It’s hard to ignore the discussion around the Open Letter arguing for a pause in the development of advanced AI systems. Are they dangerous? Will they destroy humanity? Will they condemn all but a few of us to boring, impoverished lives? If these are indeed the dangers we face, pausing AI development for six months is certainly a weak and ineffective preventive. It’s easier to ignore the voices arguing for the responsible use of AI. Using AI responsibly requires AI to be transparent, fair, and where possible, explainable. Using AI means auditing the outputs of AI systems to ensure that they’re ..read more

This post is a brief commentary on Martin Fowler’s post, An Example of LLM Prompting for Programming. If all I do is get you to read that post, I’ve done my job. So go ahead–click the link, and come back here if you want. There’s a lot of excitement about how the GPT models and their successors will change programming. That excitement is merited. But what’s also clear is that the process of programming doesn’t become “ChatGPT, please build me an enterprise application to sell shoes.” Although I, along with many others, have gotten ChatGPT to write small programs, sometimes correctly, some ..read more

The notion that artificial intelligence will help us prepare for the world of tomorrow is woven into our collective fantasies. Based on what we’ve seen so far, however, AI seems much more capable of replaying the past than predicting the future. That’s because AI algorithms are trained on data. By its very nature, data is an artifact of something that happened in the past. You turned left or right. You went up or down the stairs. Your coat was red or blue. You paid the electric bill on time or you paid it late.  Data is a relic–even if it’s only a few milliseconds old. And it’s safe to sa ..read more

ChatGPT, or something built on ChatGPT, or something that’s like ChatGPT, has been in the news almost constantly since ChatGPT was opened to the public in November 2022. What is it, how does it work, what can it do, and what are the risks of using it? A quick scan of the web will show you lots of things that ChatGPT can do. Many of these are unsurprising: you can ask it to write a letter, you can ask it to make up a story, you can ask it to write descriptive entries for products in a catalog. Many of these go slightly (but not very far) beyond your initial expectations: you can ask it to gener ..read more

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about what you needed to know to use ChatGPT (or Bing/Sydney, or any similar service). It’s easy to ask it questions, but we all know that these large language models frequently generate false answers. Which raises the question: If I ask ChatGPT something, how much do I need to know to determine whether the answer is correct? So I did a quick experiment. As a short programming project, a number of years ago I made a list of all the prime numbers less than 100 million. I used this list to create a 16-digit number that was the product of two 8-digit prim ..read more

It’s been well publicized that Google’s Bard made some factual errors when it was demoed, and Google paid for these mistakes with a significant drop in their stock price. What didn’t receive as much news coverage (though in the last few days, it’s been well discussed online) are the many mistakes that Microsoft’s new search engine, Sydney, made. The fact that we know its name is Sydney is one of those mistakes, since it’s never supposed to reveal its name. Sydney-enhanced Bing has threatened and insulted its users, in addition to being just plain wrong (insisting that it was 2022, and insistin ..read more

What would you say is the job of a software developer? A layperson, an entry-level developer, or even someone who hires developers will tell you that job is to … well … write software. Pretty simple. An experienced practitioner will tell you something very different. They’d say that the job involves writing some software, sure. But deep down it’s about the purpose of software. Figuring out what kinds of problems are amenable to automation through code. Knowing what to build, and sometimes what not to build because it won’t provide value. They may even summarize it as: “my job is to spot for ..read more

Although I don’t subscribe to the idea that history or technology moves in jerky one-year increments, it’s still valuable to take stock at the start of a new year, look at what happened last year, and decide what was important and what wasn’t. We started the year with many people talking about an “AI winter.” A quick Google search shows that anxiety about an end to AI funding has continued through the year. Funding comes and goes, of course, and with the possibility of a media-driven recession, there’s always the possibility of a funding collapse. Funding aside, 2022 has been a fantastic year ..read more

Major catastrophes can transform industries and cultures. The Johnstown Flood, the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the Hindenburg, the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina–each had a lasting impact. Even when catastrophes don’t kill large numbers of people, they often change how we think and behave. The financial collapse of 2008 led to tighter regulation of banks and financial institutions. The Three Mile Island accident led to safety improvements across the nuclear power industry. Sometimes a series of negative headlines can shift opinion and amplify our awareness of lurking vulnera ..read more

Gartner has anointed “Hyperautomation” one of the top 10 trends for 2022. Should it be? Is it a real trend, or just a collection of buzzwords? As a trend, it’s not performing well on Google; it shows little long-term growth, if any, and gets nowhere near as many searches as terms like “Observability” and “Generative Adversarial Networks.” And it’s never bubbled up far enough into our consciousness to make it into our monthly Trends piece. As a trend, we’re openly skeptical about Hyperautomation. However, that skeptical conclusion is too simplistic. Hyperautomation may just be another ploy in t ..read more