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flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Conversations with OpenAI's GPT-3

Another instance of confused language. One can not converse with a program because a conversation implies some notion of semantics and understanding. Software, represented as a binary sequence, has no semantics other than encoding some numbers and operations on those numbers. So at best, what we can say is that this post is about some arithmetic that looks like a linguistic interaction. Any semantics associated with the arithmetic performed by GPT-3 is simply self deception.

GPT-3 and all language models are just search engines that respond to queries by uncompressing the content encoded in the matrices of the model.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Mystical Experiences of Arthur Koestler (1954)

His book "The Act of Creation" is also very good. Somewhat related to prison experiences, John Leray invented sheaves while in a prison camp:

> Jean Leray (November 7, 1906–November 10, 1998) was confined to an officers’ prison camp (“Oflag”) in Austria for the whole of World War II. There he took up algebraic topology, and the result was a spectacular flowering of highly original ideas, ideas which have, through the usual metamorphism of history, shaped the course of mathematics in the sixty years since then.

It seems that solitude is generally conducive to creative activity for those that are somewhat positively oriented towards such activity.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Employers beware: hybrid work weakens loyalty

One can not be loyal to an entity that has no conception of what it means. Language like this is why people are constantly confused about where their loyalties should actually be. One can be loyal to people, one can not be loyal to a workplace.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is GitHub Copilot / IntelliCode Legal?

It's definitely in a gray area because the AI models are essentially compression engines that encode the code samples/data into the weights of the matrices that represent the ML model and then "uncompress" it to serve queries. I think it would be easy to argue that a compressed data set no matter how illegible would need to conform to the same license as the data set it was encoding but I don't think any lawyer is smart enough to make that case. So at the moment it remains a very convenient loophole for companies that have enough compute to mangle the data set beyond recognition and then use it to their advantage. So this will probably remain a convenient loophole for large companies to sidestep licensing restrictions by encoding whatever data/code they want to use into some neural network and then sell it as AI.

For why these things are essentially mangled compression engines one can take a look at "Hopfield Networks is all you need": https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02217. It allows representing all modern transformer networks (which is what CoPilot is using) as a bunch of hopfield networks which are essentially memory modules connected in some complicated topology to encode some data set.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Celebrities and NFTs Are a Match Made in Hell

This is the inevitable endgame of financialization. People think financial instruments have meaning when the reality is its just a bunch of numbers in databases and fluffy narratives about GDP and growth.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: The Philosopher’s Zombie

> The infamous thought experiment, flawed as it is, does demonstrate one thing: physics alone can’t explain consciousness

Neither can math by the way and by extension, computation. There is no such thing as a computational theory of consciousness unless consciousness is redefined to be whatever is done by a Turing machine.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: The People deciding to ditch their smartphones

> "It has improved my life," he says. "My thoughts are freed up from constantly being cognitively connected to a machine that I need to feed with energy and money. I think that the danger of technologies is that they are emptying our lives."

It's easy to forget that technology should be treated as a tool and not as an end in and of itself.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Facebook Shares Plummet 23%

Facebook has been a zombie for a while now. Maybe the market has caught up. Their stock price didn't make any sense to me when it was high and it still doesn't make sense to me. With stalling growth and lower overall engagement they don't really have anywhere to go so my guess is their stock price is going to continue falling.

flowtheorist | 4 years ago | on: Facebook Parent Meta’s Stock Plunges 26%, Loses More Than $200B in Value

It'll soon be worthless. VR is not a moat and it's unlikely Zuckerberg will manage to convince people that putting on a VR headset and hanging out in a virtual space is going to be preferable to hanging out in real life. I'm surprised there wasn't a bigger selloff. At some point the US government will also start tightening data sharing requirements and at that point their ad targeting will be essentially be non-functional.
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