From Phoenix to the 🏖️

After a quick trip to Phoenix, Arizona to last week, I'm home to beautiful Cardiff-by-the-Sea.  A short one this week... a little on family, openAI, and a broken railroad track isolating San Diego from Los Angeles by rail.

'Tis the Season for Family

I just made it through 10 days of celebrating four huge family birthdays. My father turned 80, my brother - 55, my wife - 35, and my brother-in-law - 41. Combine that with thanksgiving, and a few crazy fucking uncles and you can imagine the series of events :)

Even though this is a crazy time of year, and we've been through so much the last few years, don't forget to tell those around you you love them.  And hug them whether you mean it or not.

AI Bursts

One of my favorite books of all time is Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.  If you don't know Barabasi, may I recommend his entire catalog and ongoing research at https://barabasi.com/

Recently I've been observing renewed bursts of inquiry and activity amongst friends for a deeper understanding of data and product management. Lo and behold the finest case study I could ask for, chatGPT.

For my product people out there...chatGPT

If you haven't been following chapGPT,  you've missed one of the most amazing examples of hyper-product growth in history.  Estimates range that OpenAI, the company behind chatGPT and Dalle-2, a chat-based language and visual model is spending $3-5mln per day executing queries (processing data) in an effort to build an innumerable array of compelling products.   To many, the implications and questions raised are endless.

I am talking with all kinds of business operators in various sectors including but not limited to legal, medicine, marketing, technology, and call-center operators – all seeking to understand better the application of this prompt-based LLM (Large Language Model) flavor of AI.  

It's early, and though others have written more extensively on the capabilities of openAI, my initial thoughts are that traditional search engine optimization (SEO) infrastructure and knowledge graphs now serve as the inputs to these types of models.  

Where once we related on Google to sift through these results and be somewhat hierarchical in its response (PageRank, search results,  paid ads etc.), with openAI one can imagine a world where outputs are structured completely differently, perhaps a fully composed haiku, piece of music or snippet of code designed specifically for its intended use.  The written word is just the beginning.  

I'll likely write in my more depth, though I'd thought I'd send a few primer articles along as well as a few examples.

San Diego - Los Angeles Rail Still Shut Down

Some of you may know my longstanding fascination with rails.  Welp, chalk another one up to the ineptitude of the American rail system.

With beach eroding in San Clemente, CA (about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles), the Amtrak Surfliner continues to be closed for its third month after the route was shut down between two of the largest cities in the United States.  

And while Governor Gavin Newsome declared a statewide emergency in an effort to accelerate repairsm, not enough is made of the insane cost, and woeful service levels offered by U.S. rail compared to our European and Asian neighbors.

A California coastal town grapples with losing its beach

The shoreline from San Clemente to Dana Point is a microcosm of what issues can arise when the sandy beach disappears from a “beach town.”

The Mercury Newspperronbayareanewsgroup.com

Look forward to hearing from you this week too! Have a great week.

Josh

Links

ChatGPT: The Future of AI Is Here - TidBITS

Chatbots have just progressed to the next level with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT. Programmer David Shayer explains what’s behind ChatGPT’s curtain and ponders how we’ll deal with AI-driven chatbots that sound confident and reasonable but may be entirely wrong.

TidBITSDavid Shayer

AI Homework

The first obvious casualty of large language models is homework: the real training for everyone, though, and the best way to leverage AI, will be in verifying and editing information.

Stratechery by Ben ThompsonBen Thompson