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mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane
@mattbeane.bsky.social
500 followers 130 following 68 posts

Studying work involving intelligent machines, especially robots. @MITSloan PhD, @Ucsb Asst Prof, @Stanford and @MIT Digital Fellow, @Tedtalks @Thinkers50

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Sociology 35%
Political science 35%
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mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · May 20
Computer-mediated carcinisation

Reposted by Matt Beane

emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · May 15
This includes many of my papers, too. The point I am making is the findings in careful academic research likely represents a lower bound of AI capabilities at this point.

Reposted by Helen Margetts, Evan Selinger, Dan MacLean , and 1 more

clivethompson.bsky.social
Clive Thompson @clivethompson.bsky.social · Feb 4
I can’t

i just …

i can’t

www.404media.co/anthropic-cl...

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Jan 30
I bet if someone *has* succeeded, it's via spinning up an elicitation-GPT that just drilled you for critical intel, wouldn't let you weasel out via under/overspecified output, then dumped it all back to you in standardized format so you could think faster - basically exporting your extraction algo.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Jan 29
Exactly. If we overheard Dario, Sam, and Demis chatting about certain well known AI critics, I'd be willing to bet they'd be expressing gratitude. Proving a grouch wrong is a real motivator.

Reposted by Matt Beane

danielrock.bsky.social
Daniel Rock @danielrock.bsky.social · Jan 29
Hi Everyone!

We're hosting our Wharton AI and the Future of Work Conference on 5/21-22. Last year was a great event with some of the top papers on AI and work.

Paper submission deadline is 3/3. Come join us! Submit papers here: forms.gle/ozJ5xEaktXDE...
forms.gle

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Jan 15
Exciting new hobby project in the offing related to AI and skill. Involves a childhood passion, a wild leap into the unknown, made real via an order from Amazon just now. Will be 100% cool, I will be documenting things, sharing eventually. Feels like April 2023 again!

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Jan 13
The Silo is so good. Just superb. This generation's answer to the BSG remake.

Reposted by Matt Beane

rodneyabrooks.bsky.social
Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · Jan 9
My hobby horse. You can simulate a rocket all you want, and use more energy on computation than the actual rocket would, but you won't get to orbit until you ignite rocket fuel. What if all the energy we are spending on simulating learning is not the juice we really need to make intelligence?

Reposted by Amy X. Zhang, Matt Beane

teevan.bsky.social
Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31
In 2024 we learned a lot about how AI is impacting work. People report that they're saving 30 minutes a day using AI (aka.ms/nfw2024), and randomized controlled trials reveal they’re creating 10% more documents, reading 11% fewer e-mails, and spending 4% less time on e-mail (aka.ms/productivity...).

Reposted by Matt Beane

simonwillison.net
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · Dec 31
Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

Table of contents:
The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months “Agents” still haven’t really happened yet Evals really matter Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent The rise of inference-scaling “reasoning” models Was the best currently available LLM trained in China for less than $6m? The environmental impact got better The environmental impact got much, much worse The year of slop Synthetic training data works great LLMs somehow got even harder to use Knowledge is incredibly unevenly distributed LLMs need better criticism Everything tagged “llms” on my blog in 2024

Reposted by Matt Beane

emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Dec 20
Independent evaluations of OpenAI’s o3 suggest that it passed math & reasoning benchmarks that were previously considered far out of reach for AI including achieving a score on ARC-AGI that was associated with actually achieving AGI (though the creators of the benchmark don’t think it o3 is AGI)

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 20
Just *one* of the reasons that Blindsight was ahead of its time. Way ahead.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 14
Massive congrats!! So excited to check it out.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 10
Wow!

Reposted by Matt Beane

rgmcgrath.bsky.social
Rita McGrath @rgmcgrath.bsky.social · Dec 9
Join me by the fireside this Friday with Matt Beane as we dive into one of today’s biggest workforce challenges: upskilling at scale. 📈

Linke below to hear the full discussion on Friday, December 13 at 11 am EST!

linktr.ee/RitaMcGrath

@mattbeane.bsky.social

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 7
I propose a workshop.

Most engineers/CS working on AI presume away well established, profound brakes on AI diffusion.

Most social scientists presume away how AI use could reshape those brakes.

Let's gather these groups, examine these brakes 1-by-1, make grounded predictions.

Reposted by Matt Beane

emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Dec 7
Models like o1 suggest that people won’t generally notice AGI-ish systems that are better than humans at most intellectual tasks, but which are not autonomous or self-directed

Most folks don’t regularly have a lot of tasks that bump up against the limits of human intelligence, so won’t see it

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 4
Grateful for the opportunity to visit and learn from the professionals at the L&DI conference. And very glad to hear you found my talk so valuable, Garth! Means a lot.
garthgilmour.bsky.social Garth Gilmour @garthgilmour.bsky.social · Dec 4
In Dublin for the National Learning & Development Conference.

Some insightful opening remarks, followed by an absolutely stonking keynote by @mattbeane.bsky.social. Crystallised a lot of my worries around preserving expertise in software engineering during the age of GenAI. I have reading to do.
A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference. A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference

Reposted by Matt Beane

garthgilmour.bsky.social
Garth Gilmour @garthgilmour.bsky.social · Dec 4
In Dublin for the National Learning & Development Conference.

Some insightful opening remarks, followed by an absolutely stonking keynote by @mattbeane.bsky.social. Crystallised a lot of my worries around preserving expertise in software engineering during the age of GenAI. I have reading to do.
A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference. A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference A speaker at the National Learning & Development Conference

Reposted by Matt Beane

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 3
Wrote a little something on this in 2012, though I didn't anticipate the main reason for hiring such workers - training data.

www.technologyreview.com/2012/07/18/1...
The Avatar Economy
Are remote workers the brains inside tomorrow’s robots?
www.technologyreview.com

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 3
Ohmydeargod.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 3
David Meyer (v.) /ˈdeɪvɪd ˈmaɪ.ər/

To attribute complex, intentional design or deeper meaning to simple emergent behaviors of large language models, especially when such behaviors are more likely explained by straightforward technical constraints or training artifacts.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Dec 3
They did NOT. Wow. Sign of the times.

And I can verify on your rule! I was so flabbergasted and honored. Your feedback was rich and so helpful. Remain grateful.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Nov 30
I remember *treasuring* the previews. I'd fight to get there on time. Was part of the thrill.

But ads? F*ck that noise. Seriously, straight up evil.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Nov 30
Never occurred to me there'd be an algo under the hood that could reliably learn to provide content I'd value more than a straight read of my hand-curated list of people. My solution has been following people if they post high signal stuff all the time.

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Nov 30
I have never used the feed page. What a horror, can't quite understand why folks would try.

Only/ever the "following" page. Even there things got pretty intolerable towards/around the election, now settled down.

Reposted by Matt Beane

bobsutton.net
Bob Sutton @bobsutton.net · Nov 27
My Thanksgiving post. A Kurt Vonnegut poem. He talks with Joe Heller (Catch 22 fame) about a billionaire. Key part:

Joe said, "I've got something he can never have"

And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"

And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough"

www.linkedin.com/pulse/kurt-v...
Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Heller, and How to Think Like a Mensch
This story remains my favorite Thanksgiving message; it reminds me to be grateful for what I have and of the evils of jealousy and destructive competition. I first posted it on my work matters blog mo...
www.linkedin.com

mattbeane.bsky.social
Matt Beane @mattbeane.bsky.social · Nov 27
Oh my dear god this is an incredible study.
afinetheorem.bsky.social Kevin A. Bryan @afinetheorem.bsky.social · Nov 27
Amazing paper (link next slide) by group incl. 2 Congolese researchers in Kinshasa looks at "official" corruption. Not just rogue officers but official policy to extort drivers = 80% of police revenue. Crazy shit: they worked w/ folks IN THE POLICE to secretly monitor bribes AND VARY bribe quotas!