Let's talk about AI!
I'm coming to the San Francisco Bay Area next week.
In the next few months I’m going to focus on artificial intelligence—especially generative neural networks like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and GitHub Copilot. I’m hoping Full Stack Economics readers can help me get up to speed. I have two favors to ask.
Let’s talk about AI remotely
This week I want to talk to people who have significant experience using AI professionally. Specifically:
People (either in industry or academia) who are involved in building machine learnings systems.
Programmers who have been using Github Copilot or similar tools to do their work.
Artists and designers who have been using Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, or similar tools to do their work.
If you fall into one of these categories, I would be grateful if you could click here to grab a time slot to chat with me via video. I won’t use your name or other identifying details without your explicit permission, and I’m not looking for anyone to share confidential information about their employer or current projects. Rather, I’m looking for general information about the state of the technology and industry.
Let’s meet in the San Francisco Bay Area (we don’t have to talk about AI)
I will be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area next week, and I want to organize an evening meetup of Full Stack Economics next Monday or Tuesday. If you are interested in that, please fill out this short survey to let me know when and where you’re available. Once I have a sense for how many people are interested and where they’re located, I’ll send out an email to everyone who expressed interest with a specific date, time, and location.
Finally, if you’re in the intersection of these categories—in the Bay Area and working on AI professionally—I’d love to meet up for coffee, lunch, etc. If you’d like to do that, please reply by email with a bit of detail about you—where you work, what kind of work you do, and your availability during business hours Monday through Wednesday of next week. Thank you!
I don't quite fit into any of the three categories you mention, but I'm adjacent. I'm a programmer who's looked into using GPT-3 for various types of automation, usually finding it to be not reliable enough, and my partner is a digital artist who has looked into using DALL-E to help her in her work and also mostly found it unhelpful.
If that sounds useful to you, I'd be happy to share my/our experiences.
As a programmer, I tend to think of AI as a boogeyman. Software has gotten more complex and capable over the years. Is this really that different? When CGI became a thing, artists didn't go away. There was a new tool and medium for art. Musicians didn't stop making music because of electronic samples. Lots of hype over "the cloud" which was just "someone else's computer" as it always had been. Venture capital flows to startups with an "algorithm" to do something, when their predecessor just had a software application.
AI/ML just seems like the latest iteration in pattern matching. The ability to comb through large data sets and find non-obvious correlations is definitely useful. There might be a material science or biological interaction breakthrough that is indeed world changing. I don't know that text/visual generative programs are going to be that.