Om Malik died recently. He was a keen observer of the tech industry, insightful and thoughtful. He was also an insider in that area; maybe that’s what gives his writing such power. In his last published essay, on the meaning of the name “Mythos” that Anthropic has bestowed upon its best frontier model, he reflects on the ways that the company and its president Dario Amodei are using a constructive narrative to legitimize Generative AI. […]
Artificial Intelligence makes an alluring promise: a frictionless life. Already, it is possible to summon almost anything with a voice command or a swipe. A pizza arrives when we want it, wherever we are. Some speculate that soon enough, our personal digital servants will anticipate our cravings before we are even aware of them. The moment we begin to feel a pang of hunger for our favorite slice, it will already be on its way. […]
What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another. Many people, […]
Carol asked in a comment this week if I could say something about what I believe the impact will be on society in the near term. What follows is a quick sketch of ideas, supported by my reading, and organized by an AI Chatbot that I use to keep track of my research. I’ve edited and expanded on the results that I’ve gotten from the tool I’m using. There are several important concerns about how […]
I’m spending my sabbatical time doing a deep dive into how Machine Learning and Large Language Models (LLM) work and what the implications might be for all of us in the next few years. I came across this insight just now: AI’s Uneven Arrival – Stratechery by Ben Thompson: because they lack the ability to think and decide and verify they are best thought of as a tool for humans to leverage. Indeed, while conventional […]
Having co-written a piece with Kirk Smith on some practical ways that AI might be useful in small church ministry; I feel like I should point people to this longer, much more thoughtful article by Prof. Walter J. Scheirer on how AI might impact what it is to be a human being in the years to come: The Human in AI – Comment Magazine: The Portuguese political scientist Bruno Maçães has argued in his recent […]
