Tag: ai

Do the work

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As a high school teacher I use LLMs a lot. My peers do too. It’s just too easy not to have a model type out all the text in whatever format for (all the different) software programs we use.

One quirk of the LLMs is they always make the correct multiple choice answer the longest multiple choice answers. When in double thirty years ago we just chose “C” – now, students choose the longest answer.

But there’s something lost. TNSTAFL. Maybe not in the busy work of typing out questions, but maybe so. It could be a feature, not a bug that audiobooks (and books), are so long. It’s more time to sit with an idea.

In that spirit, here are two ideas and inspirations about doing the work:

Ezra Klein: “Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster. 

It has no idea what I really wanted to know and wouldn’t have made the connections I would’ve made. I’m interested in the thing I will see that other people wouldn’t have seen, and I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see.

I’m not saying that AI can’t be useful, but I’m pretty against shortcuts.

And obviously, you have to limit the amount of work you’re doing. You can’t read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it’s more dangerous to think you’ve read something that you haven’t than to not read it at all.

I think the time you spend with things is pretty important.”

Daryl Morey: “They (Bill James) said, ‘Hey intern, you go work on this project, see if you can look at point differential and how it affects the NBA.’

So that was my very first analytics project, which is in the ’93 basketball book. Yeah, I remember coming up—like, literally worked on it 24/7 because I was like, ‘This is my moment to try and prove something to Bill James,’ who, by the way, didn’t care at all when I did it.

He, you know, he probably thought it was derivative because it sort of was. But it took a while to come up with the idea of modifying the exponent. That was obviously the first time Bill’s ideas were adapted to basketball.”

What does AI make rare and valuable?

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Cal Newport asks is: What skills are rare and valuable? The answer leads to a whole book of career and life advice.

Our neck of the woods has a lot of bike riders. There’s a large retirement community, with many people who have or get, new hobbies. Pickleball, water volleyball, and golf are the three largest, but we see plenty of riders.

And many of them are e-bikes.

Purists (in the jtbd world this is supply side innovation) scoff. They might even mumble: ‘that’s not real bike riding’. But e-bikes changed how people cycle. We used to see many tandem riders, almost always couples who wanted to ‘ride together’ but didn’t ride at the same speed.

Now we see almost none.

Similarly, a friend said that a guy from his group got an e-bike. At first, like friends do, they gave him a hard time. But the bike lets the guy stay with the group. Rather than aging out, and into another group, the e-bike lets him stay with the pack.

In what ways will AI/LLM change work? Will we see people ‘ride together’? Will workers be older or will the adoption curve be steep and young people’s skills accelerate?

No one knows, much like no one predicted the e-bike adoption.

But, work will come back to Newport’s question: What is rare and valuable?

Note: I tried to run an outline through a LLM to create a blog post. None of the versions were the desired voice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AI taking our Jobs (to be done)

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From Ben Thompson speaking on Sharp Tech in June 2024 about the Apple Intelligence demo from WWDC.

“No, what I found striking from the Apple event was it was a vision of how this will work in normal people’s lives, and it was a clearly articulated vision. Like if Siri cannot ingest all your old text messages and tell you what someone’s address is, or if Siri can work across emails and calendars.

That was the single best demo, was the woman who needed to pick up her mom…And there was information scattered across text messages and email. It was so relatable. Like we have all been in that situation.

What time is the flight? Where was the dinner reservation? Having to sort of go across apps and just being able to find the stuff.”

Thompson references this video, where Steve Jobs notes what Apple needs to do: “and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds, it’s not to talk about bits and megahertz, it’s not to talk about why we’re better than windows.”