14 chunks · 14 episodes
...f years into the era of the LLM. The first thing that was built was chatbots, a party trick. A really compelling party trick, but still a party trick. It's nice to be able to talk to your computer, but people don't want to have to talk to th...
...rdinarily subtle ones, given enough data. AlphaFold shows that this is not some party trick; they really are cluing into deep, low-frequency patterns that are outside a human mind's ability to perceive. An LLM probably could describe the vib...
... be content, or code. Chatbots treat the context like the main thing. They're a party trick!
In the Chatbot form factor the chat is a party trick. "Look, it talks just like a person!" In Claude Code, chat is merely a natural-language way to accomplish the end you actually care about. The chat i...
... because you can doesn't mean you should. Natural language interfaces are a new party trick. They are undeniably useful, but the extreme of "everything is just a single natural language interface" is absurd. Once we as an industry sober up t...
I love LLMs and I hate chatbots. I think chatbots are an embarrassing party trick. Corporations pretending to be our friends. Depressingly, this is all people think LLMs are good for today. LLMs have vast untapped potential to crea...
...egory no one has invented yet that will make Chatbots look like an embarrassing party trick.
... and using it to... serve more personalized junk food? I think they're a sloppy party trick that we'll look back on with a mixture of embarrassment and regret.
...o cast a spell on any UI to 'make it into a Breakout game". It's a load-bearing party trick to show people how open-ended the system is. You break people's mental model of what is possible, and suddenly everything seems possible.
...hen tell your system to make that UI applied to a different set of your data. A party trick LLMs are quite good at.
Some party tricks are load bearing. Imagine an AI feature that is potentially creepy… but that works entirely on device. The party trick is that you can flip on airpl...
...mple Interaction From my summary in bits and bobs back then: "LLMs are not some party trick. They reveal something fundamental about humanity... and the universe."
...ever gets bored and has read 1000x more books than you ever will". A lot of the party tricks LLMs can do are based on that last bit. But that's also where the danger of LLMs lie, because they tend to hallucinate. What if the first bit is mor...
...rium Simple ML / eukaryote LLM / brain ? / society ? / planet LLMs are not some party trick. They reveal something fundamental about humanity... and the universe.