Category: ai

In the spirit of the year of the dragon, I made 10 images using SDXL featuring dragons in different styles. Feel free to use it for any purpose.

Which is your favourite?

This is what happens when somebody uses ChatGPT as if it’s a search engine. People are so used to precise and deterministic output from programs that it’s hard for them to imagine one that not only fabricates truths, but also does so convincingly.

The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”

Source: A Man Sued Avianca Airline. His Lawyer Used ChatGPT. – The New York Times

For a limited time only, this free course by Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng (Coursera, DeepLearning.ai), called ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers, is available for anyone looking to expand their development skills. The course is an excellent opportunity for developers who want to learn how to use a large language model (LLM) to create powerful applications in a cost-effective and time-efficient way.

Throughout the course, Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng explain the workings of LLMs and provide best practices for prompt engineering. You’ll be able to learn how to use the OpenAI API to build capabilities that can automatically summarize user reviews, classify sentiment, extract topics, translate text, and even write emails. Additionally, you’ll learn how to build a custom chatbot and use two key principles for writing effective prompts.

What I appreciate about this course is the hands-on experience provided in the Jupyter notebook environment. You’ll be able to play with numerous examples and systematically engineer good prompts. This makes it easy to put the concepts learned in the course into practice in your own projects.

So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to upskill and learn how to build innovative applications that were once impossible or highly technical, I highly recommend taking this course. Don’t miss out on the chance to learn from experts and expand your skill set for free.

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers is beginner-friendly. Only a basic understanding of Python is needed. But it is also suitable for advanced machine learning engineers wanting to approach the cutting-edge of prompt engineering and use LLMs.

Source: ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers – DeepLearning.AI

People are often amused or surprised when ChatGPT fails to give a correct response for seemingly simple questions (eg. multiply two numbers), yet is able to answer very complex ones.

The way to think about ChatGPT and other LLM tools is that they are simply an assistant and not an oracle.

AI tools like ChatGPT have a mental model of the world, and try to imagine what would be the best answer for any given prompt. But they may not get it right all the time, and in times when they don’t have an answer they will try their best anyway (ie. fabricate one).

An assistant make mistakes, that’s why you should expect ChatGPT’s output to have mistakes.

That said, ChatGPT is really good in areas that don’t require precision (eg. creative writing).

Update (2023-02-01): ChatGPT has released a newer version that is supposed to have improved factuality and mathematical capabilities. Well, didn’t work for me.

Text-to-image generation is now surprising good. Some predicts the end of stock photo business – why use a stock photo when you can generate any image you need just based on description?

Google develops competing model to DALL-E 2, which purportedly performs better than the latter and other models in a test with human raters.

Generated from text prompt “A robot couple fine dining with Eiffel Tower in the background”.

Source: Imagen: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Another ground-breaking work from OpenAI.

We are all familiar with AI models that does image analysis and outputs text description or labels. For instance,

Dall-E and its successor, Dall-E 2, sort of does the reverse. It produces an image based on text description. There’s some degree of randomization there so it can produce different outputs from the same prompt text.

Here’s an example generated from “An astronaut riding a horse in the style of Andy Warhol”.

Someone used Dall-E 2 to generate pictures from Twitter bios and the results are just jaw-dropping.

“happy sisyphus”

“bookbear”

“machine learning researchoor | technology brother | “prolific Twitter shitposter”

It’s currently in private preview but should not be long before it provides a commercial offering.

DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.

Source: DALL·E 2

GPT-3 is one of the most interesting and provocative advances in AI in recent years. There has been a lot of raving articles that both offer praise and warn of its potential. Wikipedia describes it as:

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series created by OpenAI, a for-profit San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory.

Wikipedia – GPT-3

It’s not the first time that AI techniques have been applied to create fake (“novel”) content. Deep fake techniques have been used to create entirely fake photos of people who doesn’t exists and to alter videos to make it seem like people did things they didn’t do.

Manipulating photos and videos is one thing. But generating original and believable articles is quite another. Here are some examples of original content generated by GPT-3 :

It is a curious fact that the last remaining form of social life in which the people of London are still interested is Twitter. I was struck with this curious fact when I went on one of my periodical holidays to the sea-side, and found the whole place twittering like a starling-cage. I called it an anomaly, and it is.

The importance of being on twitter

Responding to a philosopher’s article about GPT-3:

Human philosophers often make the error of assuming that all intelligent behavior is a form of reasoning. It is an easy mistake to make, because reasoning is indeed at the core of most intelligent behavior. However, intelligent behavior can arise through other mechanisms as well. These include learning (i.e., training), and the embodiment of a system in the world (i.e. being situated inthe environment through sensors and effectors).

Response to philosophers

Writing poetry:

Once there was a man
who really was a Musk.
He liked to build robots
and rocket ships and such.

He said, “I’m building a car
that’s electric and cool.
I’ll bet it outsells those
Gasoline-burning clunkers soon!”

GPT Stories

Of course, it’s not long before people started posting GPT-3 generated articles to their own blog and popular forums (reddit, hacker news) and reveal it later to be an experiment.

Writing articles, fiction or poetry is just tip of the ice berg. GPT-3 can also tell jokes, generate code from description, answer Q&A, do a tech interview, write ads, and more.

If the written text – blog, press, forum, school work etc – can be generated with such ease, what incentive is there to put in the effort to write anymore? And what will this do to the future of writing? How will anyone be able to tell spam from non-spam in the future? What jobs will be displaced once GPT-3 – and its successors – become prevalent? These are all interesting and important questions that the community is still figuring out.

GPT-3 is currently limited access – I have applied but have not been granted access yet. The creators know that the potential for abuse is too high and so have been managing it carefully. On the other hand, if that aspect can be managed I’m very sure we will start to see very exciting commercial applications of GPT-3 when it eventually goes live.