I confess these thoughts are born out of an unusually acute sense of the risks posed by these chatbots as they have been deployed (more)

ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models. (cf LLM) (more)

Noah Brier: The Prompt To Rule All Prompts. (Welcome to the BrXnd Dispatch: your bi-weekly dose of ideas at the intersection of brands and AI.) A friend sent me this post about creating a tool that uses GPT-3 and a site called StatMuse to do natural language searches of basketball data (more)

Matt Webb: The surprising ease and effectiveness of AI in a loop. AI is still in the foothills of its adoption S-curve, and I love this period of any new technology – the scope of what it can do is unknown, so the main job is to stretch the imagination and try out things. (more)

Simon Willison: A simple Python implementation of the ReAct pattern for LLMs. A popular nightmare scenario for AI is giving it access to tools, so it can make API calls and execute its own code and generally break free of the constraints of its initial environment. Let's do that now! (more)

Geoffrey Litt: Fuzzy API composition: querying NBA stats with GPT-3 + Statmuse + Langchain. LLMs locked in a room tend to make things up; why not let them use Google and a calculator too? (more)

Linus Lee: AI as a creative collaborator. I spent the last couple of months delving deeper into how I could integrate elements of modern machine learning with my love of building personal knowledge tools. (Tools for Thought) (more)

Bret Taylor is stepping down as Salesforce.com co-CEO. This is a big personnel move: Taylor was promoted to co-CEO last year, and was widely seen as Marc Benioff’s likely successor

Slack.com CEO Stewart Butterfield is leaving in January. Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield is leaving Salesforce.com in January, reports Business Insider (more)