Senior Care

We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any’ task, or do we wrap them in single-purpose apps, and build thousands of new companies around that? r: he saw a professor making a spreadsheet with chalk, on a blackboard, and realised that you could do this in ‘software’. So he made VisiCalc, the first successful computer spreadsheet, and when he showed it to accountants it blew their minds: they could do a week’s work in an afternoon. An Apple II to run VisiCalc cost at least $12,000* adjusted for inflation, but even so, people reached for

Generative AI means things that were always possible at a small scale now become practical to automate at a massive scale. Sometimes a change in scale is a change in principle.                            There’s a story in one of Georges Simeon’s 1930s detective stories that I think about sometimes when talking about a certain kind of AI problem. Simenon’s hero, Inspector Maigret of the judicial police in Paris, scares a witness, and then goes across the street to a café and calls the telephone exchange. He tells them that someone will place a call from the ‘Pelican’ nightclub to Cannes: they are to hold the call until he gets

How do we build mass-market products that change the world around a technology that gets things ‘wrong’? What does wrong mean, and how is that useful?   I will fly to India on Monday for a brief trip, and so I just spent an hour struggling through a very buggy online visa application process. Once I’d finished, since I now know what’s involved, I asked ChatGPT 4o about it. Most of these points are partially or completely wrong. This is an ‘unfair’ test. It’s a good example of a ‘bad’ way to use an LLM. These are not databases. They do not produce precise factual answers to questions, and they are probabilistic systems, not deterministic. LLMs today cannot give me

How do we think about a fundamentally unknown and unknowable risk, when the experts agree only that they have no idea? The manuscript for ‘A Logic Named Joe’ In 1946, my grandfather, writing as ‘Murray Leinster’, published a science fiction story called ‘A Logic Named Joe’. Everyone has a computer (a ‘logic’) connected to a global network that does everything from banking to newspapers and video calls. One day, one of these logics, ‘Joe’, starts giving helpful answers to any request, anywhere on the network: invent an undetectable poison, say, or suggest the best way to rob a bank. Panic ensues – ‘Check your censorship circuits!’ – until they work out what to unplug. (My other grandfather, meanwhile, was using