Category: artificial intelligence

Does Challenging AI Make It Smarter?

A recent Medium article claims that adding challenge phrases like “I bet you can’t solve this” to AI prompts improves output quality by 45%, based on research by Li et al. (2023).

Quick Test Results

Testing these techniques on academic tasks—SQL queries, code debugging, and research synthesis—showed mixed but interesting results:

What worked: Challenge framing produced more thorough, systematic responses for complex multi-step problems. Confidence scoring (asking AI to rate certainty and re-evaluate if below 0.9) caught overconfident answers.

What didn’t: Simple factual queries showed no improvement.

The Why

High-stakes language doesn’t trigger AI emotions—it cues pattern-matching against higher-quality training examples where stakes were high.

Bottom Line

Worth trying for complex tasks, but expect higher token usage. Results are task-dependent, not universal.

Source: Li et al. (2023), arXiv:2307.11760

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Source: Li et al. (2023), arXiv:2307.11760

AI is displacing software engineers, but those in Singapore have the chance to fare better

https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ai-is-displacing-software-engineers-but-those-in-singapore-have-the-chance-to-fare-better?sfnsn=mo

The CEO Magazine: David Ellis: Why AI makes new graduates more valuable than ever

https://amp.theceomagazine.com/business/innovation-technology/david-ellis/

Ellis sees a different future. Rather than eliminating graduate positions, IBM Consulting is actively increasing them.

“So, for example, we are increasing, not decreasing, the number of graduate hires that we’re making here in Australia,” he says.

Investing in the future
The reasoning is both strategic and generational. Today’s graduates enter the workforce with a crucial advantage – they’ve been using AI longer than most experienced workers.

“We have people entering the workforce that have perhaps been using AI longer than many others. Maybe they’ve been using it through their studies. Maybe they’ve just got a deeper affinity to it,” Ellis explains.

When properly equipped and trained, these AI-native workers can be a huge asset to organizations.

“We can skill them, we can equip them, we can give them the confidence to be much more effective than you or I might have been at the beginning of our careers,” he says.

Automating oral argument

Back in January 2023, a company called DoNotPay offered “any lawyer or person $1,000,000 with an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says.” At the time, everyone thought this was a silly gimmick.

https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/automating-oral-argument?utm_source=tldrai