I’ve previously argued that current gen “AI” built on transformers are just fancy predictive type, but as I’ve watched the models continue to grow in complexity it does seem like something emergent that could be described as a type of intelligence is happening.

These current transformer models don’t possess any concept of truth and, as far as I understand it, that is fundamental to their nature. That makes their application severely more limited than the hype train suggests, but that shouldn’t undermine quite how incredible they are at what they can do. A big enough statistical graph holds an unimaginably complex conceptual space.

They feel like a dream state intelligence - a freewheeling conceptual synthesis, where locally the concepts are consistent, while globally rules and logic are as flexible as they need to be to make everything make sense.

Some of the latest image and video transformers, in particular, are just mind blowing in a way that I think either deserves to be credited with a level of intelligence, or should make us question more deeply what we means by intelligence.

I find dreams to be a fascinating place. It often excites people to thing that animals also dream, and I find it as exciting that code running on silicon might be starting to share some of that nature of free association conceptual generation.

Are we near AGI? Maybe. I don’t think that a transformer model is about to spring into awareness, but maybe we’re only a few breakthroughs away from a technology which will pull all these pieces off specific domain AI together into a working general intelligence.

Squeezing a metal cylinder out my chute sounds a lot less pleasant than just pooping poop.

The warning is specifically for trans folk.

The government’s website issued guidance for transgender travelers, saying that U.S. ESTA and visa application forms require travelers to declare their sex, which should reflect their biological sex at birth. Travelers with an “X” marker on their passport or whose gender differs from the one assigned at birth are advised to contact the U.S. Embassy in Dublin for further information on specific entry requirements.

I read a series of super interesting posts a few months back where someone was exploring the dimensional concept space in LLMs. The jump off point was the discovery of weird glitch tokens which would break GPTs, making them enter a tailspin of nonsense, but the author presented a really interesting deep dive into how concepts are clustered dimensionally, presenting some fascinating examples and, for me at least, explained in a very accessible manner. I don’t know if being able to identify those conceptual clusters of weights means we’re anywhere close to being able to manually tune them, but the series is well worth a read for the curious. There’s also a YouTube series which really dives into the nitty gritty of LLMs, much of which goes over my head, but helped me understand at least the outlines of how the magic happens.

(Excuse any confused terminology here, my knowledge level is interested amateur!)

Posts on glitch tokens and exploring how an LLM encodes concepts in multidimensional space. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldmagikarp-iii-glitch-token-archaeology

YouTube series is by 3Blue1Brown - https://m.youtube.com/@3blue1brown

This one is particularly relevant - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jl0dxWQs8

Children of Time

I’ve just now realised that Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr are not the same person.

The meat industry is a huge driver of climate change. If you don’t want to stop eating meat, you can also choose to eat meat from local farmers. It will probably mean eating less of it, because sustainably farmed meat is necessarily expensive.

Thanks for taking the time to write that! I learned something new today. I usually take tea with oat milk, so now I’m curious what proteins oat milk has and if they act similarly. I’ll do some more reading.

You have piqued my interest on the thing of milk binding up beneficial chemicals. Can you elaborate?

Some people even put the milk in first.

Oof. Meme hits hard.

Trans people are literally just trying to get on with their lives while bigots obsess about them.

The same type of people said the same things about women getting the vote, interracial couples, and homosexuality.

I hope history continues to move in the right direction and leave these nosey fucks as nothing more than shameful memories.

When native English speakers complain that changing pronouns is too hard 🧐

Just to add some cool etymology to your reply: the word silhouette comes from a type of affordable portrait made by quickly painting or cutting out a persons profile in black paper. These, and portrait miniatures, fell quickly out of favour with the advent of photography.

The word silhouette is derived from the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister who, in 1759, was forced by France’s credit crisis during the Seven Years’ War to impose severe economic demands upon the French people, particularly the wealthy.[3] Because of de Silhouette’s austere economies, his name became synonymous with anything done or made cheaply and so with these outline portraits.[4][5] Prior to the advent of photography, silhouette profiles cut from black card were the cheapest way of recording a person’s appearance.[6][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silhouette

This is also an interesting article on the subject of pre-photographic portraiture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_miniature

Already we know we must lead all roads to this place.