Nicholas Thompson’s Post

A cartoon for today. from: https://buff.ly/44k2iQt

The most interesting thing in tech: prompt engineering! It's a very important skill right now. If you learn the strengths and weaknesses of the AI models, you'll be able to get much more out of them. If you write better prompts--telling them for example to take on personas or giving them examples--you'll get better results. I've found that, with good prompts, and specific requests, they can be quite helpful in certain ways for researching my book. All of that said, I don't think prompt engineering is going to be a hugely valuable skill, in part because of something a colleague showed me today.

"You may not like pro-Palestine speech; you may not like pro-Israel speech. You may think some of it veers into bigotry. The answer is to ignore it, mock it, debate it, even counterprotest it. But don’t call in the SWAT team."

"It is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, bootlick bosses, or pay your dues at soul-sucking jobs working for bad people. You do not need to get 1500 on your SAT or to have a sky-high IQ or family connections. You don’t even need sparkling talents. You simply need to want to construct goodness with whatever life throws at you."

The most interesting thing in tech: scientists have just announced that they've figured out a new way of identifying asteroids. Don't scan the sky right now. Instead just use algorithms to scan old photographs and find new patterns that computers (and our eyes) haven't been able to identify. This is very cool! Maybe it'll keep us safe from killer asteroids. And it's also a really good example of a new way that we'll do data analysis in the future. It won't just be about finding new data. It'll be using new tools to look at old data.

This made me laugh. https://bit.ly/3Wl8cP1

The most interesting thing in tech: Meta’s stock price has cratered because of an earnings call in which they announced much greater spending on AI than anticipated. The market reaction is not a surprise! Meta’s big bet on VR hasn’t panned out financially and their AI models are all open source. Still I do think I understand why they’re putting all this money in and why they have to keep doing it: they can’t become dependent on a competitor again (as with Apple) if AI becomes the platform of the future.

Delighted to be talking with Shyvee Shi and my friends at Linkedin at this event for product managers on May 10.

The most interesting thing in tech: It's getting ever easier to make synthetic videos of humans that appear quite real. You can do it with avatars. You can also do it with real people if they sit in front of motion capture technology for hours. Eventually, you may be able to do it just by looking at videos that exist. There will be good and interesting things that come of this! But we are move rapidly into a world where it's going to be extremely hard to tell what's genuine and what's not.

Update: the FCC has now voted to restore #netneutrality. Here is my conversation from last week with Chairwoman Rosenworcel.