How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin”
Last month, TheNew York Times claimed that tech giants OpenAI and Google have waded into a copyright gray area by transcribing the vast volume of YouTube videos and using that…
What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part III): Strategy
We previously shared our insights on the tactics we have honed while operating LLM applications. Tactics are granular: they are the specific actions employed to achieve specific objectives. We also shared our perspective on operations: the…
What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part II)
A possibly apocryphal quote attributed to many leaders reads: “Amateurs talk strategy and tactics. Professionals talk operations.” Where the tactical perspective sees a thicket of sui generis problems, the operational perspective sees…
What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I)
Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. It’s an exciting time to build with large language models (LLMs). Over the past year, LLMs have become “good enough” for real-world applications. The…
To understand the risks posed by AI, follow the money
Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. Time and again, leading scientists, technologists, and philosophers have made spectacularly terrible guesses about the direction of innovation. Even Einstein was not immune, claiming, “There is not the…
Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents
Why is it that Google, a company once known for its distinctive “Do no evil” guideline, is now facing the same charges of “surveillance capitalism” as Facebook, a company that…
ChatGPT, Author of The Quixote
TL;DR LLMs and other GenAI models can reproduce significant chunks of training data.Specific prompts seem to “unlock” training data.We have many current and future copyright challenges: training may not infringe…
Corporate Responsibility in the Age of AI
Since its release in November 2022, almost everyone involved with technology has experimented with ChatGPT: students, faculty, and professionals in almost every discipline. Almost every company has undertaken AI projects,…
I Actually Chatted with ChatGPT
ChatGPT was released just over a year ago (at the end of November 2022), and countless people have already written about their experiences using it in all sorts of settings.…
Copyright, AI, and Provenance
Generative AI stretches our current copyright law in unforeseen and uncomfortable ways. In the US, the Copyright Office has issued guidance stating that the output of image-generating AI isn’t copyrightable…