[HN Gopher] Paul Graham AI Essay Writer
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Paul Graham AI Essay Writer
Author : aubthread
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-01-24 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.paulgrahamai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.paulgrahamai.com)
| gigel82 wrote:
| This is really bad, looks like the kind of output you'd get from
| a self-hosted GPT-2 instance: the article "contents" doesn't
| include any reference to the given topic, it's just repeated
| mumbo jumbo: https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recnOmtVDt9C4C8ss
| aubthread wrote:
| Yeah that's certainly a wonky result. What do you think would
| cause that? My thoughts would be (i) the lack of content
| specifically related to 'herding' or 'cats' or (ii) the ratio
| of completions (~200) to completion-length (~2k words each) of
| the fine-tune data. I'm new to this so appreciate any feedback.
| aubthread wrote:
| Thanks everyone for checking this out! Anyone at OpenAI here that
| can expedite my limit increase request?
| tomdekan wrote:
| Good job! Some very funny pieces
| osmyn wrote:
| Great advice on minimizing distractions: You may be thinking 'I
| can't just delete my browser or delete my PC.' But you can delete
| your browser, or delete your PC, or move to a country where there
| are no PCs. If you want to get things done, you have to be
| willing to make sacrifices.
|
| https://www.paulgrahamai.com/rect2Rp1eu7V1I8JG
| aubthread wrote:
| Haha! Only real ones understand.
|
| This has echoes of his Disconnecting Distraction piece!
| marzell wrote:
| Well I asked for discussion about Smurfette as a sex symbol, and
| instead I got an article about She-Ra, sexualization of cartoons,
| and interesting discourse about Pixar and being able to do things
| in animation that you can't do otherwise [0]. Still it was pretty
| good even though it didn't mention Smurfs.
|
| [0]https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recPKFXrH5aI6KUks
| djha-skin wrote:
| The output asking him to write an essay on "Lisp" is a real
| gem[1]! There's some absurd things in there like "Lisp used to be
| Scheme" but some real gems of insights like "most languages
| weren't designed by their users, but Lisp kinda was". There is
| also the obvious AI garbage nonsense like "MIT programmers are
| people and people are MIT programmers" :P
|
| 1: https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recAjXpYUQCDArMUT
| aubthread wrote:
| Haha I think you've summarized it well! I've gotten some gems
| of one-liners, but often the arc of the essay is unintelligible
| or facts are reversed.
|
| On Sam Altman: "He's not just a fighter pilot. He's a
| helicopter pilot."
|
| On Stripe: "Online payments is a huge, broken mess. [...] And
| once you've done it, you have to deal with a Byzantine
| spaghetti of fraud detection, chargebacks, and so on."
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| (Example) How to Start a Successful Business January 2023 I've
| been writing for a while about how to start a startup, and I've
| noticed a pattern in the mistakes founders make. I thought I'd
| write a little about what I think is the most common mistake,
| because it's so easy to avoid.
|
| The most common mistake founders make is to underestimate the
| founders. They think they're smarter than they are.
|
| This is the mistake I made when I started Viaweb. I thought I was
| smarter than I was. I thought I could build a web application,
| but what I actually built was a Lisp application that ran on a
| web server. That was not what I wanted to build. Only when I
| realized I couldn't build what I wanted did I switch to building
| something I could build: the web.
|
| (I was lucky to realize this when I did. I was only a few months
| from running out of money.)
|
| The reason this mistake is so common is that it's usually
| harmless. It's usually harmless to overestimate your own
| abilities. If you think you can do a 10 day project in 7 days,
| and you're right, you save 3 days. If you think you can do a 10
| day project in 4 days, and you're right, you save 6 days. The
| difference between 7 days and 4 days is the same as the
| difference between 4 days and 1 day. [1]
|
| Only when you're building something new can underestimating your
| own abilities be harmless. Only then can you be sure you're going
| to hit a point where you realize you can't do what you thought
| you could. And then you're in trouble. [2]
|
| The reason founders make this mistake is that they're optimists.
| It's the nature of founders to overestimate their own abilities.
| They have to be. If they thought about how hard it would be to
| start a successful startup, they'd never do it.
|
| But it's not just founders who overestimate their own abilities.
| It's everyone. This is a mistake that can only be made by people
| who are both optimists and trying to do something new.
|
| Fortunately, it's also a mistake that's easy to avoid. The reason
| founders underestimate their own abilities is that they're
| pessimists. They have to be. Otherwise they wouldn't be founders;
| they'd be investors. So if you want to avoid this mistake, you
| have to consciously take on some of the pessimism of a founder.
| [3]
|
| If you want to start a successful startup, you have to be as
| pessimistic as a founder, but only about yourself. You have to be
| as pessimistic as a founder about the chances of success, and as
| optimistic as a founder about your own ability to make it.
|
| Notes
|
| [1] There is one case where overestimating your abilities can be
| a good thing: when you're doing something you know you can do.
| Then you can save time by underestimating.
|
| [2] The reason this mistake is so dangerous when you're building
| something new is that you're forced to make it at exactly the
| worst time. You're forced to realize you can't do what you
| thought you could at exactly the moment when you need to be able
| to.
|
| [3] There are two ways to be pessimistic. You can be pessimistic
| about the chances of success, or you can be pessimistic about
| your own ability to achieve it. I've found the latter to be more
| effective.
|
| For example, if you believe you can achieve a 10x improvement
| over existing solutions, but believe there's only a 1% chance you
| can succeed, you're overestimating your own abilities. You should
| instead believe you can achieve a 10x improvement, but there's
| only a 10% chance you can succeed.
|
| In the first case you're overestimating your ability to achieve a
| 10x improvement. In the second you're underestimating it. But the
| second way of being pessimistic leads to the right answer.
|
| For example, if you believe there's only a 10% chance you can
| succeed, you should either not start a startup, or only start one
| as a hobby. But if you believe there's only a 10% chance you can
| achieve a 10x improvement, you should definitely start a startup
| to try.
|
| If you believe there's only a 10% chance you can achieve a 10x
| improvement, you have a 90% chance of failing. But the payoff if
| you succeed is not merely a 10x improvement. It's a 10x
| improvement multiplied by the percentage of the market you
| capture. So the expected value of the bet is a 100x improvement
| in the world. Which is a good bet.
|
| (There is a case where overestimating your ability to achieve a
| 10x improvement is also a good bet: when you're so good at what
| you do that
|
| Thanks to John Collison, Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, and Geoff
| Ralston for reading drafts of this.
|
| Upvote this essay (+0)
| Xeoncross wrote:
| The Paul we didn't want but the product team said we needed
| aubthread wrote:
| If Paul were Clippy.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recERuX0piB0V6Xfa
|
| I think I broke it? There's tons of repetition and then it fails.
| aubthread wrote:
| Oof, sorry about that. I guess being a great software engineer
| isn't so straightforward :)
| KajMagnus wrote:
| It's hard to unsee these articles, isn't it?
|
| Although I know it's AI generated nonsense (although fun to
| read), it's as if parts of my brain believe it's for real, and
| want to update themselves based on it.
|
| Almost a bit scary. I cannot read the texts, without a feeling
| that I get affected by them. -- The brain lacks a `--dry-run`
| flag?
|
| In the future: People will read AI generated nonsense, it'll
| change their worldview, and once they learn that what they read
| was AI nonsense -- their brain & beliefs have been altered
| already, no undo.
|
| (It's like that already, with ordinary news (or "news") media,
| but now with AI, this can be mass produced)
| panza wrote:
| This is a good point. More and more people will unknowingly
| encounter AI content and then feel disconcerted when learning
| of that fact. It seems likely that it will lead to a general
| distrust of the technology, insofar as the AI content contains
| falsehoods.
|
| I suspect we'll see new developments in systems and policies
| relating to provenance.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Perhaps this will cause people to think for themselves more.
| There will be no zeitgeist at all as there will be so many
| diverging AI generated beleifs. Then again, people said the
| same thing about the internet. But perhaps there still isn't
| _enough_ diverse thought on the internet, just enough to force
| people into their own echochambers. Maybe AI (ML, DL, whatever)
| will force people out of these chambers somehow.
| alach11 wrote:
| > Perhaps this will cause people to think for themselves more
|
| Seems more likely that people will think whatever the best-
| funded and operated LLMs tell them to believe.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Paul is writing ... window hangs for me after countdown reaches
| 0:00 but maybe it's just overloaded. Or maybe Paul is
| overthinking the writing on this one.
| belter wrote:
| In the late 19th century Native Americans' refused to have their
| photo taken, fearful the process would steal a person's soul and
| own nature. How prescient of them, to know 100 years later, the
| algorithms would be coming. To chew on our photos, average our
| voice, scan our faces, integrate and differentiate our words,
| generalize our gait and demeanor, generalize our ideas into a
| multilayered deep network that completely steals all our essence
| and soul. We are destined to be cloned into thousands of insipid
| Agent Smiths. :-( I say we burn it now....
| unoti wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear about how the infrastructure works, the
| queueing, the storage, how it's hosted, how it's throttled...
| desireco42 wrote:
| It's hilarious, I got some really fun results.
|
| https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recNhTl3FeA0hHt9f
| danbolt wrote:
| I think once you get to the third paragraph, it's best to start
| scrolling down quickly, sampling the opening sentence of each
| successive one. Then, imagine a few HN comments speaking praise
| to such lucid and profound analysis.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Then, imagine a few HN comments speaking praise to such
| lucid and profound analysis.
|
| Feels like praising Paul's thoughts on a topic with a
| surreptitious link to the AI version should be the HN
| equivalent of rickrolling in future.
|
| (I'd link an essay on never giving you up, but it's let me
| down by not generating one)
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Heads up - getting a 502 when I tried to use it.
| aubthread wrote:
| I turned GPT-3 into PGT-3. Browse or create essays using a model
| fine-tuned to Paul's 200+ essays. Sorry Paul!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| This validates what Paul Graham has been saying about AI and
| quality of writing.
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(page generated 2023-01-24 23:01 UTC)