I’m a bit puzzled by public discourse on AI safety. It is great that the general topic has now reached mainstream media - merely a year ago this was very much a fringe topic. Nowadays it has become a primary discussion point in high-level political gatherings and has inspired numerous op-eds in prominent publications.

My wife has recently started learning Spanish in preparation for a trip to Mexico and Colombia. She uses a mix of Duolingo and Zoom conversations with a native speaker through iTalki. Duolingo is good for gamification, and it helps her practice phrase translation and vocabulary training every day. The conversations via iTalki are excellent for actually talking to other humans. However, between the two, she recently mentioned that she was missing something - an interaction a bit like conversations but with a stronger emphasis on correcting her mistakes. Her conversation partner does provide some corrections, but they can feel unnatural in a conversation and thus don’t occur frequently.

Over the last few years it seemed like we were able to observe the cutting edge of AI research more or less in the open and more or less in real time. Some was in the form of public demos, some in academic papers, others directly in products. As the capabilities of these systems advance, however, I think we need to wonder if this will remain true, and consider the repercussions of what would happen if this changes.

I just joined the fantastic team at Our World In Data! At Our World In Data we build a website with the same name that compiles data and research on the most pressing global problems. Go check it out if you don’t know it yet!

This Tuesday I gave a talk at the fantastic (currently zoom only) Berlin Functional Programming Meetup about F#. I gave a brief introduction to the language, then showed how to download and analyze some historic weather data and serve this up as a small SPA web app. Below you can play the recording - have a look and let me know if you have any feedback.