Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 402 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
37

Why did Google Brain exist?

This essay was originally written in December 2022 as I pondered the future of my job. I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared, and last week, Brain and…

39

CheatGPT

This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another. It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing! My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do:

55

Simply explained: How does GPT work?

By now, you have probably heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or any of the alternatives GPT-3, GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Facebook’s LLaMa or even Google’s Bard. They are artificial intelligence programs that can participate in a conversation. Impressively smart, they can easily be mistaken for humans, and are skilled in a…

58

AI and Mass Spying

Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired…