Kia ora from Aotearoa on the other side of the world, Alberto! Congratulations on reaching 1000... I have really enjoyed your writing during 2023, some of the most timely and insightful thinking about AI globally! I look forward to continuing to read in 2024!
My question to you: there seems to be no doubt now (to me at least) that we can actually perceive that AI is accelerating the advancement of more AI and human knowledge acquisition. 2023 was the year of multimodal / multimedia generative AI but I am starting to see signals that 2024's headlines will be more focused on AI pushing scientific and technological boundaries forward at rates we previously hadn't imagined - and as a result fields such as biotech, robotics, space exploration, brain-computer interfaces (and even potentially scalable solutions to climate change!) may be brought forward. From what you're seeing out there, who are the main movers to watch (outside of Deepmind, Xai etc) and what kind of headlines are you scanning for?
As a parent of 2 young kids and almost zero free time, I am really happy to get your newsletter in my inbox every few days, which gives me a very well put and balanced perspective of what is going on in this crazy AI world ;)
My questions would be
1) How do you manage to deal with so much information, perspectives, strong opinions.... And being able to condense them so nicely in an article? (Without going crazy in the process)
2) Which of the current AI tools / plugins would you say are influencing your work / personal life the most? (For better or worse)
3) Just a bit curious, which are your personal hobbies?
i'm curious about your latest thinking on the value of learning prompt engineering for large language models. one of your recent articles said that openai killed prompt engineering with dall-e 3 and i'm wondering if this is likely to be the case with large language models anytime soon.
i guess my real question, should i invest my time and energy in developing my prompt crafting skills?
I’ve seen various AI thought leaders state that they believe some other type of approach different from the ubiquitous transformer is necessary to achieve AGI. What are your thoughts on that and do you have any favorites that you think may be good contenders to replace transformers? I realize that the public doesn’t really have a lot of visibility for these nascent approaches, but out of the ones you’ve heard about do any look more promising than others?
1) I wonder what you make of LeCun's recent comments regarding future AI development. He compares it with Orangutan society principles, which, according to him, do not have the dominance/hierarchy setup incorporated in other primate societies. He stresses the strict separation between the need to dominate/take over and intelligence (where the later does not imply the first). The argument is intended to take away the fear of AI taking over based on its innate intelligence alone. 2) Ok, as to selfish questions: I write the ShadowLands on substack, which is less than a year old. It brings links between traditional storytelling (stories by storytellers for audiences) and scientific discovery/the life of a scientist. Do you have any pointers on advertising this type of substack contribution to broader sources of potential readers? I currently use LinkedIn and Facebook only.
Cheers on your 1000 paid subs Alberto!! Genuinely! Well deserved.
My question is:
What do you think about action transformers, Fuyu-8B and the work/ambitions of adept.ai?
I think this tech has massive potential to be just as highly impactful as chatgpt.
Once the tool gets more refined and they extend it to work beyond just the web browser, people are possibly gonna be able to (for example) edit videos like a seasoned professional with simple natural language prompts..!
Dec 4, 2023·edited Dec 4, 2023Liked by Alberto Romero
Hi Alberto,
Congrats on reaching this milestone - it's well deserved.
I've a question:
Given its hype, managers are sometimes tasked with exploring AI's feasibility within the organization. Do you have some suggestions as to what managers should be doing more, from a developer/technical person's perspective?
Thus far, I've approached it more as an exploration (rather than an exploitation) exercise, as the field is still new & isn't yet amenable to best practices & industry standards. This translates to incorporating confidence intervals into one's point estimates when coming up with milestones; using real options as opposed to IRR/NPV calculations when evaluating project feasibility; & maintaining skepticism when reading the news (In this regard, your substack is one of the few sources I trust), among other measures.
These measures mainly serve to manage/temper expectations up-stream (with upper-management) - the list of analytics/AI projects plagued by poor ROI is endless, even in "good" organizations.
However, this is just half the story. There's also the matter of down-stream management (of developers & technical personnel).
What might be your wishlist of things that you'd like managers of these projects to do more of?
Congratulations Alberto!!! What a great milestone you’ve achieved. Yes, I will be seeking your advice and I appreciate your thoughtful approach to helping people out. Presently I’m attempting to distill the essence of a short book, but I would so like to present it as instalments on Substack so as to gain exposure. I’d like to be able to start to build towards a critical mass, but I’ve never really been much of a businessman. I suspect the strongest foundation is simply to write with as much quality as I can, and as consistently as I can. Although I’m consuming AI education every day and certainly have a vantage point or two, I don’t necessarily have the depth that you do. However, I have been actively assimilating factual information and points of view on this subject since the 1990s. Some of that has been strangely prescient and ahead of its time. I’m reflecting on an AGI Emergence story that I wrote in 1992. I suspect a powerful influence in that was the Stanislaw Lem story “Golem”, a story about earths first Super Intelligence (a short story that I highly recommend if you get a chance. It’s dense and prophetic, yet quite retro fun by today’s standards). I’ve been caught up in the subject ever since I was exposed to HAL in 1968.
When the time comes I would certainly love to run some material by you to get your sense of it. Right now I’m focused on the problem of alignment and how humans could significantly pose a problem as our species itself is so very often seriously out of alignment with itself. Hardly an admirable trait if we’re teaching AI by example. It’ll probably notice this staggering deficiency before long. Whenever that happens I sense that an AGI/ ASI would likely conclude that our juvenile species is actually too immature and very often acting irresponsibly, and will require serious “management”.
I really respect how you approach the subject and how are you craft your messages. I’ve always felt that my strength is in overview territory, as opposed to being down in the weeds. I always acquire some knowledge via osmosis when I’m down in the weeds, yet focusing on the weeds does not tend to play to my strengths, as I see it.
As I’m not immediately prepared with a good coherent question at this time I will ask that you expand in one of your template questions, namely to ask about the “three points” you alluded to. I realise my queries should lean into the highly pragmatic side of writing to gain a following. I have perhaps around 200 followers on Medium, and if I’m not mistaken last month I made about $1.28, so it’s probably clear I haven’t been serious enough about monetising my passion. To that end I certainly could use your advice. Thanks Alberto.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the following, which is maybe related to AI?
It now seems beyond dispute that somebody unknown is flying hyper-high performance craft around our atmosphere. Whoever is in charge of such incredibly advanced craft may very well know a LOT about AI related topics.
Kia ora from Aotearoa on the other side of the world, Alberto! Congratulations on reaching 1000... I have really enjoyed your writing during 2023, some of the most timely and insightful thinking about AI globally! I look forward to continuing to read in 2024!
My question to you: there seems to be no doubt now (to me at least) that we can actually perceive that AI is accelerating the advancement of more AI and human knowledge acquisition. 2023 was the year of multimodal / multimedia generative AI but I am starting to see signals that 2024's headlines will be more focused on AI pushing scientific and technological boundaries forward at rates we previously hadn't imagined - and as a result fields such as biotech, robotics, space exploration, brain-computer interfaces (and even potentially scalable solutions to climate change!) may be brought forward. From what you're seeing out there, who are the main movers to watch (outside of Deepmind, Xai etc) and what kind of headlines are you scanning for?
And congratulations on 1000 paid subscribers. :)
Curious to learn what you think are some of the biggest challenges that developers are facing while deploying LLM applications.
Congratulations for this amazing milestone!
As a parent of 2 young kids and almost zero free time, I am really happy to get your newsletter in my inbox every few days, which gives me a very well put and balanced perspective of what is going on in this crazy AI world ;)
My questions would be
1) How do you manage to deal with so much information, perspectives, strong opinions.... And being able to condense them so nicely in an article? (Without going crazy in the process)
2) Which of the current AI tools / plugins would you say are influencing your work / personal life the most? (For better or worse)
3) Just a bit curious, which are your personal hobbies?
congrats on the milestone alberto!
i'm curious about your latest thinking on the value of learning prompt engineering for large language models. one of your recent articles said that openai killed prompt engineering with dall-e 3 and i'm wondering if this is likely to be the case with large language models anytime soon.
i guess my real question, should i invest my time and energy in developing my prompt crafting skills?
Congratulations, Alberto. Well deserved.
I’ve seen various AI thought leaders state that they believe some other type of approach different from the ubiquitous transformer is necessary to achieve AGI. What are your thoughts on that and do you have any favorites that you think may be good contenders to replace transformers? I realize that the public doesn’t really have a lot of visibility for these nascent approaches, but out of the ones you’ve heard about do any look more promising than others?
1) I wonder what you make of LeCun's recent comments regarding future AI development. He compares it with Orangutan society principles, which, according to him, do not have the dominance/hierarchy setup incorporated in other primate societies. He stresses the strict separation between the need to dominate/take over and intelligence (where the later does not imply the first). The argument is intended to take away the fear of AI taking over based on its innate intelligence alone. 2) Ok, as to selfish questions: I write the ShadowLands on substack, which is less than a year old. It brings links between traditional storytelling (stories by storytellers for audiences) and scientific discovery/the life of a scientist. Do you have any pointers on advertising this type of substack contribution to broader sources of potential readers? I currently use LinkedIn and Facebook only.
Cheers on your 1000 paid subs Alberto!! Genuinely! Well deserved.
My question is:
What do you think about action transformers, Fuyu-8B and the work/ambitions of adept.ai?
I think this tech has massive potential to be just as highly impactful as chatgpt.
Once the tool gets more refined and they extend it to work beyond just the web browser, people are possibly gonna be able to (for example) edit videos like a seasoned professional with simple natural language prompts..!
Hi Alberto,
Congrats on reaching this milestone - it's well deserved.
I've a question:
Given its hype, managers are sometimes tasked with exploring AI's feasibility within the organization. Do you have some suggestions as to what managers should be doing more, from a developer/technical person's perspective?
Thus far, I've approached it more as an exploration (rather than an exploitation) exercise, as the field is still new & isn't yet amenable to best practices & industry standards. This translates to incorporating confidence intervals into one's point estimates when coming up with milestones; using real options as opposed to IRR/NPV calculations when evaluating project feasibility; & maintaining skepticism when reading the news (In this regard, your substack is one of the few sources I trust), among other measures.
These measures mainly serve to manage/temper expectations up-stream (with upper-management) - the list of analytics/AI projects plagued by poor ROI is endless, even in "good" organizations.
However, this is just half the story. There's also the matter of down-stream management (of developers & technical personnel).
What might be your wishlist of things that you'd like managers of these projects to do more of?
Congratulations Alberto!!! What a great milestone you’ve achieved. Yes, I will be seeking your advice and I appreciate your thoughtful approach to helping people out. Presently I’m attempting to distill the essence of a short book, but I would so like to present it as instalments on Substack so as to gain exposure. I’d like to be able to start to build towards a critical mass, but I’ve never really been much of a businessman. I suspect the strongest foundation is simply to write with as much quality as I can, and as consistently as I can. Although I’m consuming AI education every day and certainly have a vantage point or two, I don’t necessarily have the depth that you do. However, I have been actively assimilating factual information and points of view on this subject since the 1990s. Some of that has been strangely prescient and ahead of its time. I’m reflecting on an AGI Emergence story that I wrote in 1992. I suspect a powerful influence in that was the Stanislaw Lem story “Golem”, a story about earths first Super Intelligence (a short story that I highly recommend if you get a chance. It’s dense and prophetic, yet quite retro fun by today’s standards). I’ve been caught up in the subject ever since I was exposed to HAL in 1968.
When the time comes I would certainly love to run some material by you to get your sense of it. Right now I’m focused on the problem of alignment and how humans could significantly pose a problem as our species itself is so very often seriously out of alignment with itself. Hardly an admirable trait if we’re teaching AI by example. It’ll probably notice this staggering deficiency before long. Whenever that happens I sense that an AGI/ ASI would likely conclude that our juvenile species is actually too immature and very often acting irresponsibly, and will require serious “management”.
I really respect how you approach the subject and how are you craft your messages. I’ve always felt that my strength is in overview territory, as opposed to being down in the weeds. I always acquire some knowledge via osmosis when I’m down in the weeds, yet focusing on the weeds does not tend to play to my strengths, as I see it.
As I’m not immediately prepared with a good coherent question at this time I will ask that you expand in one of your template questions, namely to ask about the “three points” you alluded to. I realise my queries should lean into the highly pragmatic side of writing to gain a following. I have perhaps around 200 followers on Medium, and if I’m not mistaken last month I made about $1.28, so it’s probably clear I haven’t been serious enough about monetising my passion. To that end I certainly could use your advice. Thanks Alberto.
What are the three keys that allowed you to go from 0 to 1,000 paid subs?
Do you think new AI newsletters can still succeed if they start today? What’s the best approach?
Off Topic Time!! Woo-hoo!
I'd be interested in hearing more about the following, which is maybe related to AI?
It now seems beyond dispute that somebody unknown is flying hyper-high performance craft around our atmosphere. Whoever is in charge of such incredibly advanced craft may very well know a LOT about AI related topics.
Should we be interested?
I like these two:
What are the three keys that allowed you to go from 0 to 1,000 paid subs?
Do you think new AI newsletters can still succeed if they start today? What’s the best approach?
And regarding Q*, look at this (which I happened to stumble across the other day):
https://twitter.com/HarperSCarroll/status/1729502499281764591?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
It's conjecture, but highly intelligent and extremely well informed and explained.
And I'm proud to be one of those 1000 :) Congratulations Alberto!