Tag: openAI

Random facts — things I learned (Jan 12 2024) — Data about the past is truth, Data about the future is religion (Auren Hoffman)

Prior editions

The most important takehome is that tokens are not equity, but are more similar to paid API keys. Nevertheless, they may represent a >1000X improvement in the time-to-liquidity and a >100X improvement in the size of the buyer base relative to traditional means for US technology financing — like a Kickstarter on steroids

But entertainment is one market, the market for attention, and one platform is ahead of everyone else in harvesting the commodity: TikTok. The Chinese (and it is Chinese) company had the most ascendant platform in history until OpenAI, and it remains the frame through which Western youth perceive the world

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

Like many people, I adhere to a religion that gives me moral guidance. The practice of it is just good sense—it keeps you out of prison and safely hidden in the crowd.

By approaching life with full consciousness, with vitality and intensity, by becoming the masters of our absurd fate — this is how we answer the question of suicide, how we defy futility and establish what it means to live.

The fun lies in tweaking things until they fit just right. Nothing can beat the feeling that happens after that.
And sometimes all it really takes is tweaking just one single thing to go from same same but different, to same same but right

The greater the doubt, the greater the dopamine

Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they’re focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.

“Memes are fun and memes are also something to come together around. Speculating on the popularity of memes and their staying power is no different than any other form of speculation… I’ve decided that I am going to stop ignoring and dismissing meme investing and start trying to understand it better. I think it is not something that is going away anytime soon and may turn into something even more interesting.” — Fred Wilson, AVC

Crypto is the modern version of the long emerging markets trade. As an industry, it will see the most relative capital inflows, budding innovation and has an innately global footprint. It provides a fiat currency debasement hedge (Bitcoin), new application networks akin to the internet (smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana) and the fastest growing population. You can compare it to any individual sovereign, country or financial market and nothing beats it.

My whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize and teach forever. – Ali Abdaal

You can’t tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams suck. – Palmer Luckey

Kardashev Type I: capable of controlling the entire energy from its planet
Kardashev Type II: capable of controlling the entire energy of its host star and travels through the solar system
Kardashev Type III: capable of controlling the energy at the scale of its entire galaxy

The barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great, you can’t put that sh*t in a f*cking book, bro.” – David Goggins

Auren Hoffman:
Data about past = truth
Data about future = religion

Think ism is a disease. We can’t solve problems by thinking about them. You have to do and try things – Kevin Kelly

Price is the maximally compressed signal of economically relevant information.

New study found that tea consumption is associated with attenuation of biological aging.
People who consistently drank >4 cups a day aged 40% slower than those who drank none.

I’ve heard old-timers say that the fifth set has nothing to do with tennis. It’s true. The fifth set is about emotion and conditioning. Slowly I leave my body. Nice knowing you, body. I’ve had several out-of-body experiences over my career, but this one is healthy. I trust my skill, and I step out of its way.

The group is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society, yet few pieces of software allow the squad as a whole to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together. To fully realize SQUAD CULTURE this must change

Startup valuation is literally a made up number
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Having an internet audience is still wildly underpriced
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Build products that no one asks for but everyone wants

Staying in conversation mode helps OpenAI thwart your goals. Remember that you’re not having a conversation with a sentient bot, you’re editing a shared document with a robotic LLM

Being entitled is the ugliest thing a person can be – Nolan Bushnell

Theodore Roosevelt: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

“Generalized trust” or “meta-trust” is “trust that whatever issues might arise between us, we can talk about things in a way that is workable for both of us and leads to issues getting resolved to our mutual satisfaction in good time.”

Money is the stored time and energy of other people

Offline, in the real world, OpenAI have designed a fictional character named ChatGPT who is supposed to have certain attributes and personality traits: it’s “helpful”, “honest”, and “truthful”, it is knowledgeable, it admits when it’s made a mistake, it tends towards relatively brief answers, and it adheres to some set of content policies

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five

When Claude Shannon worked out the math, he found something very surprising: The formula for noise in an information system was identical to the formula for entropy in thermodynamics.

Our thesis at Variant is that the next generation of internet networks will turn users into owners—specifically asset owners. The internet enabled everyone to become a publisher, and similarly, crypto enables everyone to become an asset owner, and therefore, an investor. You don’t need capital to invest, you can invest your time or work by producing art, running machines, or doing physical work.

Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. – Steven Pressfield

Given that Japan is the largest holder of US Treasury bonds and the largest international creditor as viewed by its net international investment position, actions of the Japanese private sector could place enormous upward pressure on 10-year plus maturity US Treasury bond yields.
This is data from the IMF which estimates Japan’s net international investment position is a positive $3.3 trillion

The US is now spending materially more money on the national interest payment compared to our defense budget.
That is quite a feat considering we are handing out weapons and equipment around the world like it is candy, so our allies can fight our proxy wars.

Thich Nhat Hanh
-If you see a person and don’t also see his society, education, ancestors, culture, and environment, you have not really seen that person. Instead, you have been taken in by the sign of that person, the outward appearance of a separate self.
-We already are what we want to become. We don’t have to become someone else. All we have to do is be ourselves, fully and authentically. We don’t have to run after anything. We already contain the whole cosmos.

In the traditional art world, each niche subgenre of art (Andy Warhol, post WWII African art, etc.) ends up being cornered by a handful of collectors. That is also happening to the digital art market right now. In 2023 there were around six institutional buyers who spent at least seven figures buying all the grail digital art pieces.

“When you throw the impossible at them, that’s when they get excited” – Hans Zimmer

“Always want more but never be greedy” – Giannis

I want to live in a world where building a humanoid robot at home is like building a PC today

stop thinking of time as an abstraction: in reality, beginning the minute you are born, time is all you have. It is your only true commodity…To waste your time in battles not of your choosing is stupidity of the highest order.

TIL the black hole, TON 618, is so big (66 billion solar masses), a new term was invented to describe it: ultramassive black hole

Never discriminate as to whom you study and whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.

Crypto is the machine’s body.
And AI is the brain that enters into it.

Having averted disaster, I’m suddenly loose, happy. It’s so typical in sports. You hang by a thread above a bottomless pit. You stare death in the face. Then your opponent, or life, spares you, and you feel so blessed that you play with abandon.

Could you make a “Large Solar Flares and Sunspots Model” (LSFASM) and learn to talk to the Sun and ask it where it might flare up next? How about a Large Oceanic Model that allows ships to talk to ocean currents? Or a Large History Model that works as a Prime Radiant for Asimovian psychohistory? Maybe a Large Climate Model constructed out of weather data can talk to us and supply strategies for climate change?

As the bicycle rolled across the world, critics followed, calling it dangerous because it startled horses and unbecoming for women, who had to wear traditionally male attire to ride (‘bloomers.’)
While some physicians argued cycling was healthy others linked it to insanity, deformities of the spine, face and even a cause for appendicitis. One insurance company even refused to insure avid bicycle riders, while one army recruitment office rejected applicants who were avid cyclists because it was assumed they had a weakened ‘bicycle heart.’

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
— Horace Mann

The Master said, “The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.”

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read. ~ Salman Rushdie

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
~ Harry S. Truman

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I stopped drinking caffeine this year.
It was incredibly difficult to do.
I used to drink a large Starbucks iced coffee each morning & a medium sized coffee mid-day.
That is ~ 300mg of caffeine.
How did I stop? — I went cold turkey one day. It really sucked. I had headaches, I was irritable, and generally felt horrible for about 10 days.
But the benefits made it all worth it. Here is what I’ve seen so far:
– More energy during the day
– Better sleep at night
– More hydrated skin
– Elevated mood
If you’re looking for something that could improve your life in 2024, highly recommend trying to cut out the caffeine drug.
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Start or end every day with writing about your life. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

When thinking about new cities in the United States, Las Vegas comes to mind as the most populous city founded in the 1900’s. Since its founding, it has benefited from having a different set of rules than other places. With its legalized gambling, tolerated prostitution and mob activity historically funneling money into and around Vegas, it benefited massively from having different rulesets. But it is not exactly the type of example that inspires policymakers in other jurisdictions

After studying AI and attempting to model various types of financial decision making algorithmically, I realized that humans make decisions very much the same way that modern search engines do. We have vast stores of data — the experiences we’ve encountered in our lives — and we use very simple algorithms to make predictions and decide on actions. I recollect what happened in my past circumstances, and based upon that history of evidence, I’m going to extrapolate the likely outcome of the current situation and choose the best course of action.

Random facts — things I learned (Dec 30 2023) — “Kindness is a virtue worth dying for”

Happy holidays erryone ho ho ho! Off to the random learnings we go:

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Art is not decoration. It’s exploration. It is wrong to think that art should be “pretty and easily appreciated.” Great art is always a noble “challenge” because it actually retools our perception. Great artists “train people to see.” – Jordan Peterson

There are four resources in a blockchain setting, for each participating node. (1) Computation, (2) State (memory), (3) Networking, (4) History Storage

first, we’re arguably entering an age of the Cowboy-Dev, the dev who just builds weeklong projects that they can monetize for life. the most devilish example is a hacker (as well as its angelic counterpart, the freelance auditor), but companies like openai and uniswap are actively building for nicer cowboy-devs to ride into town, deploy a plug-in or hook at the proverbial saloon, and ride out at dusk to wherever they’re needed next

Nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale – Bill Gates

I believe games (and simulation in general) will provide the next trillion high-quality tokens to train our foundation models. What’s cool is that these tokens are actively selected by the agent itself through exploration. It can choose to experiment with things that maximally reduce its internal uncertainties – kind of like how human curiosity works – Jim Fan

I’m fascinated by the fact that creativity tends to expand when you impose restrictions upon it. Many forms of poetry, for example, have rigid rules dictating rhyming schemes and even the number of syllables per line. And yet, much of the world’s most profound literary art comes from the genre. – redphonecrypto

Heresiarch = founder of a heresy, or leader of a heretical sect

Louis Gave on the Manifold podcast
-Chinese are deeply entrepreneurial. Look at all the SEA countries with Chinese diaspora, all the big cos are run by the Chinese
-China is capitalist with socialism imposed. Japan is socialist with capitalism imposed
-re: American politicians — “They’re buying your votes with your money”

Information hazards essay by Jeff Lonsdale
-Information hazards are not necessarily about red vs blue, as taking the red pill might give you superpowers. But sometimes it is more like a black pill that might give you a slightly more accurate understanding of how the world works but saps your motivation to effectively navigate it
-One confusing fact that the existence of personal information hazards help solve is how pessimists are generally more accurate than optimists, but optimists succeed more often. About the only career in which pessimists do better is law, where understanding downside scenarios is particularly valued. -Developing a bias towards optimism helps avoid focusing on information hazards that are more likely to bring you or other people down.

Once you realize something’s a monopoly you never sell it – Novo on investing

Various Jeff Lonsdale writings:
-In a Ponzi scheme, it’s only the guy pulling off the fraud that really benefits from attracting more people. In a pyramid scheme, each silo is separate, and people below someone in a pyramid scheme do not typically get any advantage from that person becoming more successful.
-For fiat currencies, the demand is certain and future supply drives price uncertainty. For blockchain, the supply of a specific blockchain is known, the demand is unknown. There may be uncertainty on the supply side. Alternative blockchains and forks effectively add blockchain assets to the ecosystem
-Robots are expensive, and precision robots that can multitask are even more so. A moderately skilled person who can be guided by a computer will be the most viable choice in many situations for decades to come.
-Occupational licensing has basically replaced union job protection in the private sector. In the 1950s, about 35% of the private sector workers were in unions. Today, that number is closer to 7%. Instead, an equivalent amount of the workforce has been created occupational licensing protections. These protections now cover over 30% of the workforce, up from 5% in the 1950s.
-We are entering a world where computers will be able to help a random conscientious person do 80% of the job of various experts

Chopping off their heads does not work: cockroaches can live without one for as long as a week. Whacking them is no guarantee either: their flexible exoskeletons can bend to accommodate as much as 900 times their body weight. Nor is flushing them down the toilet a solution: some breeds can hold their breath for more than half an hour

TIL cats in the U.S. kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds each year, along with billions of other animals
“Likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals”

A key theme I noticed while putting this together is that most of those bad trades occurred with low conviction and were often combined with the feeling that I must always have a position on. Conversely, the views I was patient with and let develop into attractive setups proved to be my best trades. I found that I’m often early to entering and exiting which is something else I remind myself of.

Nyan nyan = “meow meow” in Japanese, but is also slang for sex

Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding – Maria Popova

A Japanese Zen master once said to his disciples as he was dying, “I have learned only one thing in life: how much is enough.”

Andrew Lo on adaptive markets; There are five basic tenets of adaptive markets:
1. People act in their own self-interest.
2. People make mistakes.
3. From those mistakes, they learn, adapt, and innovate.
4. As they experiment and fail or succeed, the process of natural selection operates on individuals, institutions, and markets just as it operates on bacteria, sea slugs, and chimpanzees.
5. This evolutionary process is what determines financial market dynamics.

Embracing stress is a radical act of self-trust: View yourself as capable and your body as a resource. You don’t have to wait until you no longer have fear, stress, or anxiety to do what matters most. Stress doesn’t have to be a sign to stop and give up on yourself. – Kelly McGonigal

RICK RUBIN notes from PodcastNotes:
1. “One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they’re using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it’s painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity.”
2. “Any thought you have about outcome undermines the whole thing.”
3. The DIY punk-rock ethic: Just make it. “It might not be the dream version, but whatever version you can execute is the one for you to make.”
4. “The changes that come in meditation are to help your reactions in the real world.”
5. “The instinct and the unconscious are where the great ideas are. The things that come from our intellectual selves have much less charge.”

The Long Arm of X: X has by far the most reach of all media
* On an average day, there are 250 million active users
* On a crazy eventful day, the number of users varies between 400 and 500 million

A calorie is a unit of energy that raises one gram of water one degree centigrade

certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form – Michael Crichton

“Kindness is a virtue worth dying for”

Economic “mutation” is not random, it is creative, intuitive, and judgmental. It happens at the speed of thought because humans think on purpose. – Allen Farrington

I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well. – Bach

This run, even if it brings on heatstroke, will give me peace of mind tonight in that all-important ten minutes before I fall asleep. I now live for that ten minutes. I’m all about that ten minutes. I’ve been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep. – Andre Agassi

Personally, I resolve this particular dichotomy by thinking of realism as a desire to see the world realistically, and pragmatism as a desire to be effective. Believing you have achieved either desire is probably a sign that you’re actually trapped within one of the quadrants. It is skepticism and doubt that mark sophisticated realism and pragmatism, and distinguish them from quadrant-locked attitudes and behaviors. – Venkatesh Rao

You can almost always scale things up more than you think, and the benefits to doing so are almost always bigger and more surprising than you think. This goes from everything from technical systems to companies. – Sama

Big 3 in tennis only win 55% of all points (!)
1. Novak Djokovic = 54.95%
2. Rafael Nadal = 54.73%
3. Roger Federer = 54.54%

Protocols are engineered hardness, and in that, they’re similar to other hard, enduring things, ranging from diamonds and monuments to high-inertia institutions and constitutions. – Venkatesh Rao

Try to make your guests feel at home; and do this, not by urging them in empty words to do so, but by making their stay as pleasant as possible, at the same time being careful to put out of sight any trifling trouble or inconvenience they may cause you

Never loan money to friends or family. Give it.

people with anxiety self-report higher physical reactivity than those without anxiety. They think their hearts are pounding precariously fast and their adrenaline is surging to dangerous levels. But objectively, their cardiovascular and autonomic responses look just like those of the non-anxious. Everyone experiences an increase in heart rate and adrenaline. People with anxiety disorders perceive those changes differently.

I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of entropy. It suggests that not only is the universe indifferent to our presence, it is at least mildly hostile to it. We are low-entropy creatures trying hopelessly to swim upstream in a universe that’s gradually winding down towards a maximum-entropy heat death. So the universe itself is, in a sense, Slightly Evil. So by some sort of fractal logic, as little subsets of the universe, our true nature is probably slightly evil as well.

Life fucking rips. Life is what you make it. Life rips. You just have to realize it rips, and then it rips. Life rips if you think it rips. It doesn’t rip if you don’t think it rips. – Chris Delia

Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior

Already, relatively primitive LLMs have already completely changed the game (as in, undercut the equivalent of human labor by 1/100th of the cost, or performing equivalent tasks in 1/100th the time) in a few domains. Off the top of my head:
• Translation
• Transcription
• Stock photo generation
• Graphic design
• Data cleaning/preparation/manipulation
• Essay composition
• Programming
• Copywriting
• Vehicle operation
• Summarization
• Legal advice
• Radiology/imaging
I’ve used AI for most of these use cases and it continues to utterly shock me in terms of how much human labor it eliminates

Lump of labor fallacy – belief that there is fixed amount of work / jobs in the world, so if you eliminate jobs via tech like AI, there is more unemployment, or if you increase workers, etc

Ilya explained why OpenAI gave up on robotics with @dwarkesh_sp
“To work on robotics, you needed to become a robotics company. You needed to have a giant group of people working on building robots.”
Building robots is all in or nothing. No in between

Nietzsche:
“Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.”
The defeated demand equality: “Equality belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man & man, class & class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out – that which I call pathos of distance – characterizes every strong age.” Takeaway: Nobility wants to stand out.
“Close your ears to even the best counter-argument once the decision has been taken.” You need this “occasional will to stupidity.”

Investors have been conditioned to ignore geopolitical risk. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the S&P 500 opened down about 2.4%. That was enough selling, as it finished the day up 1.5% and advanced another 2.2% the following day. After the Hamas terrorist attack in October, the S&P 500 opened down 0.5%, but finished up 0.6% before tacking on another 1.0% over the next two trading days.

The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for — greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements — and so on, for ever — and unpredictably.


1. “We invent new tools and then our tools change us.”
2. “Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term that are impossible to solve if you think short-term.”
3. “Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.”

That’s why they call it work. You don’t always get to do what you wanna do – Bezos

But the ‘self tenured’ subset is the group of people who are still ‘in it’ but just have full financial security and freedom are in my minds the most interesting group – they can’t be rationally ’employed’ by anyone in any traditional job / the economics never make sense… but they have the knowledge, skill, and passion to pursue interesting and important technological projects…

Yes, the crazier a bonding ideology is — the further away it is from objective reality — the more powerful it is in forming tribes. Why? The crazier the idea, or the crazier the stuff one does in order to get into the tribe, the more it proves one’s loyalty to the group by shutting off their other available options

PG:
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind
But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something

Obsessions tend to win. Whether sports, a startup, a community, or a movement. Those who are obsessed will almost always, with enough time, beat those who are not

Sam Lessin:
“Tech is a story”
“AI is just more cloud”

The English language will increase its dominance in an AI world

Language is itself a technology, and like many technologies, it exhibits a classic network effect: each additional speaker of a language increases that language’s utility for all other speakers. The more “users” who speak and write English, the more valuable it is to know and use English in just about all affairs.

One obvious example is in software programming. Though there is a lot of symbolic and mathematical notation in programming languages, most would agree that English is head-and-shoulders more valuable to know (relative to the 2nd or 3rd most popular language) if you want to be a good programmer. It’s better for troubleshooting, for reading documentation, for scouring StackOverflow for copy-paste code, and now for getting ChatGPT or CoPilot to write code for you.

My belief is that as AI proliferates, English will only increase its lead. English is already in the lead with 1.4B speakers (though this number varies significantly depending on how you measure fluency), and Mandarin Chinese is second at 1.1B.

Why?

AI models need data. English comprises a majority of the available online training data. It helps that the largest economy in the world (the US) and the most populous country in the world (India, which depending on your reference, surpassed China’s population this year), are both English markets.

The largest content generating internet platforms — from Google to Facebook to Twitter to Wikipedia and on and on — are dominated by English speakers. An AI model’s output quality is directly correlated with the quantity of its training data, and there is simply more English data available than any other language, including Mandarin Chinese. Thus GPT4 and LLAMA and so forth are “smartest” in English.

There are multiple reasons why Mandarin Chinese lags behind, beyond just the fact that the breakthrough innovations in AI research and productization happened first in the US and UK. Among these reasons are the Great Firewall, the highly regulated and controlled nature of Chinese data, and China’s pervasive digital censorship (For example, there are more than 500 words alone that can’t be used on many Chinese UGC websites because they are perceived as unfavorable nicknames for President Xi Jinping)

Thus Chinese online training data lags English in both quantity and likely quality. There are also some reasons related to the languages themselves, where English is a more explicit language and Chinese more contextual.

English’s initial data lead is a self-reinforcing feedback loop — the more that people use English to interact with services like CharacterAI and ChatGPT, the more data the LLMs have to refine and improve (in English). Leaving other languages in the dust, especially long tail ones like Icelandic or Khmer.

As AI agents increasingly interact with each other, I’m guessing they will develop their own unique protocols for AI-to-AI communication. Not dissimilar to how computers communicate via highly structured network requests, only more complex and perhaps unique. AI will eventually create its own AI lingua franca. However, it’s also necessary that some human-readable component be built into this AI-ese (because at a minimum, developers will want to know where to debug and fix errors). English will likely be chosen for that AI-to-AI interface.

Of course, AI is an amazing and broad innovation that will benefit speakers of all languages. It will help to preserve and distribute rarer languages, and enable faster and better language-to-language education and translation. Whether you speak Vietnamese or Icelandic, there will be an AI model for you. I’m simply arguing that these secondary languages won’t be anywhere NEAR as good as the leading English models, and I would venture that even if English isn’t your first or even second language, you will probably still get better results using broken English to interact with ChatGPT than, say, French.

I could be very wrong here. As with any emerging technology, second and third order effects are by their nature unpredictable and chaotic. And the technology still has a long way to evolve and mature. Let’s see how it all plays out. I’m especially curious about what kinds of AI-to-AI communications will emerge, whether exposed through a human-readable interface or otherwise.

Ok that’s it, over and out good sers and madams! OpenAI wow!

Podcast notes: Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) on Lex Fridman – “Consciousness…something very strange is going on”

// everything is paraphrased from Sam’s perspective unless otherwise noted

Base model is useful, but adding RLHF – take human feedback (eg, of two outputs, which is better) – works remarkably well with remarkably little data to make model more useful

Pre training dataset – lots of open source DBs, partnerships – a lot of work is building great dataset

“We should be in awe that we got to this level” (re GPT 4)

Eval = how to measure a model after you’ve trained it

Compressing all of the web into an organized box of human knowledge

“I suspect too much processing power is using model as database” (versus as a reasoning engine)

Every time we put out new model – outside world teaches us a lot – shape technology with us

ChatGPT bias – “not something I felt proud of”
Answer will be to give users more personalized, granular control

Hope these models bring more nuance to world

Important for progress on alignment to increase faster than progress on capabilities

GPT4 = most capable and most aligned model they’ve done
RLHF is important component of alignment
Better alignment > better capabilities and vice-versa

Tuned GPT4 to follow system message (prompt) closely
There are people who spend 12 hours/day, treat it like debugging software, get a feel for model, how prompts work together

Dialogue and iterating with AI / computer as a partner tool – that’s a really big deal

Dream scenario: have a US constitutional convention for AI, agree on rules and system, democratic process, builders have this baked in, each country and user can set own rules / boundaries

Doesn’t like being scolded by a computer — “has a visceral response”

At OpenAI, we’re good at finding lots of small wins, the detail and care applied — the multiplicative impact is large

People getting caught up in parameter count race, similar to gigahertz processor race
OpenAI focuses on just doing whatever works (eg, their focus on scaling LLMs)

We need to expand on GPT paradigm to discover novel new science

If we don’t build AGI but make humans super great — still a huge win

Most programmers think GPT is amazing, makes them 10x more productive

AI can deliver extraordinary increase in quality of life
People want status, drama, people want to create, AI won’t eliminate that

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI criticisms – wrote a good blog post on AI alignment, despite much of writing being hard to understand / having logical flaws

Need a tight feedback loop – continue to learn from what we learn

Surprised a bit by ChatGPT reception – thought it would be, eg, 10th fastest growing software product, not 1st
Knew GPT4 would be good – remarkable that we’re even debating whether it’s AGI or not

Re: AI takeoff, believes in slow takeoff, short timelines

Lex: believes GPT4 can fake consciousness

Ilya S said if you trained a model that had no data or training examples whatsoever related to consciousness, yet it could immediately understand when a user described what consciousness felt like

Lex on Ex Machina: consciousness is when you smile for no audience, experience for its own sake

Consciousness…something very strange is going on

// Stopped taking notes ~halfway

Is text all you need…? Do you even need text? (Ribbonfarm on AI)

A thought provoking post from Venkatesh Rao (@vgr / Ribbonfarm) on AI:

Yes, there’s still superhuman-ness on display — I can’t paint like Van Gogh as Stable Diffusion can (with or without extra fingers) or command as much information at my finger-tips as the bots — but it’s the humanizing mediocrity and fallibility that seems to be alarming people. We already knew that computers are very good at being better than us in any domain where we can measure better. What’s new is that they’re starting to be good at being ineffectual neurotic sadsacks like us in domains where “better” is not even wrong as a way to assess the nature of a performance.

There are, by definition, only a handful of humans whose identity revolves around being the world’s best Go player. The average human can at best be mildly vicariously threatened by a computer wiping the floor with those few humans. But there are billions whose identity revolves around, for instance, holding some banal views about television shows, sophomoric and shallow opinions about politics and philosophy, the ability to write pedestrian essays, do slow, error-prone arithmetic, write buggy code, and perhaps most importantly, agonize endlessly about relationships with each other, creating our heavens and hells of mutualism.

Link: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/text-is-all-you-need

I don’t think humans are all that special. Yes, each human is special in some limited way, and together as a species we have built some very special things.

But it’s increasingly clear that some of those very special things we have built — such as AI and coming soon, smart robots — will expose our own flaws and imperfections, a kind of inverse magic mirror, and there is and will be a deepening divide between those who use or even love the magic mirror, and those who want to look away or smash it.

This divide is already a driver of the world’s growing income inequality (though I think the generational divide has been a much larger cause of this, at least in developed economies), and I think it will become *the* driver in the coming decades.