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    Ethan Mollick

    oneusefulthing.substack.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2022

    Ethan Mollick, a business school professor, writes practical guides on using AI tools like ChatGPT and Bing in work and teaching.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    AI & Machine LearningProductivityCareer & Work
    What HN says

    HN commenters cite it for tips on getting value from Bing AI and for his description of cloning a voice; others use it in broader debates about what language models can do.

    Stats for nerds
    30HN people shared it
    33linked in comments
    94story points
    Mar 2023last shared

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?
      2 people · 34 points · first shared 2023 · 9 comments on HN
    2. 2
      My class required AI. Here's what I've learned so far
      3 people · 18 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    3. 3
      A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself
      4 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    4. 4
      Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI
      4 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
    5. 5
      How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide
      3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    6. 6
      Co-Create with ChatGPT and Boost Your Own Creativity
      2 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      The future, soon: what I learned from Bing's AI
      3 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    8. 8
      ChatGPT is my co-founder
      2 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · Discussion on HN
    9. 9
      How to Have Better Meetings
      1 person · 3 points · first shared 2022 · Discussion on HN
    10. 10
      Becoming Strange in the Long Singularity
      2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • wcedmistenFeb 2023

      Here's another article summarizing the OC article [1].

      It summarizes the details without any narrative, and concludes with:

      > While he was mostly stone-walled, Galuten was able to confirm this from at least one major producer. A General Mills representative told him that the Progresso Chicken Broth recipe starts with a broth concentrate. Then they add in water and additional ingredients to create what you buy in the store. Or, Galuten, says “just buy literally any box of chicken stock because they are probably all the same.”

      Frankly I don't find this as interesting as the original post.

      I guess it seems more down to earth and less sterile than presenting the facts in a traditional "journalist" third person way.

      Maybe I'm biased because I also write in this style for my own blog, but I frequently see this style used by hobbyists exploring technical topics on the front page of HN. E.g. a random post from the front page right now [2]

      [1]: https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/whats-in-store-bought-chicken-stock/

      [2]: https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/my-class-required-ai-heres-what-ive

    • dredmorbiusMar 2023

      The process is spelled out in more detail in Prof. Mollick's month-old Substack post which is linked (through a t.co redirect) from the NPR article:

      There are now a lot of services that can create realistic, virtual voices. Many of these can create voices that mimic anybody with high accuracy. For my experiment, I used a service called ElevenLabs, which cost me only $5.... As you might be starting to suspect, there are a growing number of services that will create a video of you from just a script and a single photograph. I used D-ID, which costs $5.99 a month....

      <https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/a-quick-and-sobering-guide-to-cloning>

      I'd typically suggest that HN swap the NPR link for the disintermediated source, though NPR adds some useful observations about the political, propaganda, and fraud elements of the technology. Both probably merit first-order status at HN.

      The substack article has been submitted within the past few hours here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274362>

    • nopinsightMar 2023

      Interpolation and forming internal abstraction from training data to solve problems are what most jobs consist of. Recent language models can do that sufficiently well it can help automate many kinds of tasks.

      Check out cases of people using GPT-4 to help automate their coding (on Twitter and elsewhere). It's not ready for harder problems but we're 1-3 key ideas away from solving them as well.

      Wikipedia cannot do the followings:

      * Minerva: Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models
      https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/06/minerva-solving-quantitative-reasoning.html

      * What can AI do in 30 minutes?
      https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-in-30-minutes

      For that matter, most signatories of the petition (and myself) were never persuaded by most other "revolutionary" ideas you mentioned above.

      See the names and accomplishments of the signatories at the bottom part of the page: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

    • creatonezMar 2023

      It's self-evident that GPT is a world-modeller, at least within the confines of the text boundary. It's able to come up with novel ideas seen nowhere in the training data, combinations that demonstrate there is a world concept web and not just a text probability web. It may not "understand" much of the hallucination nonsense it spits out, but there absolutely are moments where it "understands".

      See the Rome example on this page: https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/feats-to-astonish-and-amaze
      This is essentially a completely novel answer to an /r/AskHistorians style question, which I would consider one of the most difficult types of internet text to model, in terms of the amount of understanding and concept webs you need to tie together

    • ChildOfChaosMar 2023

      For example when making goals this year I asked it to break it down into monthly increments and at what point I needed to be at this year and put that into a table, it was quite helpful.

      I’ve not used bing yet, but chatgpt is all about feeding it the right data first before telling it what you want else your answers will be generic and awful, I found this article about the bing chat bot that might help:

      https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/power-and-weirdness-how-to-use-bing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    • mark_l_watsonMar 2023

      I just read an article with good tips for getting value from Bing AI https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/power-and-weirdness-how-to-use-bing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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