Surprising Insight: Predicting Sentiment from Product Reviews using Neural Nets

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In 2017, OpenAI trained a neural net to predict the next character of product reviews on Amazon. Surprisingly, they discovered that one neuron within the net was exceptionally good at predicting sentiment. By predicting characters, the AI inferred details about the human's emotional state, such as their gender, political leaning, and sentiment. This highlights the concept of self-supervised learning.

It may seem like the rise of artificial intelligence, and increasingly powerful large language models you may have heard of, is moving really fast… and it IS.

But what’s coming next is when we enter synthetic relationships with AI that could come to feel just as real and important as our human relationships... And perhaps even more so.

In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, Tristan and Aza reach beyond the moment to talk about this powerful new AI, and the new paradigm of humanity and computation we’re about to enter.

This is a structural revolution that affects way more than text, art, or even Google search. There are huge benefits to humanity, and we’ll discuss some of those. But we also see that as companies race to develop the best synthetic relationships, we are setting ourselves up for a new generation of harms made exponentially worse by AI’s power to predict, mimic and persuade.

It’s obvious we need ways to steward these tools ethically. So Tristan and Aza also share their ideas for creating a framework for AIs that will help humans become MORE humane, not less.

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