Ask Paul: June 12 ⭐

Happy Friday! With the annual developer season finally winding down, we can turn our attention to more pertinent matters. Like the over/under on whether Xbox will ever be successful and when, if ever, I'll actually use AI regularly. It's all a mystery but you have to start somewhere. So let's jump in.
"Skeptics Question Whether SpaceX Is Worth $1.77 Trillion"

And by skeptics, we mean people who understand how math works
✍️ A prompt engineer is not a real engineer
spacecamel asks:

Since you are an “AI expert” and a writer, do you have a thoughts on how to write a good prompt? You can find many tutorials on YouTube but they all have different ideas on what you should do. I think it’s a little bit about being able to write your thoughts down in an organized way but there is a little more to it. What are your thoughts?

Well. First of all, I have no particular skill in this area. And there are many others who spend a lot more time on this than I do.

It may not matter. This is not a plan per se, but I do feel that as AI improves, it continues to do a better job of inferring what it is that you want without you having to be so explicit. I am sure I wrote this somewhere, but I was describing this situation to my wife, how anyone who grew up in the 1980s with the first home computers was told that these things would only do exactly what you tell them, and that was often the source of what we perceived as bugs; AI, conversely, almost always does more than what we tell them, inferring our intent or otherwise filling the blanks based on probability and whatever data it was trained on.

I write about this, so it may seem that I use AI more than some, but I really don't use it that often for much. I feel like I'm up to three major use cases, one being a bit nebulous, where AI is more an ingredient or sub-feature than it is at the center. And then the other two are more explicit interactions and more typical of the interactions we have with chatbots and, increasingly agents.

Other than for demo purposes, as in taking a screenshot for a book or article, I've never used AI to write. But AI assists with my writing to some degree, and pretty much everywhere, via grammar and spelling checking on PCs, tablets, and phones, and in apps of all kinds, not just writing apps but things like Messages or whatever. This may shift in the future, but if so, it will be more about research than actual writing, and that is something I've experimented with, largely to compare the performance/capability of local AI to cloud-based AI. The thought there being that local AI will eventually (i.e. quickly) become good enough to replace more expensive cloud AI for most day-to-day use.

So that's the nebulous use case, what we might call implicit AI (similar to the language used by Canonical when it describes its plans for adding AI to Ubuntu). I don't see myself ever using AI explicitly for writing.

But I do use AI explicitly in two ways. For image creation...