The week’s big news was supposed to be Meta’s release of two versions of Llama-3. Everyone was impressed. These were definitely strong models. Investors felt differently. After earnings yesterday showed strong revenues but that Meta was investing heavily in AI, … Continue reading … | Continue reading
This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned. Application Strategy … … | Continue reading
It was all quiet. Then it wasn’t. Note the timestamps on both of these. Dwarkesh Patel did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg on the 18th. It was timed to coincide with the release of much of Llama-3, very much the … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Many things this week did not go as planned. Humane AI premiered its AI pin. Reviewers noticed it was, at best, not ready. Devin turns out to have not been entirely forthright with its demos. OpenAI fired two employees who … Continue reading → | Continue reading
For this iteration I will exclude discussions involving college or college admissions. There has been a lot of that since the last time I did one of these, along with much that I need to be careful with lest I … Continue reading → | Continue reading
As always, a lot to get to. This is everything that wasn’t in any of the other categories. Bad News You might have to find a way to actually enjoy the work. Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): Sustained great work … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Claude uses tools now. Gemini 1.5 is available to everyone and Google promises more integrations. GPT-4-Turbo gets substantial upgrades. Oh and new model from Mistral, TimeGPT for time series, and also new promising song generator. No, none of that adds … Continue reading → | Continue reading
A New Bill Offer Has Arrived Center for AI Policy proposes a concrete actual model bill for us to look at. Here was their announcement: WASHINGTON – April 9, 2024 – To ensure a future where artificial intelligence (AI) is … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Previously: #1 It feels so long ago that Covid and health were my beat, and what everyone often thought about all day, rather than AI. Yet the beat goes on. With Scott Alexander at long last giving us what I … Continue reading → | Continue reading
It was clear within the first ten minutes this would be a rich thread to draw from. In my childhood and education roundups, and of course with my own kids, I have been dealing with the issues Haidt talks about … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Another round? Of economists projecting absurdly small impacts, of Google publishing highly valuable research, a cycle of rhetoric, more jailbreaks, and so on. Another great podcast from Dwarkesh Patel, this time going more technical. Another proposed project with a name … Contin … | Continue reading
Previous Fertility Roundups: #1, #2. The pace seems to be doing this about twice a year. The actual situation changes slowly, so presumably the pace of interesting new things should slow down over time from here. Demographics This time around, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Dwarkesh Patel continues to be on fire, and the podcast notes format seems like a success, so we are back once again. This time the topic is how LLMs are trained, work and will work in the future. Timestamps are … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Welcome, new readers! This is my weekly AI post, where I cover everything that is happening in the world of AI, from what it can do for you today (‘mundane utility’) to what it can promise to do for us … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I call the section ‘Money Stuff’ but as a column name that is rather taken. There has been lots to write about on this front that didn’t fall neatly into other categories. It clearly benefited a lot from being better … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Last week Sam Altman spent two hours with Lex Fridman (transcript). Given how important it is to understand where Altman’s head is at and learn what he knows, this seemed like another clear case where extensive notes were in order. … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Hopefully, anyway. Nvidia has a new chip. Also Altman has a new interview. And most of Inflection has new offices inside Microsoft. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility Ethan Mollick on how he uses AI to aid his … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Like the the government-commissioned Gladstone Report on AI itself, there are two sections here. First I cover the Gladstone Report’s claims and arguments about the state of play, including what they learned talking to people inside the labs. I mostly … Continue reading → | Continue reading
AI developments have picked up the pace. That does not mean that everything else stopped to get out of the way. The world continues. Do I have the power? Emmett Shear speaking truth: Wielding power is of course potentially dangerous … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Introducing Devin Is the era of AI agents writing complex code systems without humans in the loop upon us? Cognition is calling Devin ‘the first AI software engineer.’ Here is a two minute demo of Devin benchmarking LLM performance. Devin … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Things were busy once again, partly from the Claude release but from many other sides as well. So even after cutting out both the AI coding agent Devin and the Gladstone Report along with previously covering OpenAI’s board expansion and … Continue reading → | Continue reading
TikTok Might Get Banned Soon This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support. Alec Stapp: TikTok bill to remove influence of CCP: – passed unanimously out of committee – GOP leadership says they’ll bring … Continue reading → | Continue reading
It is largely over. The investigation into events has concluded, finding no wrongdoing anywhere. The board has added four new board members, including Sam Altman. There will still be further additions. Sam Altman now appears firmly back in control of … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The big news this week was of course the release of Claude 3.0 Opus, likely in some ways the best available model right now. Anthropic now has a highly impressive model, impressive enough that it seems as if it breaks … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Claude 3.0 Claude 3.0 is here. It is too early to know for certain how capable it is, but Claude 3.0’s largest version is in a similar class to GPT-4 and Gemini Advanced. It could plausibly now be the best … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Roon, member of OpenAI’s technical staff, is one of the few candidates for a Worthy Opponent when discussing questions of AI capabilities development, AI existential risk and what we should do about it. Roon is alive. Roon is thinking. Roon … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Legalize housing. It is both a good slogan and also a good idea. The struggle is real, ongoing and ever-present. Do not sleep on it. The Housing Theory of Everything applies broadly, even to the issue of AI. If we … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Demis Hassabis was interviewed twice this past week. First, he was interviewed on Hard Fork. Then he had a much more interesting interview with Dwarkesh Patel. This post covers my notes from both interviews, mostly the one with Dwarkesh. Hard … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The main event continues to be the fallout from The Gemini Incident. Everyone is focusing there now, and few are liking what they see. That does not mean other things stop. There were two interviews with Demis Hassabis, with Dwarkesh … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Previously: The Gemini Incident (originally titled Gemini Has a Problem) The fallout from The Gemini Incident continues. Also the incident continues. The image model is gone. People then focused on the text model. The text model had its own related … Continue reading → | Continue reading
We were treated to technical marvels this week. At Google, they announced Gemini Pro 1.5, with a million token context window within which it has excellent recall, using mixture of experts to get Gemini Advanced level performance (e.g. GPT-4 level) out of Gemini Pro levels of com … | Continue reading
Google’s Gemini 1.5 is impressive and I am excited by its huge context window. I continue to default to Gemini Advanced as my default AI for everyday use when the large context window is not relevant. However, while it does not much interfere with what I want to use Gemini for, t … | Continue reading
Hours after Google announced Gemini 1.5, OpenAI announced their new video generation model Sora. Its outputs look damn impressive. How Sora Works How does it work? There is a technical report. Mostly it seems like OpenAI did standard OpenAI things, meaning they fed in tons of dat … | Continue reading
Previously: I hit send on The Third Gemini, and within half an hour DeepMind announced Gemini 1.5. So this covers Gemini 1.5. One million tokens, and we are promised overall Gemini Advanced or GPT-4 levels of performance on Gemini Pro levels of compute. This post does not cover t … | Continue reading
While I sort through whatever is happening with GPT-4, today’s scheduled post is two recent short stories about restaurant selection. Ye Olde Restaurante Tyler Cowen says that restaurants saying ‘since year 19xx’ are on net a bad sign, because they are frozen in time, focusing on … | Continue reading
Developments around relationships and dating have a relatively small speed premium, also there are once again enough of them for a full post. The first speculated on why you’re still single. We failed to settle the issue. A lot of … Continue reading → | Continue reading
We get innovation in functional search. In an even more functional search, we finally get a Nature paper submitted almost two years ago, in which AI discovered a new class of antibiotic. That’s pretty damn exciting, with all the implications … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Previously: On RSPs. Be Prepared OpenAI introduces their preparedness framework for safety in frontier models. A summary of the biggest takeaways, which I will repeat at the end: There is a lot of key detail that goes beyond that, as … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created. Now we are engaged … Continue reading → | Continue reading
We had OpenAI’s dev day, where they introduced a host of new incremental feature upgrades including a longer context window, more recent knowledge cutoff, increased speed, seamless feature integration and a price drop. Quite the package. On top of that, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
OpenAI DevDay was this week. What delicious and/or terrifying things await? Turbo Boost First off, we have GPT-4-Turbo. Today we’re launching a preview of the next generation of this model, GPT-4 Turbo. GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge … Continue reading → | Continue reading
There are a lot of ludicrously terrible government laws, regulations and policies across all the domains of life. My Covid posts have covered quite a lot of them. Yet if I had to pick one policy th… | Continue reading
Rather than attempt a synthesis this time around, I’m going to experiment with the opposite. Over the course of the last three weeks, I kept adding to a long list of sources and interesting things … | Continue reading
This is a follow-up post to the last section of Ukraine Post #2 on the need for Better Decision Theory. In particular I want to think more about the following result and some resulting logic and ex… | Continue reading
[Note: While I do intend to write more about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this post is intended to address this only indirectly rather than directly, by helping illustrate how to find other source… | Continue reading
I have fallen mildly ill, as have my wife and son. So far we don’t have a positive Covid-19 test, and everyone is maximally vaccinated, but given the timing the obvious conclusions do seem likely. … | Continue reading
Previous Omicron updates: #1, #2, #3. Last weekly non-Omicron update. An introductory word: Thanks to Dominic Cummings, I have a lot of new readers, many from the United Kingdom, so I want to welco… | Continue reading
A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to Understand what happened.Make sure everyone knows it ha… | Continue reading