On April 22, 2022, I received an out-of-the-blue text from Sam Altman inquiring about the possibility of training GPT-4 on O’Reilly books. We had a call a few days later to discuss the possibility. As I recall our conversation, I told Sam I was intrigued, but with reservations. I explained to him that we could only license our data if they had some mechanism for tracking usage and compensating authors. I suggested that this ought to be possible, even with LLMs, and that it could be the basis of a participatory content economy for AI. (I later wrote about this […]

Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place. The company seeks to minimize costs while meeting a 23 percent increase in demand. Wouldn’t it be easier for the company to just ask ChatGPT to come up with an optimal plan? In fact, for all their incredible capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often perform […]

On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot.  I was surprised by those results, which you can read about in my full story. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an AI model trained to provide therapy is the solution for millions of people experiencing a mental health crisis. How could a bot mimic the expertise of a trained therapist? And what […]