I’m trying not to be perfectionist about this blogging thing, and concentrate on getting stuff out so in that spirit so this week there’s just a few links, all on AI.
First up - how to use AI.
I see so many people type some random question into ChatGPT/Claude, get a mediocre answer back and move on. But how to get good results from these systems is not at all obvious. For a complex example, see my post on Experimenting with Deep Research or an even more extensive example of using one model to generate a prompt for another
But “just use another model to generate your prompt” isn’t exactly helpful advice on how to get started! Every’s post on how to use AI may have a clickbait title, but is a really good summary of the basics - experiment, write things down, repeat: Your CEO Just Said ‘Use AI or Else.’ Here’s What to Do Next
And for a very developer focused version, Nicholas Carlini’s How I use AI is also good
The Robots Are/Are Not Going to Kill Us
A massive, massive piece from Google Deep Mind on AGI and Safety. Even if you don’t buy the hype, it’s worth reading the first part to understand Google’s position. tl;dr they see not reason that current methods won’t scale past human level intelligence, and that this is likely to happen by 2030
There’s a lot of background on page 20 and forward in the paper as to why they make these assumptions.
Google on AI Safety and AGI - blog post and full paper