GPT and Technofetishistic Egotism
AI is having a moment! New models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have captured the imagination and challenged assumptions about the capabilities and limits of machine learning. But how do these “generative” models work? What does a future where these models are commonplace look like? And what are their limitations? I’ll focus primarily on GPT, but some of this analysis will also apply to image generation models like Stable Diffusion as well (and indeed, with GPT-4’s new visual capabilities, the line between these two categories of models is now rather blurry).