Gil DuránMay 12
The stuff I write about is so nuts that I find myself quadruple-checking the facts with pen and paper. For example, in 2020 Andreessen Horowitz led a $12 million investment round in the Clubhouse app (at a $100M valuation). It had 1500 users. It reached $4 billion valuation in 2021, then...poof.
Show threadGil DuránMay 12
Like...how can that be real? Such is the terrible power of venture capital.
Show threadGil DuránMay 12
Only by printing out a hard copies and matching word-for-word do I fully trust my eyes. I am pretty lax about many things, but I get very OCD about this stuff. Books—the original blockchains.
Show threadGil DuránMay 12
Not to mention the Antichrist/overthrow the USA stuff. Did the billionaires really say these things, or did someone spike my tea with LSD? Also, how do people trust AI to do this stuff? I hired a human fact checker. And yet I am reviewing every single fact and link again..because this is my baby.
Show threadGil Durán
I will say: reviewing all the facts with fresh eyes has yielded new info and insights. All of that would be missed with a hallucination machine fact check. One must suffer the thinking to obtain the knowledge.
May 12 at 12:24amWeb
Show threadGil DuránMay 12
Also, anyone who has witnessed an LLM completely hallucinate a juicy headline that doesn't actually exist...
Show threadGil DuránMay 12
I still have yellowed copies of my newspaper stories from the 1990s in storage. Was gonna toss them, but then realized: One of my major pieces completely disappeared from online archives. Another was defaced (word changes) by a rogue typist. The proof matters.
Show threadGil DuránMay 12
I tried to rectify the defaced piece some years ago...no one was interested! Some typist (back when print pieces had to be manually entered into databases) clearly didn't like my story, so they changed a word to reverse the meaning of a key sentence.