Noah Brier: Things I think about AI

...born from a place of spending an inordinate amount of time using and building with these tools over the last few years

Below is a list of things I think I think about AI. It's incomplete, in no specific order, and probably controversial. But, it's born from a place of spending an inordinate amount of time using and building with these tools over the last few years (my estimate for time spent working on AI-backed software is ~2,400 hours since 2022, and that doesn't count the day-to-day use of ChatGPT, Claude, etc.).

So please, add, argue, critique what I've got here (as long as you're a) actually playing with this stuff and b) not still solely using 4o 😉).

Thanks,
Noah
Alephic

1. You don't need fancy techniques, classes, or a complicated prompt to learn AI. The best way to get up to speed is to pay $25 per month for a ChatGPT subscription and use it as much as possible.

2. If you're still using 4o, your opinions on anything happening with AI are nullified.

3. o3 is the best model from OpenAI, and you shouldn't ever really have to use anything else.

4. Claude is a better writer than ChatGPT.

5. ChatGPT is better at just about everything else.

6. There's nothing Perplexity does that ChatGPT doesn't do better.

7. Grok voice > ChatGPT and Gemini voice (mainly because it uses a better model)

8. ChatGPT's advanced voice mode will remain unusable until they switch off 4o

9. Google Search is good for getting you to a website when you can't remember the URL or can't be bothered to type it in. AI is good for everything else.

10. The only way to be is a token maximalist. Always err on the side of too much context, not too little.

11. If you aren't exhausting your deep research queries in ChatGPT, you're using it wrong.

12. You should be writing with Claude Artifacts/ChatGPT Canvas.

13. The only time prompt engineering techniques really matter is when you're working on a shared prompt (app, GPT, project); otherwise, you should just work with the chat.

14. Sometimes you need to be rude to the AI to help it understand you really want it to do something.

15. You should never share something written by ChatGPT without reading it first.

16. You should never apologize for having used ChatGPT. WWGPTD.

17. Em-dashes are fine, everyone should chill out.

18. I have never found a use for fine-tuning that a prompt can't solve.

19. We will continue to be surprised to find out that, without any specialized training, transformer-based models can solve many problems that specialized models were built to solve.

20. People who say AI isn't useful for their job aren't trying hard enough.

21. People who say AI can't be creative aren't being creative enough.

22. One of the most important races in enterprise AI will be between the model creators trying to figure out how to build a rich text editor and the rich text editor companies (Google and Microsoft) trying to figure out how to integrate AI into their products in a way that isn't awful (like it is now).

23. People are the bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption, and it will stay that way for longer than anyone expects.

24. Most lawyers who worry about AI data protections haven't read the terms of service.

25. If models didn't progress from what we have today, we'd still have 10 years of runway to integrate their value into corporations and society.

26. When it comes to AI, don't trust anyone who sounds too confident.

27. If someone says, "You won't lose your job to AI, you'll lose your job to someone using AI," you should stop listening. It's not that it's wrong, but that we need a lot less certainty (and more humility) when it comes to this stuff.

28. The value of using AI isn't that it gives you great foresight into the future of how AI will evolve; it's that it gives you an uncanny ability to sniff out everyone else's BS.

29. AI is underhyped.