Subluminal

Lately, there’s been quite some interest in LLM, thanks to ChatGPT

Plagiarism

One of the big concern du jour is plagiarism. Here’s an interesting piece by Noam Chomsky in the

The human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

And a more elaborate conversation:

Emergence

However, it seems there is a little more at stake. A former classmate of mine who works at Microsoft talked about sparks of Artificial General Intelligence in a podcast – there are emergent properties in AI, meaning that it does not only remix text, but also seem to have an ability to create things merely from structure (short of being able to think.)

ChatGPT 4.0 can generate code to make a unicorn, even though it has no notion of what a unicorn is, and that code is procedural. (excerpt from Bubeck’s lecture atBerkeley on sparks of AGI)

Physics of AI

The same friend is actually exploring what he dubs the Physics of AI: trying not to understand why AI works, but under what circumstances you can make it work.

Excerpt from Bubeck’s lecture on the Physics of AI

Liability

Computers are great, but –

IBM slide from 1979 (from MIT CSAIL)

In the end, humans will be only be there for liability. In  a way this is how American society has evolved.

ChatGPT as anonymous expert

Personally, I think that the ability to get answers to question without the fear judgement – asking dumb or intimate questions  – will have an incredible impact, perhaps more than the productivity gains that are touted by experts (sure – you can generate reports with AI, then summarize these reports with AI: perhaps the thought should have been boiled down i. the first place.)

“To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.”
–Georg Cantor

There is still some room for human thinking.