Abhinav Vinci

“If the untrained infant’s mind is to become an intelligent one, it must acquire both discipline and initiative. So far we have been considering only discipline. —ALAN TURING1”
― Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

“This tends to make us uncomfortable: After all, how can AI, a machine, generate something new and creative? The issue is that we often mistake novelty for originality. New ideas do not come from the ether; they are based on existing concepts. Innovation scholars have long pointed to the importance of recombination in generating ideas. Breakthroughs often happen when people connect distant, seemingly unrelated ideas. To take a canonical example, the Wright brothers combined their experience as bicycle mechanics and their observations of the flight of birds to develop their concept of a controllable plane that could be balanced and steered by warping its wings.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“And you can’t figure out why an AI is generating a hallucination by asking it. It is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the AI will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result. The system has no way of explaining its decisions, or even knowing what those decisions were. Instead, it is (you guessed it) merely generating text that it thinks will make you happy in response to your query. LLMs are not generally optimized to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have enough information. Instead, they will give you an answer, expressing confidence.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“Close your eyes and imagine your ideal day at eighty years old (or one hundred, in the case of the ninety-year-old!). Vividly imagine it. What are you doing? Who are you with? Where are you? How do you feel? The exercise forces you to begin with the ideal future end in mind—it establishes a personal definition of a successful life that can be used to reverse-engineer the actions in the present to achieve that desired end.”
― Sahil Bloom, The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life