We’re in the early stages of an AI arms race. The biggest, most influential and well resourced companies in the world have, more-or-less, all pivoted their business models to focus primarily on progressing their own development of Artificial Intelligence. Google, Microsoft, Meta (previously Facebook), Amazon, X. In a somewhat surprising plot twist, Meta have emerged…

References for this essay: Imagine yourself as an eccentric Willy Wonka style character in a futuristic chocolate factory.  You’ve agreed to an experiment, and are now wearing a high-tech suit measuring everything – heart rate, brain waves, even the chemicals communicating between the tip of your tongue and your taste buds.  As you take the…

Life is weird. And.. there’s nothing quite like the process of ‘metamorphosis’ to demonstrate that weirdness. During ‘metamorphosis’, a caterpillar transforms itself into a chrysalis – a cocoon-like shell. Inside the shell, the caterpillar breaks itself down into a soupy mixture of cells, before magically rearranging itself into a butterfly – complete with legs and…

References: Stuff that’s good to know. LLM stands for Large Language Model. It’s a very specific type of AI, a Neural Network using a Transformer design (like a brain). An LLM predicts the next word in a sentence – billions of adjustable dials allow the model to map meaning between words. AGI is Artificial General…

References: Ex Machina explores the mind-bending question: ‘how do we assess whether something else has consciousness?’  Here is Alex Garland explaining that premise. Is AI conscious? Will AI become conscious? When will AI become conscious? These are the big questions many are grappling with. At this point, I think it’s fair to say that this…

References used: Truth Terminal is the Twitter account of an ‘almost’ fully autonomous AI agent who managed to convince Mark Andreesen to send (it?) $50,000 worth of Bitcoin last week. We’ll come back to this story at the end of the piece. I’ll go on record now saying that we are just dipping our toes…

This was a recent conversation (June, 2024) between four researchers from Anthropic’s Interpretability team ( Josh, Jonathan, Adly and Tom) discussing the scientific and engineering findings and challenges encountered in scaling interpretability research – will explain what all that means. Some background information: Big Ideas/tlrd: 📒 Some background information 👉 ❓ Who is Anthropic? Anthropic is…

References: In the early 20th Century, visionary engineer Reginald Dacey created the first ‘Automatic Nanny’.  After hiring a shitty and ill-tempered human Nannie for his own child, Dacey became convinced that his Automatic Nanny invention would be much better equipped to raise a child than a human.  From both practical and psychological perspectives. At first,…

Resources used to create this essay. Mustafa Suleyman and Seth Rosenberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNzRviY4Ei8 The economy and national security after AGI | Carl Shulman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTci0CdOPIc&list=PL-BRtcBm4Yj4aKn72p4PjyqHh0ZQFdI1A&index=1 Sam Altman & Brad Lightcap 20VC conversation: https://youtu.be/G8T1O81W96Y?si=IF6LfghiRr7dhIRK How to survive the looming AI take over. “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” “There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever…

References used to create this essay: What if you had a minute with God? Or, more specifically – the opportunity to ask a supreme intelligence a single question. What would that question be? Remember Elon Musk’s question? In a recent conversation on the 80,000 hours podcast, Carl Shulman explains why AI progress will likely lead…

This is a recap of Situational Awareness. Important to know before the recap. What is AGI and SuperIntelligence? As I’ve shared in previous essays – binary definitions and terms like ‘Intelligence’ and ‘AGI’ are misleading.They are better thought of as existing on a spectrum – narrow at one end, broad or more general at the…

Everybody agrees that at some point in the near’ish future, we’ll have some form of human-like general intelligence; and then we’ll have vastly-smarter-than-human intelligence. And the implications will be fecking insanely wild. So the more pressing questions are the ‘when’ and the ‘how’? Some people think we’ll have a human-like AGI within the decade (and…

Resources used to create this essay: In the last essay, we introduced Leopold Aschenbrenner – a very interesting 23 year old Columbia graduate who was recently hired and then fired from OpenAI. Leopold’s ‘Situational Awareness’ series unpacks some potential paths and timelines toward ‘General Intelligence’ and ‘SuperIntelligence’. I wanted to share and explain, in simple…

Resources used to create this essay: Ned Ludd was a skilled weaver from Nottingham, England. He spent long hours weaving intricate patterns and creating beautiful fabrics, taking great pride in his work. One fateful day, early 1800’s, at Ned’s countryside factory, a new mechanical loom was installed. The factory owner boasted the machine could weave…

References used to create this essay: “Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do…

I’m currently researching the wild and wonderful world of ‘memory’ for an upcoming essay. Like almost all of the fundamental functions of human-ness, Artificial Intelligence is forcing us to revisit what we actually understand (and more importantly – don’t understand), about memory. The research was inspired by a recent conversation between Lex Fridman and Charan…

Resources used to create the essay: WTF is a Large Language Model? David Silver doesn’t make much noise. He’s not on Twitter, he rarely does podcasts, and he never seems to engage in the heated debates around the more controversial aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Yet, he has made some of the most significant contributions to…

Some of the resources used to create the following essay. The AI Emergence Debate (is not) for Dummies This following story is taken directly from Terrence J. Sejnowski’s Large Language models and the reverse turing test paper. One of my favorite stories is about a chance encounter on the backroads of rural America when a…