The humming thread (#121, #146, #170) is no longer humming; it’s DEMOING. OpenAI’s GPT-3 API went into beta last month and my Twitter feed has spent the fortnight full of demos that would have been dismissed as staged a year ago: plain-English descriptions turned into working React components; legal prose translated to plain language; essays continued in the style of their opening paragraph; a fake blog post that hit the top of Hacker News before the author revealed the byline. It’s “just” next-token prediction at 175 billion parameters, and the honest staff-level assessment after two weeks of playing with it: it is simultaneously the most impressive parlor trick I’ve ever used and obviously, OBVIOUSLY, a new kind of infrastructure. It confabulates with total confidence (ask it for citations and it invents plausible ones — the failure mode is FLUENCY, which is worse than being wrong badly). It has no idea what it doesn’t know. And none of that changes the trajectory: #121 logged a paper, #146 logged a benchmark-eater, #170 logged a staged release, and this entry logs the first fortnight I watched non-ML engineers build PRODUCTS on the thread. The extrapolation exercise is now everyone’s homework.
Geopolitics did its own platform work: India BANNED TikTok outright (59 Chinese apps, 200M Indian users, gone by executive order — #156’s platform-risk-at-nation-scale, now the largest single market removal in history), and the US is making similar noises. The splinternet (#156’s bifurcation watch) is arriving app by app.
TIL: few-shot prompting — the model does tasks it was never trained for, given examples IN the prompt. The interface is the training. I don’t fully understand the implications and I’ve stopped pretending anyone does; the archive will keep minutes (its actual job — #171).