The above are easy optimizations compared to the stuff below:
Re the first #3, Jason Yuan and Sam Whitmore just released Dot today, an AI assistant with longterm memory.
more a piece of glue, but I want a self-hosted AI to basically do experiments on me. I want to tell it a goal that I have, and get its feedback on figuring out how to measure that goal, and then it'd track things about me (either ambiently by me giving it access to home automation, credit card statements, etc, or actively by texting me and asking questions or giving reminders). Ideally it'd ask me to make small/easy modifications to my day-to-day life to test how effective various changes are at moving me toward my goals with minimal active effort on my part. I basically want to outsource the executive function and consistency required to benefit from the whole Quantified Self thing, which seems like it should be absolutely possible these days.
The problem is that I really want it self-hosted -- I'd buy it terabytes of storage, and I'd spend around $1000 for dedicated hardware that it could run on, and if it worked really well I'd consider upgrading it for more of the same to the tune of 10k-100k over time -- but I absolutely don't want that intimate of a software system to ever be emitting data onto the internet or acting like it's owned by someone else and only rented by me.
Been exploring local models lately, and I might be interested in working on a 7B-13B model version of this, potentially with scaling up to preferred models, if I could find the time and compensation.
A $1000 computer would be low for what you want, and $10,000 would be high, unless you need the kind of self-tuned reasoning capability only truly accessible on enterprise graphics cards; a 7B model or quantization of it would work best with at least 8GB vRAM (or unified memory? I'd go higher on unified memory and not make it dedicated hardware), and 34B 4-bit ...
Writing polite but short emails that have a single intention is hard. The fewer words you use, the more can be wrongly inferred about the tone you hoped to convey. You want to save your recipient's time and energy and to do that consistently, but it's difficult to know if people will read something you didn't intend to say.
While Claude and GPT-4 often understand exactly what I mean when I feed them poorly written word salad that is both long-worded and not acceptable to send, they don't yet do a good job of removing what I want because of what seems to owe to how instruction-tuning and RLHF weight verbosity. Maybe this is easy to fix with the correct prompt, but no prompt I've tried has been universal.
I want software that can totally remove my personality and the extra context of what else I might be thinking about from a piece of writing, while also double checking every interpretation of my tone . I want to be the Bruce Lee of emails.
One software that would unify my accounts across Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Teams, Zoom, and dozen other similar applications, so that I don't have to install them all and have every discussion in a separate application.
(Like in the old times when we had ICQ, AOL messenger, MSN messenger, etc., and then there was Pidgin that communicated to all of them.)
Quoting another comment I made:
Make a hyperphone. A majority of my alignment research conversations would be enhanced by having a hyperphone, to a degree somewhere between a lot and extremely; and this is heavily weighted on the most hopeworthy conversations. (Also sometimes when I explain what a hyperphone is well enough for the other person to get it, and then we have a complex conversation, they agree that it would be good. But very small N, like 3 to 5.)
Also sometimes when I explain what a hyperphone is well enough for the other person to get it, and then we have a complex conversation, they agree that it would be good. But very small N, like 3 to 5.
It's difficult to understand your writing, and I feel like you could improve in general at communication based on this quote. The concept of a hyperphone isn't that complex---the ability to branch in conversations---so the modifiers "well enough", "complex", and "very small N" make me believe it's only complex because you're unclear.
For example, the blog...
If you're not already aware of it: This idea of a hyperphone seems highly convergent with Loom, a similar branching interface originally designed for interaction with language models. This sort of interface is very natural for language models, and in fact this "octopus mind" you describe makes a lot of sense as being a part of the mind closer to pure prediction (and therefore has similarities to language models). I agree that this structure makes a lot of sense for humans as well, and from what I can tell long-term use of Loom can pull people to approach c...
Here's software I wish existed. Some of them combine software + physical stuff into what might be a viable business.
I would like for the software I use to maintain my notes and to-do lists to look as good as a text-heavy web page does. I.e., I.e., I want something like a text editor, but with better typography. (The way it is now, I use Emacs to maintain notes and lists. At least it lets me specify the width of the left and right margins, and I like how easy it is to customize.)
A browser extension that colors reddit usernames red if the user is a likely bot.
User friendly financial software that can help with saving and budgeting. And some sort of software that can optimize career potential.
File explorer where I don't type all of D:/F1/F2/F3/F4/X to get/open folder or file X, but I type (part of) F2 and F4 and it immediately (yes, indexing etc.) offers me X as a result (and maybe the few others that fit the pattern)
If I have an insane amount of subfolders/files, maybe it indexes better those with recent or regular access.
Extension: A version on steroids might index even file-seek results of files and index on (my or so) most common searched words. Find if that's a bit too extravagant.
Useful in traditional file structures, as we then type/think/remember less. Plus, it might encourage a step towards more tag-based file organization which I feel might be useful more generally, though that's just a potential side-effect and not the basic aim.
I recently listened to an interview with Liron Shapira - whose first startup achieved a huge valuation and then came to nothing. And he was blunt in mentioning it failed because it wasn't useful for any single person.
They had an abstract idea of something that seemed exciting and didn't check to see if it was of much use to any single individual. He claimed many startups fail this way, and most founders would probably be much better off finding one person and trying to build something they find helpful enough to use regularly - and then expand from there.
Conditional on this being true, individuals who long for non-existent software are highly undervalued! So please post requests for software that does not exist but you think would be of great immediate value to you.
And if we get enough posts, perhaps some devs will actually implement some. And who knows, maybe we can nucleate a startup or two!