So bizarre to see the article refer to outputs as the models referencing "themselves". Computers are not a "them".

Why not? "Them" is a generic pronoun for anything. Boats, cars, computers, all of them

I agree, in the same way that bodies are not a "them".

A program with agency, opinion and intent however, does qualify. To say that such programs are "thems" only if they run on specific hardware, say a homo sapiens, is very tricky territory. Slavery and Fascism both leaned heavily on the axiom that the hardware needs a specific skin color.

I am finding it depressingly rare to see people who don't believe, whether they admit it or not, in souls here. I used to think a technical audience like software engineers would have a decent percentage of people making the completely commonsense default assumption that consciousness like anything else we have seen till now is a physical phenomenon.

How dare you malign Jensen's jacket so.

Do your students know their feedback is AI generated?

A pre-AI example from the military : course reviews and performance assessments were changes to be from a set of about 70 descriptors instead of written custom. Instructors could modify them, but many didn't or did so only trivially. The system was junked in within three years because of the obvious: those giving feedback didn't own it, and those receiving feedback didn't value it.

Feedback is not AI generated, just structured grammar corrected and pasted at the right spot. I then review the output to see if it remains within what I meant to convey with my feedback. This is relatively simple feedback, I have 'highlight' and 'to improve' fieldsm, with a few sentences in each, very focused. If the feedback felt depersonalized or its meaning or tone changed I would fix it or not use this method. For longer forms of feedback it may not work.

Reviewing if generated feedback is within scope of what you'd give is not the same as giving feedback yourself. It is wildly different in fact.

Please, re-read.

I wonder if this will mean a resurgence of encyclopedias or other authoritative digital records that are known to be verified.

Well, I suspect the non-LLM ones will become much more expensive than they are now due to the specialist knowledge they’d require to make combined with the smaller pool of people willing to pay for the difference

And the fact that LLMs are actively taking traffic away from them

As long as they're behind a wall that AI bots can't reach and suck all of the authoritative information out and then starve of visitors.

Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.

I wonder how visible it will be when showing final charges for an order.

I'd definitely be more likely to "wait it out" when considering purchases in my cart if I can see what I expect will be a temporary levy.

So, given that Phoenix, Denver, and Vegas already have spacing similar to European nations do they see the benefits that the author is suggesting?

Phoenix metro has 5mm people and does 37mm bus rides. NYC has 8.5mm people and does 400+mm bus rides. London has 9mm and does 1.8 billion bus rides.

But those 37mm in Phoenix are probably going faster than 8mph.

Amusing that the author can't stomach referring to themselves as an agent manager so they retreat back to the term "agent engineering". Please.

That was the joke: it's not easy to quit smoking.

And yet somewhere around that 6th donut it will hit and you will stop.