Artificial Intelligence
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Sigmund Freud observed that humanity has suffered three great “humiliations.” Galileo found that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin found that we are not the culmination of nature, and he himself (Freud) found that we are not in control of our own minds. Ayad Akhtar recently made the point in The Yale… Continue reading
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I’m with stupid
Large language models actually work. They’re not fake, and they’re surprising, amazing technology. LLMs are real. The LLM vendors and their business models, though, might be something else again. They’ve raised historic amounts of money, which the venture capitalists are going to want repaid at some point. But if you examine their revenues, expenses, and… Continue reading
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Author! Author!
What is writing for? What matters, who wrote some text, or who reads it? One idea is that text — I’ll call it “literature” here — only matters, and only really exists as a significant entity at all when someone reads it. This is a key idea from “reader-response criticism,” a branch of literary theory.… Continue reading
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Speed, oversimplification, and delusion
Artificial intelligence seems to be mostly about speed. Instead of days, weeks, or months working on your software, book, or other project, it can be done in hours or even minutes! Well…okay…but so what? There are certainly cases where speed is an important component of an outcome. Dousing a fire. Removing a steak from the… Continue reading
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The intelligence is the words
Kevin Kelly asks If programmers did not program ChatGPT with logical deduction skills, where does the intelligence in its models come from? He hypothesizes that It is the architecture of language that conveys the intelligence. I have another idea: our intelligence is the language, and that’s been hidden in plain sight for centuries or more.… Continue reading
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Contradictions
Terry Goodier’s essay The Boring Internet is all about the low level protocols that underpin Internet services. He points out that there’s nothing pretty or easy about protocols. And he points it out in a visual essay that’s lovely to see. The form of the essay and the form of its subject are a contradiction.… Continue reading
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The mythos mode and the logos mode
Another deeply thoughtful essay this morning from Om Malik. You should read it! Malik begins by wondering why Anthropic called its new model Mythos. To even wonder about that, you have to understand some things about history, literature, and philosophy. I won’t explain Malik’s inquiry; that’s what his essay does brilliantly. It’s another example of… Continue reading
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Well whaddaya know
Everybody knows a lot more than they’re able to explain. There are some areas where language just isn’t adequate. For example, imagine trying to explain an aroma without referring to other smells. Without “it smells like…”, there’s not a lot you can do. Even though people have amassed countless pages of written information, and that’s… Continue reading
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The bills are starting to come due
The leading AI vendors are starting to remove the curtains around how many tokens you’re using and how much they cost. In large corporate settings, token cost has been effectively zero for individual practitioners. In my most recent corporate gig, I was strongly encouraged to make as much use of Codex and its ilk as… Continue reading
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An ogre is like an onion
Metaphors are a tool for easily understanding and explaining something. They’re comparisons. If you say “the AI industry is a house of cards,” anybody who shares enough experience and language with you knows you’re saying the AI industry is fragile and could collapse at any moment. The Metaphors We Live By, a 1980 book by… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!