I've been skimming lots of articles and threads on GPT and AI. What strikes as a bit repulsive is the overwhelming panicky tone, conservatism, moralism, finger waving, and outright luddism on display. So, nice to see something a bit more positive. Dog got sick, chat gpt 4 saves the day. Amazing.

I'm more or less an optimist. My default attitude is that things will be fine even if they aren't perfect just right now. I enjoy utopian sci fi. I know intellectually it is a utopia and not realistic. But I still like to imagine how great humanity could be if we got rid of that before mentioned attitude. Chat GPT is the most concrete thing in my life time that gets us close to how people interacted with such classic AI characters as c3po, twiki (Buck rogers), kitt in Knight Rider, or the nameless "computer" in Star Trek. I grew up in the eighties (obviously).

My first computer was a commodore 64, that wasn't quite that smart. All that went from being science fiction to being science fact in the last few months. We now have conversational AIs that we can discuss all sorts of topics with. Like C3PO it jumps to the wrong conclusions some times, can be wrong in very entertaining ways, and is scarily good when things go right. I had some debate with Bing as to what to eat and then debugged some code with chat gpt 3 and it pointed out some mistakes that I made.

Is AI going to replace me in everything I do? No, I don't think so. If only because it is in my interest to find ways to keep myself busy. But I sure am going to be using it a lot to do what I do a little bit faster. Which means I get to do more interesting things. Sounds good to me. I like doing interesting things.

GPT 4 apparently has the ability to use tools. Where GPT-3 struggles to do math, GPT-4 can use a calculator and learn to use other tools. This is going to be very disruptive for me. Because learning how to use all sorts of weird and obscure tools is a big part of what I need to do. Often what I do conceptually (I'm a startup CTO) is pretty easy to grasp. Except I then need to figure out a whole bunch of tools to get the work done. Which is actually somewhat tedious. I hate it when an idea pops in my head and I then have to grind at figuring out stupid tool issues for the next few days/weeks/months to get things done. I often don't have time for this so most of my brain farts don't get very far. I actually have to be very economical about what I pursue even or I won't get anything done at all. For most of the ideas I have I don't even have enough bandwidth to validate if they are even good ideas.

This is frustrating to me. And fundamentally, this frustration is what drives creativity. You get stuck on some problem, grind away at it, and then you find a solution and your brain rewards you with a little endorphin rush. We're not very complicated. That incidentally is also the business model behind social media: AI driven endorphin rushes in the form of an addictive feed of stuff. And that AI is mind numbingly stupid in comparison.

So, I don't see AI as a threat but as a massive enabler for me that I can delegate to, cross check ideas with, ask to provide me with some inspiration, explore new concepts with, etc. GPT-3 is already quite good in a limited way but from what I've read about GPT-4, I've seen nothing yet. And I'm sure we'll have GPT 5,6,7 and so on leap frog what is possible in a relatively short time frame. Not to mention the countless other companies that are working on competing AIs.

So, yes, AI is going to change lots of things and I think that's great. Can't wait. Can I fast forward ten years or so?