The abridged version of my latest Substack post. You can find the full essay as NVIDIA is a long-term bet against Moores’ Law on The Puzzle and its […]
Continue readingCategory: Technology and its malcontents
Let Generative AI Be Itself, Not an Imitation Human
The first proper post is up on the Substack, Let Generative AI Be Itself, Not an Imitation Human.
Continue readingBook Updates Moving to Substack
For those following my book-related posts, I’m making a slight change to how I share this work. To better organise this expanding body of work, I’ve recently launched a Substack newsletter where I’ll be sharing book excerpts, work-in-progress concepts, and applications of the analytical framework I’m developing.
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Predicting the unpredictable
Predicting the future of work presents significant challenges due to the intricate interplay between technological advancements and human decision-making. To better understand the potential outcomes and critical decision points, more sophisticated models are necessary.
Continue readingThe limits of generative AI
Whilst cruising the interwebs I can across a nice description of the limits of large language (LLMs) models.
Continue readingContinue readingEven the effects already discovered are due to chance and experiment rather than to the sciences; for our present sciences are nothing more than peculiar arrangements of matters already discovered, and not methods for discovery or plans for new operations.
Aphorism VIII. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, 1620
Where will LLMs take us?
Not a week seems to pass by without some surprising news concerning large-language models (LLMs). Most recently it was when an LLM trained for other purposes played chess at a reasonable level. This seemingly constant stream of surprising news has led to talk that LLMs are the next general-purpose technology—a technology that affects an entire economy—and will usher in new era of rapid productivity growth. They might even accelerate global economic growth by an order of magnitude, as the Industrial Revolution did, providing us with a Fifth Industrial Revolution.
Continue reading“I am still struggling to find a proper definition of AGI… ur thoughts”
The short answer is that AGI is a bit meaningless as a term as we don’t really know what ‘I’ is. The best approach is the assume that AGI means “human-like intelligence in machines” while accepting that “human-like intelligence” is something of an unknown.
Continue readingThe coming wave
This book describes itself as the work of ‘the ultimate insider’. This seems rather apt as it provides us with a glimpse of what the technocratic chattering class are saying about the current AI moment. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide us with insight into how this current moment will play out as the view from inside appears to be is quite poor, lacking the perspective need to really grapple with this question.
Continue readingForever ten years away
Why do some the technologies always seem to be ten years away? We’re not talking about the science fiction dreaming of faster than light travel or general AI and the singularity. Those ten years apply to technologies that forever seem to be just out of reach, just beyond our current technical capabilities, like nuclear fusion (as opposed to fission) or quantum computing. Researchers make incremental progress and we’re told that (once the technology works) its going to change everything, but despite this incremental progress estimates of when the technology will be commercialised and so available to the public always seem to be in the ballpark of ‘ten years’.
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