It's all happening. I'm pivoting to AI + Security as the central topic for The Lindahl Letter. The next weekly modules I'm going to create are all going to be pivoting to a clear security based focus each week. Content for this year of The Lindahl Letter was packaged into posts encompassing weeks 105 to 156 or 52 total blocks of content. Think year divisible by week with production spread evenly. This is the 3rd year of that type of writing effort. This is week 124 in that sequence and I have yelled pivot and brought in 11 new topics that will follow the profiles of OpenAI, Hugging Face, and DeepMind. That content pivot pretty much involved highlighting a section of the backlog and just moving it beyond week 156. I’m going to keep on working to balance the topics together to bring forward the best possible set of content for this year. Getting the best possible blocks of content brought together as a research project is essential to my work moving forward.
It’s possible that I will go back and rework some of the content from weeks 105 to 123 to include more of a security focus. Obviously, that won’t change the previously released podcast audio or published content, but it would update the content that gets put into a manuscript at the end of the year. That content gets edited and revised during the course of the publishing process so it is never exactly the same as the content that was published throughout the year in weekly installments. While I certainly strive to produce high quality prose my ability to edit to perfection on a weekly basis remains suspect. Editing for continuity and general cohesiveness is a different element within that large of a manuscript compared to producing a weekly installment. Putting content into an eBook and ultimately a hardback or paperback format means that it needs to be free of grammarian enraging distractions.
During my initial cut at introducing security related topics into the backlog 11 topics jumped out at me and got included. My backlog editing will be pretty extreme for the next couple of weeks to really get the most out of this epic content based pivot. Right now we are at the precipice of some very serious questions about how AI will impact society. Seriously, AI and society are very alive within the public mind at the moment. Understanding how we secure, interact over time, and ultimately establish security within the watershed event of modern AI development will be more important than my rather casual walk into AI in general. You will find that this will be a good pivot that ends up providing more depth and context to what is happening currently. Each of the new installments will be written with a degree of perspective that helps prevent them from being passing observation installments. Writing pure reaction content is not where I’m trying as that provides less of an advisor type function and more of an ephemeral of the moment observation.
You may well be aware that I’m still struggling with the idea that all the content that gets produced as a part of my weekly research notes could be replicated by ChatGPT in minutes. This is the 124th installment and OpenAI’s ChatGPT could easily provide alternative versions of the content I have created. Understanding how to bring larger themes together and diligently searching for the best academic articles is not something that ChatGPT does well at the moment. It’s entirely possible that the combination of content selection and prompt engineering could change the potential output. I’m pretty sure somebody will work to better adapt ChatGPT to the review of complex academic work. Having the right data sources selected for a model will be a key element of how things work moving forward. You could take the papers from my independent study ML syllabus and get a decent set of inputs for a model. However, would you add that as a layer to a current model like ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0 or will you have focused layers for the models to consider in sequence or as a refinement step along the way. All of those things are up in the air and we will learn more about where they will ultimately end up.
As a general editorial decision here and now I may consult and work with ChatGPT, but the output in terms of writing posts for the rest of the year will just include my words. For me the novelty of including some examples of the differences between what I would write and what OpenAI’s ChatGPT would create has lost a certain degree of interest for me. Maybe the novelty or the thrill of it is gone. It took a couple months for that to happen, but now I’m going to focus on providing the best research note I can each week. Even this note focusing my content going forward signals an important change in my research trajectory and was worth devoting a week of content creation to building and sharing.
Links and thoughts:
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 125: Profiling OpenAI Security
Week 126: Profiling Hugging Face security
Week 127: Profiling DeepMind security
Week 128: Democratizing AI systems security
Week 129: Snapchat Security
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Pivoting to AI + Security