New Yorker (Mar 11, 2024) Among the AI Doomsayers is a lengthy profile of some of the people at the center of the AI Doom cult. Based in Berkeley and San Francisco, they share living quarters and obey all the standard “2020s tech” subculture fashions. The article notes the irony that the Doomers, all of whom are well-off financially thanks to technology, are also closely associated with the very companies that supposedly are going to bring our demise.

2024-03-29 Everypixel has a guide to the changing frequency of key AI terms used on much of the web

With the use of NOW Corpus, we accessed a repository containing over 18.8 billion words sourced from online newspapers and magazines spanning from 2010 to the present day. Employing a collocation search, we pinpointed the most frequently used terms related to AI. We also analyzed popular AI blogs and newsletters to identify prevalent terms within AI-centric communities. Additionally, we examined articles on Dictionary.com about new words to trace the emergence and adoption of AI-related terms. All identified terms were cross-checked in the NOW Corpus year-by-year over a 10-year period to track their usage and identify their emergence.

As you’d expect, the frequency usage of all of the terms (e.g. “prompt”, “AI models”, “GPT”, “LLM”) are sharply up and to the right. It’ll be interesting to watch this over the next few years to see the change.

2024-03-28

Pew Research says 30% of Americans under 30 have used ChatGPT for work.