I’m not super thrilled about the current phase of “AI” hype we are in, particularly with respect to health research. I’m not thrilled with the environmental costs. I’m not thrilled with the blatant theft of people’s intellectual and artistic contributions to our world. I’m not thrilled with the polite sociopaths who seem to, more often than not, lead these companies obsessed with LLMs and generative AI. And Yet (!) I couldn’t resist plugging one of my blog posts into a Google LM notebook and hearing it “translated” into a podcast style conversation. Not only did it capture they key elements of what I wrote, the conversation extendended to broader points in an entirely sensible way. I mean, I’d still much rather read a 4 minute essay from a person I can connect with than listen to a 12 minute audio clip generated by an algorithm; but I’m still impressed nonetheless.
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Everybody's backyard
John Tukey said that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard. It’s a great quote. While it more obviously reflects the tendency of applied statisticians (defined broadly) to be involved in lots of studies, it also captures something about statisticians that is often missed - that we are also scientists, d…
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