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We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the market demand. So we put together a bespoke ASCII tab importer (which was near the bottom of my “Software I expected to write in 2025” list). And we changed the UI copy in our scanning system to tell people about that feature. To my knowledge, this is the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists. (Yay?) I’m sharing the story because I think it’s somewhat interesting.

This evolution didn’t come out of nowhere. The results of the 30-year experiment with a hands-off approach are in, and much of society, including the Supreme Court, is recoiling from the consequences. The fear of stifling a new technology has been replaced by dread of the harms that technology, left unregulated, can cause, such as damage to children’s mental health and the potential undermining of democracy itself. In Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court is acknowledging this paradigm shift. The laissez-faire era is over. What remains to be seen is whether a new era of regulation will prove any more successful at mitigating the toll of the digital world.

n short, imitation learning can rapidly teach a model to mimic the behaviors in its training data, but the model will easily get confused in unfamiliar environments. A model trained with reinforcement learning has a better chance of learning general principles that will be relevant in new and unfamiliar situations.