Microsoft to invest $10 billion in OpenAI
What a dark omen this feels like for the future of white collar workers, where Microsoft laid off 10,000 people and then makes this sort of investment. Sends a very clear signal to employees.
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Jodorowsky's Tron
A fun and fascinating look at the philosophy and style of Jodorowsky, through the lens of AI created images from what his version of Tron might have been. Notably, this article is not by someone random, it's by the person who made the documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune."
Though I especially love this excerpt. It speaks to me and my own philosophy of ad melistra:
During the filming of my documentary, Alejandro told me about the Greek-Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff. He taught that we are born without a soul and that our task in life is to help our soul to grow and develop: Souls aren’t born; they’re earned. Every single day, Alejandro creates. He writes, he draws, he paints. He works on his soul through art.
We should all strive to work on our soul each and every day.
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David C. Lowery defines the exact problem with our current era of AI
OpenAI: The same Silicon Valley monopoly pseudo capitalists that have given you all the other monopoly platforms. Start with Sequoia capital. Go from there. Now it's important for the scam to present it as something that is "open" to the public as if they are creating something like a public park or library (one of SVs favorite Trojan horses). Because what they are really doing is taking private property (copyrights, TM, ROP) that rightfully belong to artists (big and small, professional and hobbyist) without permission and converting it to a private company owned by the same people who brought you the current monopoly platforms. The trick works cause commentators (especially tech journalists) willfully repeat the framing that a public good is being created. Not the next Google.
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Me as an Anime hero
I gave in and ran myself through the TikTok anime filter. I heard it killed beards so I was curious to see.
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The AI Research Assistant
I haven't delved into this tool deeply, but I came across it while reading another article. Seems like it would be interesting, so sharing here as a reminder to dig into it later on.
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Verifiable work & Identity in the coming era
I was thinking this morning about how the progression of AI as being "good enough" is going to force a change on homework that is AI doable. Math, writing, computer science, all of these areas are ones we're seeing AI become capable enough to solve in a way which would make it hard to identify whether the student did it on their own, or with aid.
I noted two posts by a friend of mine on Mastodon in yesterday's favs, included again below:
On the one hand, I believe many common examples of homework to be remote busywork. At best, misguided as to the efficacy, and at worst, just work to be able to feel the student put in effort. Yes, there were definitely examples that I felt helped me understand and grow in my abilities in different academic areas, but they were exceptions. As a layman with no evidence to back this up, my feeling is that there is a sizable dip in effectiveness where the earliest years of schooling benefit from the added practice, and that in the later years of schooling it has similar levels of benefit as projects become more complex and require more than the time allotted in school. Additionally, team projects which require collaboration were good practice for communicating with others, rudimentary project management concepts, and also understanding how others work (or often didn't work.)
As Adam noted, there will likely be a growing importance in these sorts of projects to provide additional resources, proof of work, research, notes, as means of helping show your process and work, and as another piece of verification for work completed by you and not an AI assistant.
Additionally, in this same vein of verification against AI, comes the concerns over deepfakes, or more subtly the impersonation of someone in text form on social media or online. How do we know our friend really said those things when AI can generate a good-enough doppelgänger in many cases?
One idea I saw floated, though I didn't flag it so it is now lost to me, was that online identity verification could be an example of a blockchain style public ledger for verification. Obviously it has numerous security, privacy, and technology concerns; but it did strike me as perhaps the most compelling use-case for blockchain style technology that I have heard in a while. I recognize that I am not well informed enough to know if it is indeed viable; but it at least got my gears going.
Anyways, AI and this new era is definitely on my mind and likely will continue to be.
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ChatGPT made a virtual machine and it was usable
It's very avant garde, I can't help but feel we're about to see a new era of 'ai-vant garde' art exhibits as AI melds reality with its algorithms.
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Artist trains AI on her childhood journals and talks to her younger self
Very emotional and touching and fascinating. Definitely some uncanny valley for me as I read it, but I am very curious to try and replicate this for myself using many things I posted online decades ago.
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There are interesting and exciting opportunities for how AI/Machine Learning can help Indigenous people protect their homes
This is not anything unusual or unbelievable, but it is an interesting confluence of technology and those people who most care about protecting their corner of the environment. One example in the article:
One of the first AI-based Indigenous conservation projects, undertaken by Cornell University, was co-developed with the Coral Gardeners, from Mo’orea, French Polynesia. Founded in 2017, this Indigenous group cultivates heat-resistant super corals and transplants them onto damaged parts of the reef. Cornell provides the software to track the sounds of the many organisms making their home here and, working also with the University of Hawaii, integrates them into a recording platform, ReefOS, a network of sensors and cameras collecting visual and acoustic data 24 hours a day. The AI-mediated soundscape tells the on-site respondents whether the reefs are starting to sound like healthy and stable reef systems, or whether additional restoration efforts are needed.
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An AI designed keyboard layout
I have a deep seated love for keyboard systems different from the standard QWERTY or even DVORAK. I remember making one based on someone who did word analysis and a simplistic model which wanted to minimize the movement required. The biggest hurdles with something like this is that I found I really struggled to be "bilingual" when it came to keyboards.
I needed to be forced to only use the new one, with no exceptions, otherwise I would give in and switch back to an easy layout for speed and simplicity. Given today's world where I use, on the regular, three different computers (home laptop, work laptop, and home desktop) as well as two phones (one Android and one iOS) I would need to find a solution that easily allowed me to adopt a new keyboard in all situations, as well as have a length of time for learning proficiency such that I would not be hampered in my day to day career and life.
A tall order. However, I still find things like this fascinating.
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Has anyone had AI "watch" movies and then analyze movie synopses and/or movie revews, and then have it do its own synopses and review of movies it has not been trained for? Would be fascinating to see how it did.
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Dall-E Less a Threat for Artists than for Stock Photos
A blog post that talks about the process of using Dall-E pictures for the thumbnails on the company blog. The work that goes into getting good pictures, thoughts, tips, etc. But also, as one of the final bullet points highlights, this isn't threatening to replace artists as much as it is right now just replacing stock images.
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A man ran 120 excuses people use to not pay artists online through an AI to generate web comics and it's as amazing as you think
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"Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)"
But Sony soon learned that speed alone wasn’t enough to make GT Sophy a winner. The program outpaced all human drivers on an empty track, setting superhuman lap times on three different virtual courses. Yet when Sony tested GT Sophy in a race against multiple human drivers, where intelligence as well as speed is needed, GT Sophy lost. The program was at times too aggressive, racking up penalties for reckless driving, and at other times too timid, giving way when it didn’t need to.
Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand.
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A thought I had after my brief detour into transhumanism this morning:
One aspect of the Crypto boom and the power consumption spike it caused is likely, a precursor to a similar boom if AI ever really takes off. Consider what will happen if the world ever sees capable AI able to handle tasks humans have traditionally done. How many businesses would flock to AWS or to snag GPUs to run their own machines if they could replace paying humans.
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How Normal Am I?
A very educating look at the technologies being used for looking at people and how machines can judge various aspects of who we are, as well as pitfalls of this.
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Google's Blake Lemoine Feels Their Latest AI Has Reached Sentience
Two notable excerpts for me:
“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.
As well as this counter perspective:
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,” especially now that the illusion has gotten so good.
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AI Attempts Converting Python Code To C
This is an interesting idea. Just last week, when I was exploring Markdown stuff in preparation of working on the conversion for the blog, I came across a fantastic Markdown library from Stripe written for Nodejs. And I was bemoaning I didn't have access to it. A future where we have AI systems to do porting between platforms or systems is an exciting future.
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The Day I Became Friends with a Robot by Tristrum Tuttle
A story written by AI and illustrated by AI.
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SEPIA Framework
What is SEPIA?
The "A" in SEPIA stands for assistant. Think of it as a digital companion that helps you whenever you need it, not unlike Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana or Google Assistant, but a very special, private, customizable and open version that really belongs to you!
In fact SEPIA is not only a ready-to-use, cross-platform app for iOS, Android and desktop browsers but also a complete open-source framework for DIY AI assistants. You want to build your own smart-speaker or home-assistant or you simply want to use a virtual assistant that respects your privacy? Then you found the right place to start :-)
This looks like a project I'm going to need to give a try when I have some free time.
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Lego AI Sorter - 2 years in the making
Very fun and neat project! Legos truly are amazing.
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