Work developed through artistic value and/or subjectivity (songs, books, movies, speeches, paintings, consumer products). My point is the greatest works stand the test of time and are typically studied/appreciated over the years. Ex's like Paul Graham's essays, albums from decades before, or even the minimalistic design of Apple. If people keep coming back, it got something right and was likely ahead of its time. Compared to other metrics (total impressions or number of comments), repeat behavior tells a less noisy story about the quality of the work. Level, 1, 2,3 were arbitrarily chosen. What I meant was when you move from something early-stage to mainstream, you have to let go of some of the beliefs or ideas that may have garnered your first fans.
I agree with your negative examples, but those are hardly the kind of businesses I'd ever want to work in.
1 and 3 are not the kind of work I had in mind when writing this take. I see your second point, but I’d want to counter with the fact that what got you from Level 1 to Level 2 won’t be the same thing as what gets you to Level 3 (this is the natural cost of scale). You may outgrow some initial users, but this can be compensated by a low overall churn. Most won’t leave unless your core offering has drastically pivoted.
The aspect of your work to care about the most is replay value. How many times do people keep coming back? Number of replays, rereads, and repeat purchases are proxies for high resonance. On that note, I wish more writing platforms let you see in aggregate how many first-time readers visited again and how spaced out their visits were. If they can still look past the known plot and imperfections in your work, you're on to something.
But it's not the kind of thinking that leads to clever jokes, good business ideas, scientific breakthroughs, etc.
Could an LLM write a show like Seinfeld? This might actually be my test for whether I accept that LLMs are truly clever. Anyone who's watched it knows that Seinfeld was great because of two reasons: (1) Seinfeld broke all the rules of a sitcom. (2) The show follows very relatable interactions on the most non-trivial issues between people and runs it with it for seasons. There is no persistent plot or character arc. You have humans playing themselves. And yet it works.
Benchmarks sound like a way to see how well LLMs do when up against reality, but I don't think they really are. Solving SAT problems or Math Olympiad problems only involves deep thinking if you haven't seen millions of math problems of a broadly similar nature.
Benchmarks are best-case analysis of model capabilities. A lot of companies benchmark max, but is this inherently bad? If the process is economically valuable and repetitive, I don't care how the LLM gets it done even if it is memorizing the steps.
Nobody has identified as step-by-step process to generate funny jokes, because such a process would probably be exponential in nature and take forever.
I tweeted about why I think AI isn't creative a few days ago. It seems like we have similar thoughts. A good idea comes from noticing a potential connection between ideas and recursively filling in the gaps through verbalizing/interacting with others. The compute for that right now is unjustified.
Young people would benefit a lot more if they defaulted to forming and defending an opinion in real-time. I would rather say what I think and find out how wrong I am than keep waiting for more data.
This thought came to me during a walk to class. A good professor of mine would show us a graph with a blurred out title. He’d ask for our initial observations or what we think it represents. Even that is intimidating for most because no one wants to say something stupid or too simple. This idea that you can’t have conviction and update your beliefs later needs to be unlearnt.
Sure. But more than the immediate, associative leaps, I think I’m interested in their ability to sample concepts across very different domains and find connections whether that is done deliberately or randomly. Though with humans, the ideas that plague our subconscious are tied to our persistent, internal questions.
My theory on why AI isn't creative is that it lacks a 'rumination mode'. Ideas can sit and passively connect in our minds for free. This is cool and valuable. LLMs don't have that luxury. Non-linear, non-goal-driven thinking is expensive and not effective yet.
Cross-posted from X
yes that’s basically it, thanks!