AI

off topic

No, this will not be a post about AI in perfumes, though I look forward to it composing a masterpiece. Since Mathilde Laurent showed that you could make a great fragrance with only synthetics, anything is possible.

I want to talk about two miraculous things AI is doing for me every day: 1- data analysis and 2- steady extermination of the apparatchik class.

1- I have spent the last month playing with a large chunk of data (≈ 60 MB of numbers) gathered by my brilliant graduate student Ekin Daplan. What ChatGPT lets me do is play with it in an infinite variety of ways without writing a single line of code. As in “divide every third data point in column 3 by the average of every row in column 5 and plot in polar coordinates, each experiment in a different color with the size of the markers proportional to the value of column 2.” I have always been pretty convinced that Murray Gell-Mann’s quip that “the best physicist is the one who is wrong the fastest” was true. I can now be wrong one hundred, and in some cases a thousand times faster than before, and it has changed my life. What GPT does each time, of course, is generate code to do the job and then execute it. This is not a hidden process: you can ask GPT for the code, ask GPT to annotate it and check it or have GPT check it. Jaw-dropping, euphoric, life-changing stuff.

2- Anyone who has read Anthony Powell’s magnificent series “A Dance to the Music of Time” will shudder at the thought of the character named Widmerpool, the classic hard-working, empire-building, tedious bureaucrat with a shit-colored soul who rises to huge power and influence. Universities are full of scale models of such people, and they derive their strength from one thing only: smart people are paralysed by the tedium of what these people know, everything to do with regulations, compliance, procedures, etc. They become indispensable because they alone can breathe the mephitic swamp gases of administrative garbage and live. I can reveal that their days are numbered. It is now possible to upload all the tedium into a custom made GPT (I have just done so with my Uni’s regulations) and simply ask a question. The apparatchik’s smug superiority of knowledge, the only thing that gave them power over the less tedious than them, is over.

Yes, AI could still kill us all etc. but at this point I take the view that I would then die doing what I loved rather than minding semicolons in Matlab or reading a Strategy document.