The backstory behind Taming Silicon Valley | Continue reading
So many people are confused about the relation between human cognitive errors and LLM hallucinations that I wrote this short explainer: Humans say things that aren't true for many different reasons • Sometimes they lie • Sometimes they misremember things | Continue reading
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.” If all we had was ChatGPT, we could say, hmm “maybe hallucinations are just a bug”, and fantasize that they weren’t hard to fix. If all we had was Gemini, we could say, hmm … | Continue reading
Some thoughts occasioned by Meta’s new model and a bad week in the stock market | Continue reading
A remembrance from Doug Hofstadter | Continue reading
It’s kind of surreal to compare some of the talks at TED yesterday with reality. Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman promised that hallucinations would be cured “soon”, yet my X feed is still filled with examples like these from Princeton Professor Aleksandra Korolova: | Continue reading
How well did last year’s talks hold up? | Continue reading
How Generative AI plays on human cognitive vulnerability | Continue reading
The conventional wisdom, well captured recently by Ethan Mollick, is that LLMs are advancing exponentially. A few days ago, in very popular blog post, Mollick claimed that “the current best estimates of the rate of improvement in Large Language models show capabilities doubling e … | Continue reading
Why Elon was probably wise not to take the bet | Continue reading
An open letter to Elon Musk | Continue reading
A bunch of small but important items in recently-breaking AI news: Tesla settled their lawsuit with the Huang family over Walter Huang’s death, for an undisclosed amount of money. “Although Huang’s family acknowledges he was distracted while the car was driving, they argued Tesla … | Continue reading
With apologies, there was a broken link in my last post (now corrected in the online version of the post). The important new arXiv article can be found here https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125. Thank you all for your support! –Gary | Continue reading
A new result casts serious doubt on the viability of scaling | Continue reading
You may have read yesterday’s New York Times report by Cade Metz and others on how many of the biggest AI companies have been cutting ethical corners in a race to gather as much data as possible (“OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and dis … | Continue reading
AI is making shit up, and thar made-up stuff is trending on X | Continue reading
A couple days ago I reported a survey saying that most IT professional are worried about the security of LLMs. They have every right to be. There seems to be an endless number of ways of attacking them. In my forthcoming book, Taming Silicon Valley, I describe two examples. The f … | Continue reading
Why and how it could happen in the next 12 months. | Continue reading
By any reasonable account the worst investment in the history of AI has to be the over $100 billion that have been invested in “driverless” cars. There may be a payoff someday, but thus far there has not been a lot. By many accounts Waymo rides are still a net loss on a per ride … | Continue reading
It’s not every day that I say this, but OpenAI got something exactly right yesterday, at a meeting at Columbia: OpenAI’s VP of Global Affairs Anna Makanju is exactly right - the race is on. I have some concerns, partly about the way that race is going, partly about (in)justice in … | Continue reading
Ten birthday observations | Continue reading
“Certainly, here is a list of” scientific garbage that may have been partially written by a factually-challenged bot | Continue reading
Not every thing the company says is completely candid. | Continue reading
Science is in for a rough ride | Continue reading
Anyone remember this piece? We are starting to see some signs in that direction. The WSJ recently reported that Microsoft Copilot was perhaps underwhelming some customers. Today Stephanie Palazzolo The Information asked: A longer story there (that she pointed to in the above)) wa … | Continue reading
Report card on an infamous paper. | Continue reading
And why it is becoming increasingly difficult to take them at their word | Continue reading
Shocking new paper with potentially serious implications | Continue reading
Agony first. The agony starts with the fact that Elon Musk has a point; OpenAI, Altman and Brockman *have* changed their mission since he gave them his money, his time and his reputation. Here's what they told that State of the California in 2015: THIRD: This Corporation shall be … | Continue reading
Some subtleties that eluded the All-In podcast | Continue reading
Third lawsuit this week | Continue reading
The dangers of generative pastische | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on ten of the challenges I expected OpenAI to face this year. Things just got worse. Here’s some of what’s happened in the last two weeks. 👉 Sora demo blows minds but fails basic physics and biology 👉 One of OpenAIR … | Continue reading
The thing about promises is that in Silicon Valley, accountability rarely shows up. Investors put in over $100 billion into the driverless car industry, and so far have little to show far it. Endless promises (and empty predictions) were made at essentially no cost to those who m … | Continue reading
No time to write today, but here is a fascinating graph, hat tip to Jeffrey Funk: Maybe, and I am just spitballing, LLMs aren’t quite the magic panacea that the industry lead us all to believe? See also this report February 13 at WSJ and this one, February 16 | Continue reading
And why it is unlikely to get much better anytime soon | Continue reading
Oh, Sexy Sora, what have you done? | Continue reading
Monkey see, monkey confabulate | Continue reading
What happens to chatbots if they people who use them for customer service are held responsible for the things those bots say? | Continue reading
Some thoughts on what it all means for AGI | Continue reading
Programming in English might not be all its cracked up to be. | Continue reading
The Foundation Remains Shaky | Continue reading
Dall-E 3 and Gemini have something in common with DALL-E 2 | Continue reading
Your post on X this morning raises many questions | Continue reading
The costs of extravagance | Continue reading
A lot | Continue reading