What I Learned About AI in 2023
Reckons
Notes from #WIRED30
A Camera, Not an Engine
But why stop with datasets that induce languages with “grammars” that can be rendered legible to us? Could you make a “Large Solar Flares and Sunspots Model” (LSFASM) and learn to talk to the Sun and ask it where it might flare up next? How about a Large Oceanic Model that allows ships to talk to ocean currents? Or a Large History Model that works as a Prime Radiant for Asimovian psychohistory? Maybe a Large Climate Model constructed out of weather data can talk to us and supply strategies for climate change?
One reason it is hard is, once again, our tendency to mistake discoveries for inventions, or equivalently, cameras for engines. Instruments of discovery measure more than they are measured. Yes, there are a number of ways you can measure a telescope (mirror diameter or focal length for example), but the interesting measuring going on is what the telescope is doing to what it’s turned towards (the analogy to AI here is perhaps to things like floating-point precision — that’s closer to mirror diameter).
Fire and Motion
The religion of techno-optimism
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
Stanford revamped its design school for a new generation of designers
UN Global Pulse
Inside the Chaos at OpenAI
Not much is changing, a lot is changing
Dan Hill on Strategic Design
Future risks of frontier ai annex a
Analysis: Global CO2 emissions could peak as soon as 2023, IEA data reveals - Carbon Brief
Unbundling AI — Benedict Evans
To Boldly Go Down The Hall
Marc Andreessen is a Techno-Extremist
What if everything turns out OK? The power of imagining a better future
The vanishing designer
How AI reduces the world to stereotypes
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
Generative AI exists because of the transformer
Column: Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be
Frieze London art fair review – a graveyard of creativity for tasteless one percenters
Introducing public design
The absence of a common proposition divides rather than unites the design family, and it is the number one barrier to bootstrapping design in governments. We need a universal definition and proposition for design in the language of governments and ministries of finance.
Lorna Finlayson · Let them eat oysters: Animal Ethics · LRB 5 October 2023
Your NFTs Are Actually -- Finally -- Totally Worthless
Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models
Lukas Berglund and others, led by Owain Evans, asked a simple, powerful, elegant question: can LLMs trained on A is B infer automatically that B is A? The shocking (yet, in historical context, see below, unsurprising) answer is no
Elon Musk and the Infinite Rebuy
Tomorrow’s Democracy Is Open Source | NOEMA
How 9/11 affected the Digital Future