justing.net

Week Notes No. 44: Learning Currents

By Justin G. on 25FEB25TUE

Since this is a short week, content may be lighter than it otherwise would have been.

1. Articles & Newsletters
   • Robin Sloan’s Is It Okay? about all the recent progress on AI. Useful read.
     • Robin assumes that these advances do not fundamentally alter the social contract, that business as usual can continue, approximately. That sounds about right. But surprises happen–they always do. I’m not sure how far the rules stretch before the deal is altered, and people feel real impacts. Even if today’s economic theories remain intact, it doesn’t mean our lives stay the same. But that’s all really out of the scope of the article.
     • Staying in scope, I had a couple of follow up questions that I would like to examine:
       • What, really, is the training corpus? Is it everything everything? Or all of the internet and some books? Or some of the internet and a lot of books? I’ve only heard conversational details; I’d like to know a more concrete answer.
       • It seems preposterous that the machines could fabricate a replacement dataset that is as large, varied, rich, or as valuable as the original. But I should check this before placing any big bets. Why don’t I believe this: is it justified?
   • Do more pointless things. Hell yeah!
   • More on that asteroid that might land on us in a few years. And my new favorite domain: arewedoomedyet.org.
2. Links
   • The AI tip off phrases, on Ethan’s bsky. They do seem pretty generic to me. I would add an over use of em dashes.
3. Facts & Ideas
   • It’s not super clear, but I think this is saying that a particular cave in Spain was occupied by various people for 46,000 years. That is amazing.
4. Open Questions
   • What are the functions of a bureaucracy? Information storage and retrieval is one function. Also executing rules about the decisions, operations, and behaviors of the people that make up that institution.
   • Is YouTube infrastructure? It’s a question after my own heart. But no, I would not trust it to be infrastructure. Relying on it as a real archive seems risky. There are no laws to govern it that way, and nothing serious in place to protect it.
   • I am confused about how the AIs avoid witch hunts and conspiracy theories. Do they, in fact, avoid them? Ethan found a replicable paper on how they can be used to diffuse belief in conspiracies in humans. That’s usefully adjacent to my question.
5. Panics & Tripwires
   • I think I should get something specific in here. Any tips?
6. Bets
   • There is a lot of change going on. What to wager?

Moment of cat zen.

To Reply: Email me your AI thoughts.