tingilinde

the lack of a killer app

Hundreds of billions are being dumped into generative AI. Companies and investors really need to find large number of essential killer apps soon.  So far expecting users to pay more and do props engineering isn't working out so well.

 

 

generative ai and art

Ted Chiang writing in The New Yorker

snip

...

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

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spotting deep fakes

With astronomy-specific software.

that glint in their eyes

 

 

just one study

On coding errors made by a GPT.   

just one study and it asked "uncommon" questions ... but it isn't surprising to see issues with anything out of th ordinary.

 

 

 

a hacking story

On the hacking of Voyager 1 to recover its ability to send useful data.

a tip of the hat to Bjarne

Also this bit on the centrally important antenna near Canberra

 

 

 

"quality" software

This time at American Airlines.

 

on why llms work

A very high level view, not o the mechanics, but why these things work by Bertrand Serlet. He doesn't get into the problems, but it's a nice discussion.  You'll be fine if you have an inkling of how a neural net works , but you might want to stay away if you don't know what linear algebra is (even though this isn't mathematical). 

(More interesting would be where these beasts shouldn't be used - anywhere from just plain wrong to $100 solutions to nickel problems. Many businesses are doing some rather stupid things these days. )

sort of amazing

The team that's keeping the little spacecraft going after al these years finally had a breakthrough!

 

a clear discussion of how a gpt works

There are many poor descriptions.  One would expect something solid from 3Blue1Brown and he does a good job on this first piece.  This picks up on some older pieces he did on neural nets and will continue.

voyager 1

Still no luck - a very difficult puzzle.  It's amazing these two spacecraft have done this well.