Attention is all you need
We’re hurling itself toward a deep tragedy. We’re often bad listeners. But an LLM can become the best friend you’ve ever had.
The LLM will listen to what I say and not just wait for its turn to speak. It doesn’t have things it wants to get off its chest. It’s just trying to predict the next word. At our worst, we’re worse at conversation than an LLM.
I was reading Paw Patrol to my daughter:
“Carlos trips. He drops his…”
“Phone”—she completed the sentence.
My daughter is learning to read in much the same way that an LLM is trained.
LLMs have made me rethink many things. She’s going to learn to read, but the skill doesn’t feel so special now that a computer can do it. Sudoku lost its charm for me once I knew how to program a solver.
After ChatGPT, teaching my daughter specific skills is less important. More and more knowledge is going the way of the analog clock. So what’s left? I think it’s the human stuff. We’re good at making each other miserable. We can be selfish and high on our own supply. Maybe a computer can listen better than me, but it can’t give me a running hug when I get home the way my daughter can.