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Equinox greetings: the way we live now · Probable Futures

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By now, everyone reading this letter has likely heard of ChatGPT, the software that can write birthday cards and term papers, might be able to fall in love, and perhaps heralds the beginning of the end of civilization. Having been fed books, academic journals, and portions of the internet, the software predicts, literally one word at a time, what we want to read or hear when we ask it a question. Large language models (LLMs) like GPT4 (which powers ChatGPT) are “generative pre-trained transformers,” and as such, they are the latest, most advanced effort to do something humans have undoubtedly been doing for thousands of generations: Take the stories of the past and transform them into insights that can be useful in the future. In a way, the computer scientists working on AI are the successors to the traditions of oral historians, griots, and bards. For millennia, those esteemed women and men passed on tales and legends to help individuals and communities make good decisions and live we

September 23, 2023, 2:50 am ET By now, everyone reading this letter has likely heard of ChatGPT, the software that can write birthday cards and term papers, might be able to fall in love, and perhaps heralds the beginning of the end of civilization. Having been fed books, academic journals, and portions of the internet, the software predicts, literally one word at a time, what we want to read or hear when we ask it a question. Large language models (LLMs) like GPT4 (which powers ChatGPT) are “generative pre-trained transformers,” and as such, they are the latest, most advanced effort to do som

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