Wonderful work is being done; Free people in free markets make the world better for us all.
And, no, ChatGPT didn't tell me to say that.
In the midst of global spikes of mean people doing mean things to other people, it’s always worth remembering that tremendously positive things are happening. As nothing exists in a vacuum, many of these positive developments are irritants to the mean people who only spew hatred.
The world of computational reality is galloping ahead.
The “artificial intelligence” company OpenAI had their first ever developers conference on 6 November 2023 in San Francisco. Their Co-Founder and CEO Sam Altman gave the Opening talk. I always love to see an inherently tech guy who has worked hard to appear comfortable doing public speaking.
Sam kicked the talk off by letting a few different users speak for themselves in testimonial videos. It is worth everyone watching those few minutes, because it brings home just how valuable and enabling these assistive technologies can be. The testimonials were powerful coming from a young man with left-side paralysis after brain surgery who had trouble using a computer to a young woman raised in America who wants to craft an appropriate form of expression in Tagalog to convey her daughterly love for her father and can use ChatGPT to achieve just the right tone in a language she is not fluent in.
From there he goes on to discuss the new product roadmap, which I will not dwell on here. Those interested can go find out more by watching his talk. My point is there are lots of creative people building really powerful - and fun - tools for the rest of the planet to make use of.
Wouldn’t it be great if Gaza were like Dubai, and young kids spent time making memes about their Israeli friends who come to the beach every weekend, rather than throwing rocks at tanks while serving as human shields for Hamas billionaires hiding in Doha?
Aside from rolling out the cool new features and the technical wizardry, Sam also gave some coverage to the basic hallmark of free market capitalism: The product or service improves in quality and value while the cost continues to drop. That is what drives Leftists insane - that Karl Marx was a grumpy old journalist and failed stock market speculator who bitched and moaned about people smarter than he was at making money. His bitterness has left hundreds of millions of people dead and got a dingbat bartender elected to Congress.
On the cost front, the audience whooped and hollered when Sam announced the new pricing metrics, which will allow developers to use these tools even more for the same cost and encourage them to use it lots and lots more in anticipation of it sliding asymptotically towards negligible cost.
Why am I dwelling on this?
As someone who has worked in and around “A.I.” companies and technologies for years, I try to dispel the most unfortunate and common misconception about these technologies, that they are going to “steal your job” or replace human workers. If you stop to think about your experience with work - whether desk job, shopfloor or outdoor - you can think of a dozen things that help you do your job which did not exist 20 years ago. Tools are tools. Good tools let a human do lots more things and often very different things than he or she can do without the tools.
There is an explosion of creative coding tools coming to market. In text-to-image space alone, there are a few dozen applications you can play around with. Here is one random example I got using Midjourney. A few descriptive lines and 5 seconds:
Here is another image, this time generated by Leonardo:
Now that is all fun and games, but the practical applications are endless.
I dwell on this because days after Sam made this information-packed, if not precisely Oscar worthy, speech, the Board of OpenAI which he co-founded unceremoniously kicked him out the door. You can find lots of chattering on the Internet about why this may have happened. You can go chase that rabbit hole, if you like. I have no opinion on the matter as I don’t know Sam and have zero idea what may have brought the Board to such an action.
I do know the smooth brain zealots chanting for death to Jews on American college campuses and around the world had better not be the future. It had better be the folks sitting in the audience and all around the world applauding Sam’s speech about new features and lower costs for OpenAI’s toolset.
That future depends on your getting involved. 12% of registered voters in New York City bothered to vote in the last 3 mayoral elections. That got New Yorkers two terms of Comrade Warren Wilhelm, Jr. (latterly known as Bill DeBlasio - why do Commies always change their names to run for office?) and the even larger colossal failure Eric Adams.
If all the registered voters who think these two clowns were and are an apocalyptic disaster for New York had, y’know, voted, these two buffoons would not have had the chance to ruin the city I love but had to leave.
Get involved. The politicians want you to be disinterested, so they can keep stealing your money and ruining your children’s future. They can only do that if you stay complacent. Your choice, while you still have one.
Inspiring message amid the doom and gloom of 2023;
That was informative and positive amidst all the negatively right now.