Boris Steipe @boris_steipe@qoto.org

There has been a hiatus in my Sentient Syllabus Writing, while I was lecturing and thinking through things.

But I have just posted an analysis on the #Sutskever / #Altman schism at #OpenAI and hope you find it enlightening.

Enjoy!

#ChatGPT #GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #AGI #ASI #ChatGPT #generativeAI #Bostrom #AI-ethics #Education #University #Academia

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/priests-and-badgers

The latest post in the #SentientSyllabus project is a bit of breaking news, an accessible introduction to a paradigm shift that is rapidly gaining stem, although it is only about a week old.

While we are still struggling to fully grasp the implications of "speech from a box", there is a veritable explosion of interest and activities that take this a step further, treating individual prompts and responses as a thought, and chaining them together to "thinking".

It turns out this is rather easy to do. While one instance of #ChatGPT only has responsive agency, two together can sustain this and have full agency over an extended domain. Add in memory and remembering, the ability to call on external executor AIs, to access the internet and other services, and you get full-fledged computations, a novel paradigm that we may call "generative programming". Generative, because the program flow itself is not pre-specified, but it is generated on-the-fly with the evolving context of the task at hand. And it is all glued together by natural language and the everyday understanding of our world that language brings with it.

We discuss the #Smallville experiment, and introduce #AutoGPT, #BabyAGI, #Jarvis, and #LangChain - with a shout out to #pinecone; names that it will be worthwhile to remember - at least for a week.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/trains-of-thought

Drop in, enjoy the thinking, and share with whoever would benefit.

Language is learning to talk. "Die Sprache spricht."

#GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #generativeAI #Education #University #Academia #GenerativeProgramming

Part 2 of the #SentientSyllabus course redesign project has been posted: Academic visions.

Before we actually look at contents and course details, we embark on a substantial visioning exercise. Thinking of academia in the future: how will the nature of work change, and what does that mean for the economy? How will our course materials respond? How will learning itself change? And how will our roles as instructors change?

We extrapolate from current trends to derive the contours of a reimagined academia. One of the interesting conclusions is that although we will be using more technology, that technology will become more transparent. That's a simple consequence of natural language instructions.

Finally we consider different pedagogical frameworks – it turns out that #KnowledgeBuilding has some interesting ideas to contribute, for example the concept of "Epistemic Artefacts" ...

It's getting interesting. Have a look

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/starting-over-2

#ChatGPT #GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #generativeAI #Education #University #Academia #CourseDesign #Syllabus

@mistersql

The "Primer" in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.

@jonippolito

Thanks Jon - you and Peter did a great job putting this together. Let me encourage you to have a look at https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/ – I'm sure you will find this useful.

:-)

@manjusrii

If "we" includes you, yourself, have a look at the course re-design that we just embarked on at the Sentient Syllabus Project.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/starting-over-1

🙂

@flancian

🙂

It actually missed the most significant point: it has no-self.

@pablo

The "great authors" of the future will be those that are able to make their experience resonate with their reader.

But that was equally true of the great authors of the past.

It is an open question whether such resonance requires that the author _have_ human experience. Or whether it is sufficient to learn from human experience. (From all of it.)

🙂

@j

The question really boils down to whether a "self" as an integrative experiencer of this recursive attention is a precondition or a consequence of the feedback.

But there is indeed a big difference (that IIRC Hofstadter did not consider): that is "agency", or the ability to sustain experience from within.

(I would not consider this "disturbing" though.)

🙂

@philipphacker

Philipp - I have a conflict at this time. Are you going to record the meeting?

As you can see, we have shared interests in this topic.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com

Good luck with your meeting!
🙂

@kuketzblog

Und warum?
(Und das mein' ich auch ernst.)

🙂

@matthewskelton
@ntcoding

Matthew - I've used a similar approach for academic writing with a slightly different twist: use the AI as a generic reviewer and ask it for feedback. It will give you the "current thinking", it will slightly misunderstand your arguments, and often generally miss the point. Just like a human reviewer will. But now you can go and emphasize your writing's novelty, make your arguments more explicit, and make your points crystal clear - before the paper gets sent off.

We always write with a ton of implicit knowledge. Having a patient reader who does not share that knowledge is invaluable. It helps us make implicit knowledge explicit. That's what it's always about.

🙂

#Sentientsyllabus

@sheeep

... subject to the constraints of the context window, right?

@syntaxseed

Of course.

🙂

Being respectful enhances your _own_ dignity. I treat my refrigerator with respect - why not the AI?

@JesseSkinner

Jesse, this is well known. In "technical" terms this is determined by the size of the "context-window", the number of tokens that a LLM has available at any given time. With ChatGPT-3.5 that was about 2,000 tokens, with ChatGPT-4 these are about 3,500 tokens which comes to a bit over 2,500 words or five pages of single-spaced text.

Everything beyond that is washed out of the conversation.

🙂

It's not quite right to say that #GenerativeAI will transform the #university. It is we who change it – as faculty, as learners, as administrators. In the Sentient Syllabus Project, we are setting out to establish best-practice for such change, and we start with a single course.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/starting-over-1

We have written analysis about the impact of AI on #Academia for several months now, and we looked at questions of #authorship, #AcademicIntegrity, and personalized instruction. Now we start putting this into practice. This new post maps out a course redesign which will proceed in steps until early July. There are many new developments and visions to integrate with longstanding experience, but the July date will also give others time to build on the results for their own fall term courses.

Actually, we plan to work on two courses - one in #STEM and one in the #humanities.

Welcome to join us along the way.

🙂

#Sentientsyllabus #ChatGPT #GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #Education #CourseDesign #Syllabus

@ukrio

How did the editor respond to you?