BlogFlockGreetings all,
I’m editing this piece en route to New York City, where I hope there will be enough overworked air traffic controllers to prevent my plane from landing in the East River. Provided that does not happen, I’m very much looking forward to visiting the place where, according to…
Geoffrey Hinton recently won a Nobel Prize for his work on backpropagation, a foundational piece of research that contributed to the emergence of contemporary artificial intelligence systems – particularly generative AI systems such as Large Language Models. I recently served as a panelist at the "Who's…
Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob Silverman, author of GILDED RAGE: ELON MUSK AND THE RADICALIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY, a…
Greetings all,
I’m a little bleary today, as I wrote much of this after staying up late watching the Dodgers go 18 innings in a completely unhinged, 7-hour World Series game. I am not necessarily what you would call a Huge Sports Man, but you have to get into the…
I don't identify as neurodivergent, per se, though I know I have been a synesthete, which I know sounds like I am trying to be fancy. Synesthesia is a bit of a superpower – music seems to be much cooler for me than for most other people – but…
For the past few years, the AI industry and executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have very cleverly shepherded the conversation about generative AI to work in their own interests. In their telling, generative AI is a transformative technology that is improving many different aspects of our society, but particularly…
I have to apologize for nearly any invocation of Slavoj Zizek or Jacques Lacan, so fair warning. But I want to highlight a point made by Yuxuan Zhang in a paper on the LLM "Unconscious," where he draws on a favorite joke of Zizek:…
Greetings all,
Well it’s officially fall here in LA. You can tell because we have experienced our annual day of rain and the city’s infrastructure nearly collapsed in on itself as a result. Always a good time! This week, we tally up the AI law scorecard in California and consider…
In my update over the summer, I had to make an admission: I’d only read eight books so far during the year — well behind my goal. Over the past three months, I’m happy to say I’ve made some progress. My tally has risen to eighteen, with more to come…
It's important to acknowledge that Large Language Models are complex. There's an oversimplified binary in online chatter between the dismissive characterization of LLMs as "next-word predictors" by many anti-AI proponents, and the pro-AI advocates who act as if the model is a perfect replica of the…
Tech critic Paris Marx provides the critical take on Silicon Valley you’ve been missing
2 posts last monthA newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. Featured in Wired and Rolling Stone.
0 posts last month