Tag Archives: ai

Wordy Wernicke’s

There are two major brain areas involved in language. To oversimplify, Wernicke’s area in the superior temporal gyrus handles meaning; Broca’s area in the inferior frontal gyrus handles structure and flow. If a stroke or other brain injury damages Broca’s … Continue reading

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The Obligatory GPT-3 Post

I. I would be failing my brand if I didn’t write something about GPT-3, but I’m not an expert and discussion is still in its early stages. Consider this a summary of some of the interesting questions I’ve heard posed … Continue reading

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A Very Unlikely Chess Game

Almost 25 years after Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, another seminal man vs. machine matchup: Neither competitor has much to be proud of here. White has a poor opening. Black screws up and loses his queen for no reason. A few … Continue reading

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Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence

Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened? I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn’t everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions … Continue reading

Neurons And Intelligence: A Birdbrained Perspective

Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren’t they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as “it takes … Continue reading

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Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry

Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it on … Continue reading

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My Plagiarism

I was going back over yesterday’s post, and something sounded familiar about this paragraph: A very careless plagiarist takes someone else’s work and copies it verbatim: “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. A more careful plagiarist takes the … Continue reading

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GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence

A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying: I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked. I … Continue reading

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Do Neural Nets Dream Of Electric Hobbits?

Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works. For example (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response): Prompt: For … Continue reading

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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your going through the … Continue reading