On the principles and practice of interaction design, visualization and interpretability for ML systems, and how to understand and explain language models.
Martin Wattenberg brings a unique perspective to all the topics discussed.
I appreciated his nuanced conception of language and the way meanings of words are grounded in representations of worlds.
I liked his additions to the current debate about methods of interaction with LLM. I have been a strong critic of chatbots, but he is right, text is still a very powerful medium. Perhaps the next step in interaction is finding new ways to manipulate text.
I also really like the moment when you very consciously spoke about AI genre text as "content that looks like fiction" vs. "content that looks like non-fiction." This resonated with an intuition I have had for a while now about AI and intentionality.
Some critics of AI continue to insist that it "lies" or "produces fiction." I personally think these statements flatten the complexity of an AI locution, and lead to unproductive lines of thinking about the larger cultural moment we live in. More on that later!!!
As always, many thanks for listening! Yes, I think there’s a reasonable middle ground on all this: LLMs are limited, but very powerful and a big step forward.
Curious to hear more of your thoughts re the last paragraph!
I really enjoyed this podcast.
Martin Wattenberg brings a unique perspective to all the topics discussed.
I appreciated his nuanced conception of language and the way meanings of words are grounded in representations of worlds.
I liked his additions to the current debate about methods of interaction with LLM. I have been a strong critic of chatbots, but he is right, text is still a very powerful medium. Perhaps the next step in interaction is finding new ways to manipulate text.
I also really like the moment when you very consciously spoke about AI genre text as "content that looks like fiction" vs. "content that looks like non-fiction." This resonated with an intuition I have had for a while now about AI and intentionality.
Some critics of AI continue to insist that it "lies" or "produces fiction." I personally think these statements flatten the complexity of an AI locution, and lead to unproductive lines of thinking about the larger cultural moment we live in. More on that later!!!
As always, many thanks for listening! Yes, I think there’s a reasonable middle ground on all this: LLMs are limited, but very powerful and a big step forward.
Curious to hear more of your thoughts re the last paragraph!