Ronnie Chieng gave a commencement speech to Harvard’s graduation class. He has some thoughts on AI (YouTube link) that are both humorous and trenchant. I particularly enjoyed: “AI is just going to make mediocre people dumber.”
thank you for that link
I would have put this somewhere more appropriate, but you know what you can’t run a thread search for? “AI.” It doesn’t seem worthy of its own thread.
Anyway, I’m here to say, to @wolfpup’s gratification, that I’m grudgingly learning to use AI to write grants.
Now, there is a lot of nuance to this. Last week was my first attempt at this. I used ChatGPT to review a draft I wrote and compare it to an RFP. (Request for Proposals - the document where the funder tells you what they want to fund and how you’re expected to write the application.) A lot of the stuff it pointed out was like, “Shit, have I really gotten this lazy?” (Or overworked?) Because it was nothing I didn’t know. It gave me a bunch of suggested language, and with each individual statement, damned if I could figure out how to write it better. But then once I put too much of these recommended statements into the application, it read like shit.
I asked AI to tell me where I was redundant and repetitive, so it helped with that, but it also encouraged me to strip things out that basically are what made it written by a human being.
At any rate, I do think I improved the application in some ways.
This week I’m working through the weekend on a very involved grant we are not competitive for. It’s the worst thing ever, doing your best on a project you know is doomed to fail. Because I’ve been house-hunting I got wind of what was actually needed for this grant way too late. I also had several people drop the ball (surprise!) and just decided to do it all myself.
First I tackled letters of support. I only turned to this because writing letters of support in that state of mind, at that time, felt excruciating. Well, it wrote one letter of support, and then I realized I can’t use the same thing for every letter of support. So not terribly helpful there. I wrote the rest on my own. Mine were better.
Today, I’m facing down the narrative questions and yet another way we are not competitive for this grant, and I was like, shit. I don’t know how to write this. I guess I can ask.
So I asked something like,
“This funder [named] wants us to talk about our community partnerships. The funder seems to want deep collaborations. While we have numerous community partners, I think the funder is more interested in future collaborations, and wants evidence that we have planned commitments. We have none of that. The best I can say is that one major objective of the grant is to facilitate new partnerships. I know this is not a competitive response. What would be a more competitive response?”
[the actual language I used was much lazier.]
Well, the response I got was… wait for it… incredibly helpful. It pointed out ways I could increase specificity to make it sound more intentional, and explained that this funder’s terms were proxy language for three important concepts, all of which I could speak to. Looking at the RFP itself, this checks out. I don’t know how much more competitive it’s going to make us, but I think applying this strategy will make me feel less like I phoned it in. Of course, I’m not going to use any of its actual language, because its word choices were pretty shit. I need to keep this stuff in my own voice for it to stand out. But the kind of feedback it’s giving me isn’t just “write these words instead” but more about grant-writing strategy, and in my expert opinion, it is compelling strategy. I don’t want to become reliant on AI, though. I think I’m just going to try to learn as much as I can until I can apply those principles myself.
I’m sure my CEO will be delighted.
(I still think AI is ruining the world.)
I’m happy to hear that!
FTR, I’m not unconditionally supportive of all AI applications, I just recognize its usefulness in many applications while recognizing and accepting its current limitations.
Recently I was especially impressed by Claude, which seems to have both a sense of humour and a propensity for unsolicited philosophizing. In a recent discussion about specific medical issues, Claude went off on a reflective commentary about how modern medicine was gradually shifting away from classical authoritarianism (“here’s a prescription for five medications that you need to take forever”) to a more collaborative doctor-patient relationship. This is where the patient questions risk/benefit tradeoffs, dosage amounts, and whether a particular medication is really necessary at all, and where a good doctor embraces this collaboration and adds informed opinion, not dictatorial stricture. I was impressed.
I thought it was exactly right and perfectly described my recent interactions with my cardiologist, and it came completely out of the blue. We had actually been discussing the risks/benefits of one specific medication.
you’ll never convince a fan boy of that
meanwhile, maybe the defunding of PBS means they can do some hard hitting journalism?
here is a 22 minute video by PBS Terra
We Saw What AI Data Centers Don’t Want You to See
I feel so sorry for the people in the areas of Texas talked about, and I also worry about where I live since we have 4 data centers currently.
I don’t think they have their own (extremely polluting) power plant but who knows? plus, since everything is a secret, maybe that’s coming next.
You might try this thread instead: Where could “AI” be actually helpful?
To be fair, that appears to be a general-purpose data center, not one dedicated specifically to AI.
People who want to impede technological and economic progress because of vibes are definitely Making America Great Again.
You can, however, click on the ai tag.
Are you saying that AI data centres do NOT have negative environmental implications? Or that any environmental cost is worth it because of the economic benefits?
The “vibes” seems dismissive, but I’m not quite sure if you just want these damn hippies to get a haircut and a job, or what.
Well, speaking for myself, what I’m saying is that large data centers exist and will continue to proliferate, serving the needs of “cloud” service providers and corporate computing needs that are being increasingly outsourced. That’s what the cited proposed data center was supposed to be about.
For anyone who hasn’t noticed, computers in all forms are the backbone of today’s economy. Are you questioning whether the “environmental cost” is worth it? It’s not just about AI, it’s about the fact that centralized data centers are more efficient and cost-effective than individual smaller ones that companies have to run themselves. Which means that overall resource usage and environmental impact is actually less than with distributed, fragmented, smaller centers. But the big mega data centers are the ones that attract all the criticism, probably exacerbated by Luddite fearmongers who think they’re only about AI.
I was specifically wondering what JohnT was objecting to, because I couldn’t parse his comment.