It appears that in what is clearly a wonderful little PR stunt, a Polish rum company managed to do a Sophia and appoint an ‘AI-driven’ ‘robot’ as its ‘CEO’. The other guilty party to this pile of steaming bovine excrement is Hanson Robotics, famous for giving us Sophia, the “world’s first robot citizen”. Most of what I’m saying here goes just as well for Sophia.

In the first four entries (1 2 3 4) of this sequence, I have focused primarily on what LLMs aren’t, can’t, won’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t. It’s probably time to conclude this series by that much awaited moment in all stories, where the darkest night finally turns into a glorious dawn, where we finally arrive at the promised land, where we finally get to talk about what LLMs could be. What I see as the most successful potential model of

There’s a style of visual design I’m inordinately fond of called Raygun Gothic. It’s hard to describe what the hell exactly one needs to be on to enjoy it, but think of it like the aesthetic from the latter Fallout games with a more optimistic outlook on the future. Gibson described it as “the future that never was”, and I think that’s a pretty apt description. We get these competing futures in technology all the time.

The temple of Asclepios, the Greek god of healing arts and medicine, at Epidaurus was pretty much the ancient Greek world’s equivalent of the Mayo Clinic. It then tells us a lot about the Greek worldview of healing that one of the things the temple complex prominently featured was a theatre. The Greeks believed in drama therapy, but in perhaps a slightly different way of how we think of it today.

Tip If you’re here for the DOI matching script, the link is here. Quarto is a great tool for reproducible research. It is also a great tool for building websites. After about a decade of Wordpress-based websites, I’ve moved to Quarto primarily for two reasons. First, most of my content is largely static.

I have probably spent more time looking at Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time than any other work of art. Sneaking off to the Wallace Collection in London and just looking at the Dance was my comfort activity while living in London – a time that was not exactly devoid of its trials. It’s not, by any measure, great art, insofar as such judgments can be made with any objectivity.

There’s something special about language. It is ‘our own’, it is ‘us’, in a profound way, and quite surprisingly, more so than art. I was deeply struck by this when I first saw reactions to large generative language models that created realistic, human-ish prose.

Yesterday, I completed a marathon on the SkiErg, with a pretty respectable time (see results here). I know I can do better, and I know I will do better. On the other hand, this was a marathon where I pretty much did everything wrong. And that was sort of an instructive experience in its own right. The title is somewhat misleading. Not much went wrong – the marathon itself was smooth sailing.

Over at the work blog, I’m discussing what knowledge means for large language models (LLMs), and the ways in which we can leverage this knowledge dividend for better inference. Read the full post here.

Over at the work blog, I’m discussing what knowledge means for large language models (LLMs), and the ways in which we can leverage this knowledge dividend for better inference. Read the full post here.

There’s a notion in artificial intelligence known as Moravec’s paradox: it’s relatively easy to teach a computer to play chess or checkers at a pretty decent level, but near impossible to teach it something as trivial as bipedal motion. (Hassabis 2017) The sensorimotor tasks that our truly wonderful brains have mastered by our second birthday are much harder to teach a computer than something arguably as ‘complex’ as beating a chess grandmaster.