Q: "After doing AI for so long, what have you learned about humans?" Sam Altman: "I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this, like really special human thing and kind of somewhat magical. And I now think that it's sort of a fundamental property of matter..."
People: Musings about making sense. Good food plan. Surgeon general: loneliness is a pandemic, 2023 [PDF]. EU for non-pay research papers? Finland trains students as fact-checkers.
Cities: Shrinking cities ecology, Meta’s green neighbourhood, and Google’s, and Elon’s.
Tech: Gov't want hackers to pwn satellites. France invest in microchips factory. Breast cancer detection from smelling sweat samples.
AI: Immortality hubris and LLMs. Using AI for pool-taxes. Playing text-based adventures. Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models [PDF].
DIY: DIY summarizer, airgapped. LLM, Neo4j and APOC. Agents.
Actual reality googles
Homo silicus [Link]
We can’t currently put digital selves into bodies. Biological, robotic, or otherwise. […] here’s what people can (and will) do with existing LLM technology.
Write Extraordinarily Deep Descriptions of Themselves: Your whole life story. Your dramas and traumas. Your key life events. Your preferences. Likes and dislikes.
It’ll Import from Everything You’ve Done Online: Do you have a podcast? A video channel? Instagram? The company doing this for you will import all of it, and that will be part of the training.
Journals, Texts, and Other Private Data: They’ll also ask you to import as much conversation as you can gather from throughout your life, because that will train it (you) on how you interact with others.
Extensive Interviews and Scenario Exercises: Once all that is done, the company, let’s just call it Eterna, will then take you through as many hours of interviews as you can stomach. Deep interactive interviews putting you in various scenarios to extract your preferences to an extraordinary fidelity level.
Interviews With Loved Ones, Friends, Coworkers, and Associates: The more interaction impressions and data the better.
All of this will, using LLMs, create a version of yourself that responds more like you than you imagine. You couldn’t just tell it who you are because like I talked about above, we’re not good at that. No, we have to show it who we are.