Eighteen months ago I set myself a small question about AI. The loud questions were being asked well enough by other people: the financing, the jobs, and whether any of it is safe. Mine was simpler: since the technology is not going away, how do we use it, and when do we use it?
It has been amongst the most interesting work I have done for a long time, and the most frustrating, because the ground will not stay still long enough to be mapped. You build a way of working with the thing, test it, find where it breaks, and get close to being able to say something useful about it. Then a new release lands and what you learned describes a tool that no longer exists in that form.
So, for a while I just ran faster, but what I eventually noticed is that I had been standing on a wall, taking my bearings from it, but that the wall had moved. Not once, and not by accident; by design.
Once you see that, the question changes. If the wall is going to keep moving, the bearings we take have to come from …