Wednesday, 22nd March 2023
Weeknotes: AI won’t slow down, a new newsletter and a huge Datasette refactor
I’m a few weeks behind on my weeknotes, but it’s not through lack of attention to my blog. AI just keeps getting weirder and more interesting.
[... 1255 words]Datasette: Gather feedback on new ?_extra= design. I just landed the single biggest backwards-incompatible change to Datasette ever, in preparation for the 1.0 release. It’s a change to the default JSON format from the Datasette API—the new format is much slimmer, and can be expanded using a new ?_extra= query string parameter. I’m desperately keen on getting feedback on this change! This issues has more details and a call for feedback. # 11:14 pm
Don’t trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn’t trained on Gmail
Earlier this month I wrote about how ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can. Consider this part two in the series. Here’s another common and non-intuitive mistake people make when interacting with large language model AI systems: asking them questions about themselves.
[... 1950 words]GPT-4, like GPT-3 before it, has a capability overhang; at the time of release, neither OpenAI or its various deployment partners have a clue as to the true extent of GPT-4’s capability surface—that’s something that we’ll get to collectively discover in the coming years. This also means we don’t know the full extent of plausible misuses or harms.
— Jack Clark # 12:40 am