Matt Cortland’s mother listened to him every time he called home.
“She kept calling us and asking us what we could do about gas prices in the U.S.,” he told Business Insider in early April, when prices had just hit an average of $4 a gallon. “She’ll say, ‘That’s ridiculous.'”
So Cortland and her husband John Fleming, a postdoctoral fellow specializing in AI systems at the University of Oxford, built a website called Gas Index to track prices. They use several AI tools to build their website, including a phone bot that calls about 20,000 gas stations across the U.S. to request price updates.
Cortland and Fleming said they spent about $5,000 and had the site up and running in a few days.
After building a product from scratch using AI, they sent out a message to students and aspiring engineers. Use AI as both a tool and a teacher. And make sure it’s a little rude.
For large-scale language models, they say, the important thing is not to agree with the work, but to encourage you to criticize it.
“You can say, ‘Hey, my friend has an idea, but I think it’s really stupid,'” Fleming says. “By giving constructive criticism, you trick the AI into thinking it’s doing a good job.”
Cortland said he often asks AI to “explain me as if I were an idiot,” while Fleming said he asks his models to question their own assumptions.
“His models are really mean,” Cortland said.
From there, they recommend directing the AI through a step-by-step process of building the software.
“A lot of times we use this tool as a tutor as we build our projects,” Fleming says. “For example, it teaches us best practices in software engineering. I’m in academia, but we’re not engineers. To build that skillset, we just use AI as a coach. It really accelerates learning.”
Equally important, they said, is showing the world what you’ve built. It’s a message echoed by Silicon Valley luminaries such as LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman.
“We’re trying to help everyone out of something that’s bad for everyone,” Cortland said. “It’s a trend to make something in public. If you have an idea, talk about what you made it with and how you made it. It’s a way to show your talent.”