ChatGPT - Whitepaper generation, can it write like a CTO?

In December 2019, after a successful Rugby world cup (despite experiencing technical glitches, I felt my team did well to reach the stage we did, with evolving the technical platform only two years into it's turnaround journey) - I realised that the members of the Board and ExCo, did not fully appreciate the world of online video streaming because they came from the traditional world of satellite broadcast world, where technology stack was largely under their control - and reliability / availability was generally accepted as always on. So, from their perspective, to expect a system to be either "1" or "0" wasn't unreasonable, albeit ignorant of the complexities, they couldn't be blamed for not having that context. So it was up to me as CTO to get them to understand, or at least, help educate them on the subtleties driving the differences, that are actually quite big and therefore a certain level of perspective is needed. In the online world, when a platform fails due to high load, usually this is a good signal that the platform is gaining much traction, and engineering teams can use this data to learn and only get better. 

So I wrote this whitepaper here.

And today, I asked ChatGPT (3.5) to write something similar - and here it was it produced.

Verdict: My paper is much better. Clearly my blog isn't part of ChatGPT's data set yet.  The machine isn't going to replace my role just yet...but at least the machine can help as my co-author!

You are a CTO responsible for building an OTT video streaming platform. You are having trouble communicating with executives who come from traditional PayTV satellite broadcast and set top box world. Write a white paper than shows the different challenges posed in the end to end technology stack for online video streaming as compared to traditional satellite set top box environment. Cite references used. Focus on what makes OTT different (and hard).

The rest below shows what ChatGPT produced:

ChatGPT - a little serious note

 Whilst I've been having some fun doing my research, I think will only be comfortable trusting a machine for other insights outside of the coding / business / tech domain, when I have open access to all its data sources and citations that showed the formulation of the response. I want to know what the machine is trained on, so that I can make my own judgements on the responses. AI companies must openly public these sorts, publish a bias index, something like a cultural sentiment index, and show whether sandboxing different philosophies / social frameworks and constructs. Without this access, I am okay to limit my interactions to well-bounded, technical and professional contexts to help me be more productive, do research, as an another tool to make humans optimise, etc. Beyond that, I will not entirely trust the machine  enough yet to have deep, meaningful discussions about life, world politics and human civilisation challenges because of biases that haven't been independently tested for, etc. I believe the entire test-suite for validating the safety and quality of the AI must be released in the open, for independent scrutiny. If tech companies are truly serious about uplifting human civilisation with general AIs, then stop with the profiteering and start with building humanity on open transparency, level the playing fields. This is not a space race to outcompete one another. This not the next tech to make yet another tech geek nerd the richest person in the world! This is not about making money - I'm talking about the broad uses of the AI. Sure, you can make some money for constrained topics - but don't go releasing AI into the wild that can cause more serious harm than good.

Given this technology is mostly born or heavily marketed from capitalist America (my bias: winner-takes-all, survival of the fittest, competitive, good guy vs bad guys, profit before people, we must always strive to be the world's dominant region - unfortunately overshadows what made American ideals great, the American dream, a place I always wished to go and work at) roots, makes me very nervous about the potential misuse, misunderstanding of the machine. I fear the future of children growing up with this tech, like what constructs they would learn, potentially throwing thousands years of human traditions, culture and beliefs. As such, I'm leaning more and more on controlling these releases, and perhaps escalating regulatory reviews to inspect deeply...we don't throw babies into shark-infested waters the first day they're borne, so why expose such a powerful, misleading tech to the whole world, children and adults alike?? We don't give guns to children, do we? We have checks and balances in place for all kinds of risky tech? Take nuclear tech for example? Honestly, this topic is so broad and wide, concerning...it's a pity that Lex didn't address these topics directly with Sam in their interesting conversation here. 

Exploring ChatGPT will almost become a full-time activity outside of my work hours - so many unknowns, so much of things worth exploring...but my priority would be humans first, machine last. If the pace of progress needs to be slowed down until we understand more, so be it. There should be a global moratorium on this tech, a world governing framework like NATO/UN/etc. to regulate. 

So my view: Proceed with extreme caution, be bold to explore the limits of the machine for a well-bounded context limited to science / computing / business / historical facts - but nothing more...until there's a way to characterise these AIs by archetypes we can identify with.

I have to say, I am leaning heavily on the side of regulation - putting on the brakes!!

IMHO that is...

Time to start my day job!! Plugging into the matrix now...

ChatGPT fun - oh man, this is getting addictive!

[my daugher is waiting for her school run....and I'm still playing with ChatGPT!]

do you remember the norton spinning control animation when running from dos days?

Yes, I'm familiar with the Norton spinning control animation. It was a popular animation that Norton Utilities, a suite of disk and system utilities for MS-DOS, displayed while it was running disk optimization or defragmentation. The animation featured a spinning disk with a check mark on it, and the disk would spin faster and faster as the optimization progressed.

show it to me

can you create the code I could run in the browser for this classic spinning control?

that's close but not exactly like I remember it. The sequence of rotating "-\-/" is missing

sorry, you lost context again. Now I only get is an empty square?

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style> #spinner { width: 30px; height: 30px; border: 1px solid black; font-size: 20px; text-align: center; line-height: 30px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="spinner"></div> <script> var spinner = document.getElementById("spinner"); var sequence = "-\\|/"; var index = 0; setInterval(function() { spinner.innerHTML = sequence.charAt(index); index = (index + 1) % sequence.length; }, 100); </script> </body> </html>

yes, that's very close

I'm glad it's close! If you want to adjust the size or speed of the spinning animation, you can modify the SIZE and SPEED constants at the top of the JavaScript code.

Friday fun with ChatGPT - A series of Hello World in less than 40 minutes

I'm still early in my journey of experimenting with ChatGPT - and every time I interact with it, the more I'm blown away.  This "simple" animation is the result of spending just under 40 minutes, exploring the code generation powers of this machine. Whilst I did not reach the end result I was looking for, the machine gets pretty damn close, close enough for a developer to take the code and tweak it...

The implications of this tool are just mind boggling. 

Here's a transcript of my interactions:

Alright, do you have the ability to write code?

write me a simple hello world that I can run from a browser

can you repeat that using javascript?

can you work on simplifying using the least amount of html and more javascript?

can you add an animation so that the text "hello world" moves from left to right like a ticker stream?

can you enhance the animation so that the ticker moves clockwise around a square block contained to a width of 500 pixels and height of 500 pixels?

Wow, I am amazed. Thank you for giving me a daily dose of your awesome utility!

let's take it next level

add a second hello world to the animation, but this time the second text should be revolving anticlockwise, with the two revolutions happening as concentric circles

okay that is close enough. Add another hello world text in blue, that moves vertically up and down, centered to the two circles

unbelievable! Okay, time for next level

Add an animation, starting at the bottom left corner of the square, of a rocket emoji with the text "ChatGPT rocks!", that moves around the square, completing one revolution anti-clockwise and then another revolution clockwise, all around the edges of the square border. The text should be bold.

sorry, you got that wrong. You've lost all the previous animations of hello world texts, please try again. Also make the "ChatGPT rocks!" text smaller.

still wrong. get me back to the code that showed the previous animations before the rocket ask

okay, it seems you're not good at remembering context. You've lost all the previous context that created the square block and showed the circular and vertical animations.

nope still wrong

I need to add one more animation to the code, which is the rocket ship. Do you remember my ask? Please repeat to me so I can examine if you've understood my request correctly.

Yes, you asked to add an animation of a rocket emoji with the text "ChatGPT rocks!", that moves around the square, completing one revolution anti-clockwise and then another revolution clockwise, all around the edges of the square border. The text should be smaller and bold.

Yes, do you want to give it one more try? Please don't lose the previous code. Build upon it.

ok, that's close enough for today. I need to spend more time with you, clearly.

Hello, World!

Hello, World!

Hello, World!

🚀 ChatGPT rocks!

ChatGPT as my new research assistant

I continue to be blown away by ChatGPT. This is a game changer!

One of my biggest misses in my life is missed opportunities converting my ideas in starting up my own company. It's not like my ideas were not great, it's that I lacked the follow-through and risk-taking to get started executing once my idea was validated.  I would spend so much time researching, doing the market analysis, identifying opportunity, writing up the idea and then failing to take it further forward. Here's one example -  the start-up research I did for my original personametry idea about the application of monitoring physiological signals that can help manage mental well-being, like stress before this topic hit mainstream. Check my Trello workspace if you're curious. 

I spent a good 300+ hours doing the research and thinking of the opportunity. I'd wake up at 4am every morning, doing the research, before starting my official work-day at 8.30am, after doing the school run. I also invested in working a 4-day work-week to create space for researching my ideas, because my goal then in 2015/16, was to startup a product company. Since I was consulting, I could manage my own time and take a hit on my earnings because my personal goal was important at the time literally putting my money where my mouth is. Unfortunately the consulting work got busy, and my personal life went a little off-balance, that made me rethink my focus areas - so I left start-up ideas aside. If you've read my posts on my RAGE model tracking, I dropped the start-up ideas focus since 3-4 years ago. Work, Life & Family took priority over my aspirations of booting my own start-up entrepreneur.

Until now, with ChatGPT in the mix, I'm reconsidering my options. I can save so much time, exploring my ideas without compromising my other life streams. All I need is to timebox at least an hour each day, and a couple hours over weekends to get back into tackling my backlog of 100+ ideas that were sitting on the shelf that last few years.

My latest thesis is this: As I enter into the second half of my working life, with at least another 20 years left to work in a career - I need to be doing more purposeful work during my core work hours and not as side volunteering gig. Since being a Muslim is at the centre of all my decisions across my life and work streams (part of the reason I left a CTO job had to do with staying true to my personal moral value system: example - promoting video content I'm not comfortable with, targeting people to spend time on endless watching of video for entertainment wasting hours of life away, building gambling and sports content betting technology, etc. This is why I joined AWS and decided to get inside the engine room in B2B enterprise systems but it's been a tough adjustment after 20 years building consumer apps). So, now I want to be spending my time working on impactful, value adding streams. As a Muslim, we believe in investing for the Akhirah (the next world). My ultimate BHAG was about becoming financially independent before retirement so that I could start an NGO/NPO focused on socially beneficial projects. Unfortunately, I'm very, very far from this goal. The other option was to join an NPO/NGO and contribute my skills as a GM/CTO/Manager, earning a reduced salary but at least I'll be happy doing good work. Alas, my searches to date have yielded nothing material (living in South Africa is also a limiting factor). So my latest idea - why don't I find opportunities in the Islamic Tech space? After all, I am a seasoned technology leader, surely there are opportunities in the Islamic tech space worth checking out? The total addressable market for Islamic Tech is 1 billion+ people. Introducing tech for this space initially (which would scale to the entire planet maybe), benefiting the ummah, in this world and the next, would be something, wouldn't it?

This is where ChatGPT came in to help. In the past, I'd outsource the research to some gig worker and pay up to $10 per hour for a research report. Or, I would spend hours of my own time, doing the research. No more! With ChatGPT, I can do the initial research in just one hour!! 

I am still to dive deep into the research, during my weekends - but I'd like to share with my readers, and especially for the muslim professionals out there, similar to me, looking to find opportunities to contribute to spiritually uplifting projects (either community or paid-for work), the amazing power of ChatGPT.

I'm not leaving my current job anytime soon though, insha Allah (although this is never guaranteed especially when there's real uncertainty now with Amazon's latest round of layoffs). 

I am however, being open about a topic that is becoming increasingly important and relevant to the aging workforce - as people approach their fifties, their stage of work-life changes from chasing the career ladder to seeking fulfilment, doing work they can feel proud of, to leave a legacy behind, to leave the world in a much better state they found it. That's where my head is at. I am not interested in chasing the next promotion. If promo comes my way, it should be an organic, natural result of my sincere contributions, backed up by people who value my contributions. I want to invest my time wisely doing work that matters to me. Right now, my work is about building leaders and growing people, being the modern elder. Ideally, it would be great if I could find something that builds up my Akhirah points and also get paid for it at the same time :-) 

Here's the transcript of ChatGPT as my research assistant: