Celia Quillan
Appearances
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So, so, but for the most part, if there is, you know, I think humor is the one that really falls flat on, but cleverness, you know, if you ask it to create 10 clever headlines, maybe one of them, you pluck it out after you read it through as a human is clever. The other nine might not be so much, but one of those 10 is bound to get you a little closer to where you want to be.
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That is a super good question. And the answer is you should be always a little skeptical with everything, especially if it's a super niche topic because these tools do create, you know, their best, they're just predicting the next best answer. That prediction could be wrong. Just kind of like how the weather prediction might be wrong for the day. If you're looking at your weather app. But yeah,
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these tools are progressively getting better and better and trained on more data sets, which are making them less likely to what we call hallucinate. Mathematics, they used to be terrible at predicting the best answer to a mathematical question. Now, the more advanced models, especially those that are,
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are called deep reasoning models where they kind of, when they generate a response to you, it takes a little bit longer because it's actually running through its response through itself over and over again to see if it's really getting to the best answer. Those will be more likely to be correct.
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Now, when it comes to general questions about things that are likely, there's likely a lot of information about it on the internet, for example, therefore it's likely trained on a lot of that data. Like why is the sky blue? it's probably going to give a pretty solid answer to that.
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If you ask it about a very niche disease that just appeared in the world that hasn't been heavily researched, it's probably going to give you an answer, but it may not be correct. The best thing I tell people to do is that when you use these tools as a jumping off point, because they can get you really far, and then do a quick Google search, see if there's a secondary source that backs that up.
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You'll find that a lot of the time, it is totally right. It's wrong enough of the time that you should always do that extra step of fact-checking.
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You will get one lasagna recipe back. It will not necessarily be the best lasagna. Best is, you know, arbitrary. But you will get a recipe back that is most likely to result in a lasagna. That's the best way I can put it. So if you truly want to have the vetted, you know, best ranked lasagna, lots of great ratings, Google might still be the best way to go.
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But if you're looking to just get started, I want to try and cook something quick. I do this all the time. How do I? Give me a quick recipe. I have chicken, asparagus. Parmesan and tomato sauce in my fridge. What can I make with this? It will generate back a recipe that will result in something tasty. It may not be the best thing you've ever made, but it will get you there.
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And that is again, because it's taking in all of the data it has of all the lasagna recipes that are in its training data, which is likely a massive amount because they are effectively trained on the whole variety of things on the internet.
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That's correct. You ask for one, you get one. Now you can ask for five and it'll give you five different ones. I do say in the case of a recipe, if you're looking for a recipe, most of these tools have a certain text-based cutoff. After they generate a certain number of words, they'll finish the answer. That way they don't go on for forever and you'll have 10 pages of content to read.
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So if you're looking for recipes, for example, sometimes you're better off asking for one and then saying, okay, that sounds okay, but could I have another? And then it generates another one. But I like it, honestly.
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Instead of having to scroll through endless pages of search results and then click through them, scroll past all of the ads and all of the recipe blogs tend to have a lot of extra context up front that has nothing to do with the recipe. ChatGPT will give you exactly what you want, nicely packaged, short and sweet.
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And if you don't like it, you can ask for another one and it'll generate it just about as quickly.
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couple years ago i planned a whole trip to puerto rico with it um i did not know where i wanted to go i just knew i wanted to go on a vacation i knew what the criteria that i wanted were um my husband and i wanted to go on a nice romantic trip together somewhere warm that we had never been before that um you know maybe it was a little bit tropical but was in a certain distance and we didn't want to go to hawaii it was too far away and it generated a bunch i asked it to generate you know 10 recommendations based off of all that criteria
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generated 10 recommendations. Then I had it do some more research on, okay, tell me more about Puerto Rico.
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Once we had landed on that trip within basically 10 minutes, I had it make a table breaking down all the different activities that we could possibly do there based off of the price per person, based off of a description, like describe it, give me a price per person, give me where it is relative to the hotel we're thinking about staying at. And it just accomplished so much work
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research tasks that would have taken me hours and hours and hours on Google, popping through different travel blogs, trying to find responses. So that's one thing, just everything related to travel planning. Related to that, The vision capabilities on these tools, which is basically being able to take a picture and ask questions about it, is huge.
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You can snap a picture of a menu at a restaurant and ask, you know, I'm on this kind of diet. I'm looking for lower sodium. I'm trying to be gluten-free, but I don't know what has gluten in it. It's kind of one of those fancy menus that has... menu items that I've never heard about listed on the menu.
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Could you describe what this dish probably is or go and describe in layman's term what this fancy menu means or translate this menu entirely in French into English? Um, It can analyze data now. ChatGPT has a data analysis feature. So I personally track all of my finances in a spreadsheet.
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I can attach it into ChatGPT with all the different inputs of how much money is in what account and have it create graphs and charts and analyze what's going up, down, what I should be considering. There are so many things it can do. I could go on forever.
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Absolutely. Yeah. And it's really great. I mean, it is truly a collaborative tool. It is like engaging with a second person in the room. So if you're trying to sort through a problem, that's another use case.
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If you're an interpersonal problem with a family member or friend, and you just need something to bounce ideas off of and get advice from, it's surprisingly good at delivering mature, thoughtful, somewhat objective advice as long as you ask for that. And it's very, very collaborative and creative. It's just it's an expert at mimicking how humans communicate.
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That's correct. Sometimes it will say, sometimes these tools will say, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. I don't have the ability to browse the web. But if you know it can browse the web because either you've, because you've tried it probably in the past before, then it will say, okay, I'll go do it now.
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And then it will come back to you and you'll know it did it because you'll be able to see a link that you can click through on.
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The level of progress they've made in the past two years, two and a half years since they released is insane. So they will be able to do more and more advanced things as time progresses.
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I do this all the time. Give me a quick recipe. I have chicken, asparagus, Parmesan and tomato sauce in my fridge. What can I make with this? It will generate back a recipe that will result in something tasty. It may not be the best thing you've ever made, but it will get you there.
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Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
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Absolutely. I think many people think of it as a search engine, which, especially in the early days, might have been a detriment to them because at the time, many of these tools could not browse the web for you and do that search. Now they can. But I do think that that is kind of the first and foremost thing that people think of them as.
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Brainstorming, it's excellent at coming up with new ideas and helping you creatively come up with new suggestions for how to accomplish tasks or how to name something. It can help you create and generate effectively anything that is text-based.
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So if you needed to create a quick guide to a place that you're traveling, instead of searching one thing, you can search many things at once effectively by having it create a guide. You could have it craft a shopping list according to your groceries that you have to accomplish for the week.
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You could turn it into your personal secretary, articulating out all the things you have to keep in mind and remember and have it jot it down and summarize it in a nice, concise way for you to refer back to later. There is no limit to how it can help you, really. Anything that is text-based, it effectively acts as an intern, as a super advanced intern that can do anything for you.
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Another use case that many people enjoy is meal planning. So you can put in your preferences for what you... what your dietary preferences are, what you want to eat, how many meals you need prepped for, what your calorie intake you roughly want for each meal is.
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And it can generate a list of ideas, recipes, grocery lists from there, and really help you outsource a lot of the menial tasks that take a lot of energy and mind space in your day-to-day.
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Absolutely. And it is always better when you collaborate with it as well. You can refine it to make it more personalized. You can give it feedback. It's almost like a co-collaborator. And it really is, it's a magical tool when you first use it because I'm realizing that it can unlock this. It's like having a second intelligence in the room with you.
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Yeah. Key thing to understand, unlike a search engine, these tools are not going and browsing a massive database of information, plucking out a paragraph or two and then pasting them back to you. They're not doing what a Google search might where it's browsing all the URLs on the web and finding the content that most matches your search. Instead, it is a predictive tool.
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So it's predicting the best possible answer word by word or more technically token by tokens, a fraction of a word to give you an answer based off of the words you put into it. And it's basically like a very, very advanced autocorrect. How it's able to do this is these tools were trained off of a massive amount of data. So think about the contents of the entire internet, for example.
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The computer is able to run a lot of complex calculations and notice different patterns within language. So it basically became very good at mimicking human language patterns and assigns weights to different words. So, for example, it might know that the word kitten is more frequently associated with cat than puppy.
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And over time, all those different things informs the model that allows us to interact with these tools, the large language model. But all you need to know is effectively it's not retrieving information. It is predicting the best possible answer word by word based off of this massive training model that it has developed.
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Certainly, I find them to be more or less interchangeable. So you have ChatGPT, kind of the leader, the most well-known, but there are countless tools in this arena. If you're looking for a more general purpose AI that can do kind of everything that I mentioned before, ChatGPT, Google Gemini,
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Cloud AI is another one, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Meta has an AI now that also has a chat interface. All of these tools can do all of that text-based generation. There's some subtle differences between the different tools in terms of the extra functionalities they have, but as these companies behind them are developing and trying to compete with each other,
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they are frequently introducing the same features and functionality that ChatGPT might have just released so they can keep up. So some examples are attachments. In the early days of ChatGPT and these other tools, many did not allow you to, say, attach a PDF to your question or query. Now, ChatGPT can do that. Cloud AI can do that. Google Gemini, you can connect it with your Google Drive.
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Microsoft Copilot works in sync with your Microsoft 365 suite so that you can now communicate with those PDFs. Other examples, as we mentioned earlier, web browsing. So all of these different tools, with the exception of Claude that I mentioned earlier, can now actually go and browse the web, generate a response summarizing what it finds, and then link back out to the source that it got that from.
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So all of these tools have subtle differences, but by and large, I try and encourage people to, you know, if you have one that you like, and especially if it's free and you're just getting started, experiment, play around with it.
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In no time, if some competitor launches a new feature, it probably won't be long until they launch their own version of the same thing because these tools are evolving so quickly and they're all trying to stay competitive with each other.
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So it doesn't really know anything, I guess is the one way to put it. It's not actually intelligent, but it is artificially so. So snappier, you know, kind of how a thesaurus works really. Snappier is associated with other words like catchy, zingy, you know, all these other things.
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And in its training data, it's associated, you know, snappy characters in a text it might've been trained off of, right? Maybe a character is described as snappy in their dialogue at some point in time. It starts to associate those words with different kinds of output.
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So it's hard to explain it exactly, but it does have a very advanced way of understanding human language patterns and human language context and meaning. So if you ask it to be snappier, it will probably develop a response back to you that is more concise, maybe a little bit sassy. Maybe it has a rhyme to it, depending on what else is in your prompt.
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But it because it has become like an expert of mimicking human language patterns, it effectively is very good at understanding the meanings of words that you use. Now, if you use the gibberish word that had never existed before and said, can you make it more smorgasbord?
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It would have no idea what you meant, but it might come up with something that's, you know, similarly silly sounding as smorgasbord.
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Yes, that's a good way to put it. It is definitely attempt to. You'll see this with the earlier models from ChatGPT. These tools are slowly getting better at it, but if you ask it to, for example, make something funny, make it funnier, it will have a little bit more trouble with that.
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It will kind of give you a response back that sounds like it could be a premise for a joke, but then it does the punchline falls flat. And that's an important thing to understand about these tools is they don't have the same, you know, human experience that we have. They don't really know anything. They're just guessing at the best answer.
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So I believe at some point I asked it to tell me a knock, knock joke about the dentist. And it was like, knock, knock. Who's there? Dentist. dentist to cavity another. And it, you know, that doesn't make any sense to us, but it was in the structure of a joke.