Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Quotations in Sep, 2023

Filters: Type: quotation × Year: 2023 × Month: Sep × Sorted by date


Looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We’re seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.

Andrej Karpathy # 28th September 2023, 8:50 pm

The profusion of dubious A.I.-generated content resembles the badly made stockings of the nineteenth century. At the time of the Luddites, many hoped the subpar products would prove unacceptable to consumers or to the government. Instead, social norms adjusted.

Kyle Chayka # 27th September 2023, 12:26 am

We already know one major effect of AI on the skills distribution: AI acts as a skills leveler for a huge range of professional work. If you were in the bottom half of the skill distribution for writing, idea generation, analyses, or any of a number of other professional tasks, you will likely find that, with the help of AI, you have become quite good.

Ethan Mollick # 25th September 2023, 4:37 pm

Note that there have been no breaking changes since the [SQLite] file format was designed in 2004. The changes shows in the version history above have all be one of (1) typo fixes, (2) clarifications, or (3) filling in the “reserved for future extensions” bits with descriptions of those extensions as they occurred.

D. Richard Hipp # 18th September 2023, 6:02 pm

In the long term, I suspect that LLMs will have a significant positive impact on higher education. Specifically, I believe they will elevate the importance of the humanities. [...] LLMs are deeply, inherently textual. And they are reliant on text in a way that is directly linked to the skills and methods that we emphasize in university humanities classes.

Benjamin Breen # 13th September 2023, 3:40 am